Bob Costas talks watching himself on The Last Dance and the potential for a Summer Olympics in 2021

The Athletic

Costas says he gets a kick out of watching old clips of when NBC had the rights to the NBA. "But I’m looking at it mostly as just a sports fan and also as someone who appreciates television when it’s done well," says Costas. "And this is done exceptionally well. (The Last Dance director) Jason Hehir was a young producer just in his mid-20s when I first met him and he did pieces for my programs on HBO in the early 2000s. You could tell then that he was gifted and very dedicated." As for the Summer Olympics, Costas says "we have to be overwhelmingly certain that it’s safe," adding: "Let’s bring more than 10,000 athletes from virtually every nation, along with their delegations and all the media and everybody else who shows up from the four corners of the globe with varying levels of health care in their home nations, let’s have them compete at close quarters, sweat on each other, breathe on each other, live together in the Olympic Village, and then let’s send them back to their respective countries and see how that turns out. Talk about a petri dish for causing the whole thing to not just increase, but explode."