Ten million viewers tune in to watch skater Kamila Valieva falter at Beijing Olympics


Ten million viewers tune in to watch skater Kamila Valieva falter at Beijing Olympics

Kamila Valieva

The not-so-good days for the 15-year-old Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva continued at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics on Thursday. This came when her night’s long-form routine drew an audience of a whopping 10.3 million to NBCUniversal’s Olympic television as well as digital broadcasts, according to network figures.

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As per NBC, The United States of America (USA) primetime replay of the skating competition brought in 1.4 million more viewers than the previous night’s Olympics coverage! ROC’s Valieva, the gold medal favourite in the spotlight at Beijing 2022 after testing positive for a banned heart drug by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), made mistakes on her first four jumps and burst into tears in following visuals after her routine.

However, she recovered well from there and finished in the fifth place, behind two of her compatriots, Anna Shcherbakova and Alexandra Trusova, who took gold and silver, respectively. On the other hand, Japanese skater Kaori Sakamoto finished third on the podium to take back the bronze medal.

NBC’s nightly broadcasts witness 12 million average viewership

NBC Sports
NBC Sports

NBC’s nightly broadcasts of the Winter Games have averaged a staggering 12 million people, according to the network’s total audience delivery metric. Notably, this combines the viewership on traditional television, cell phones, tablets and Internet-connected TVs.

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Coming to the Sunday night’s competition, which drew the largest audience so far for NBC’s coverage from Beijing, attracting 24 million viewers — the largest NBC Olympics primetime audience since the opening of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games, NBC said. 

Earlier, NBC’s coverage of the 2022 Olympics opening ceremony averaged close to 14 million television viewers, according to NBC. This includes people across all platforms, including USA Network, the NBC Sports app and the Peacock streaming service, and the audience reached nearly as many as 16 million people.

Also Read | “This is immense mental stress” – IOC president Thomas Bach on 15-year-old Kamila Valieva’s team