NETWORKS Ebersol to be at NBC Sports helm for 5 more Olympics

Ebersol began his career at age 19 on ABC coverage of the '68 Winter Olympics.
NEW YORK (AP) -- NBC Sports has locked up its Olympics guru, Dick Ebersol, in a new contract that keeps him at the network through 2012, or five more Olympic games.
Ebersol is chairman of NBC Sports, a network division that has dwindled down to just the Olympics and smaller events such as Wimbledon tennis and professional golf.
The announcement means that Ebersol, who will be 65 when the contract ends, will likely end his professional career where it began. He dropped out of Yale at age 19 to work as an ABC researcher at the Grenoble Winter Olympics in 1968.
"It's like this fabulous nirvana that comes every two years for 17 days and I can't live without it," he said. "It's been my personal fountain of youth."
Ebersol has handled other TV jobs. He became director of late-night programming at NBC in 1974 and replaced Lorne Michaels for a rocky tenure as executive producer of "Saturday Night Live" in the early 1980s.
He became president of NBC Sports in 1989.
Financial considerations
In 1995-96, NBC broadcast the World Series, Super Bowl, National Basketball Association finals and Summer Olympics. But NBC has gradually dropped out of covering major sports such as baseball, football and basketball, believing -- unlike its rivals -- that it can't make money off of them.
"If we can find a way going forward, we'll go back into everything, as long as it doesn't require us to lose money," he said.
NBC has already announced that it will telecast more than 800 hours of Olympics competition from Athens next year on five networks, double what was shown in Sydney in 2000. It will be shown on NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo and Telemundo.
Ebersol said there will be many more hours telecast beyond that. Upon completion of its merger with Universal entertainment, NBC will add the USA, Sci-Fi and Trio cable channels to its portfolio.
Ebersol's contractual longevity matches him with Tim Russert, NBC's Washington bureau chief, who is also signed through 2012 -- or three more presidential elections.