Knapp Prepared for Seventh Olympic Games

New Jersey native will broadcast swimming and wrestling for NBC’s 2024 coverage

According to recent reports created by the data team and editorial staff at JournoResearch.org, of the 50 states in America, New Jersey has produced 15 Olympic medal winners over the last six Olympic Games (including three winter and three summer). It’s the seventh-highest total among states.

Something JournoResearch didn’t calculate was the number of Olympic broadcasters to come out of New Jersey over that same time span covering the past six Olympic Games.

There’s at least one.

Medford, New Jersey native and Shawnee High School graduate, Jason Knapp will be behind the microphone for NBC’s coverage of the 2024 Paris Games.

Overall, Paris will be Knapp’s seventh NBC Olympic assignment and it will mark the fourth straight Summer Games in which he’ll have the play-by-play for wrestling. At the 2012 Summer Games in London, he also handled coverage of archery, shooting and judo. In 2016 at Rio, he also worked on beach volleyball, and in 2021 (2020 Tokyo Olympics) he handled tennis. Plus, in each of the last three Winter Games (2014-Sochi; 2018-PyeongChang; 2022 Beijing), Knapp has called curling and really saw the popularity of that sport skyrocket.

Despite the fact that he’s a veteran of NBC’s Olympics coverage, Knapp is still just as excited and honored to be able to be a part of the broadcast team as he was when he made his Olympic debut in 2012.

“To me, it’s still the ultimate sporting event on the planet and I’m honored to have the chance to call it. It’s fun, it’s challenging, it’s exhilarating. It’s a privilege to be able to help document the biggest moments maybe of people’s lives, at least athletically.”

The NBC broadcast network and streaming service Peacock will be the company’s primary platforms for its more than 5,000 hours of coverage of the Olympic Games Paris 2024, July 26-Aug. 11. This marks the third time in history that Paris will play host to the Summer Games, tying London for most all-time.

Locally in the Philadelphia market, NBC10 will be the home for Olympic coverage and they’ll have plenty of extra content ready for the weeks leading up to the Paris Games, including feature stories on athletes and coaches from the Delaware Valley.

This year Knapp, a Syracuse University grad, will be a part of one of the two announcer teams responsible for live coverage of swimming. He’ll be working the preliminaries during the first week of Olympic competition where he’ll team up with six-time U.S. Olympic gold medalist Amy Van Dyken. She was the first American woman to win four swimming golds at a single Olympic Games, doing so in Atlanta in 1996.

Knapp is perpetually preparing for swimming by faithfully keeping notes in a computer document that he constantly updates whenever he uncovers new and interesting facts or nuggets. He shared some of his notes on the U.S. swimming team.

“The U.S. run of success in swimming is really phenomenal,” Knapp explained as he looked through his swimming research while getting ready to call the 2024 U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials in Indianapolis last month. “The American swim teams have led the medal count at the last 16 World Championships and at nine straight Olympics. So just the history, to be able to follow that and document that is going to be awesome.”

During the second week of competition in Paris, Knapp will be describing the action taking place on the wrestling mats. Earlier this year, Knapp handled the play-by-play of the U.S. Olympic Wrestling Team Trials held at Penn State in late April.

“For wrestling, to get to call that for the fourth straight Olympics and try to continue to follow a lot of the great storylines of the U.S. it’s great,” Knapp said. “The American men clearly have had some great success with David Taylor winning gold last time but you see him get knocked off for this Olympics. The U.S. is so strong, especially in freestyle. Greco-Roman, they’re trying to claw back. It’s harder for Americans because it’s not the dominant discipline here in the U.S. as it is around the globe.

“The U.S. women’s freestyle team is really going to do very, very well,” Knapp shared. “I think the American women and the Japanese women are the two top teams together. The U.S. men have won the team title at the World Championships – there’s no specific team title at the Olympics – but they certainly have a number of strong candidates to win gold or be on the podium.”

Knapp says that despite the fact that he works for an American broadcast company, it’s not just all about the American athletes, but finding amazing stories from around the world and telling them to the millions of viewers tuned in at home in the United States.

“[The job is] not just to document what the Americans are doing, but we’re in the business of storytelling and there are so many remarkable stories for people around the globe. Clearly, we’re following all of the American progress and certainly, we know a lot of their stories, but between NBC research, the digging that I do, and just talking to people and learning about things around the globe and then to bring that home to viewers is just really, really satisfying to see how it all works together on such a grand stage.

“You’re still celebrating the achievement of whoever is performing. I always say, ‘I never root for individuals. I root for stories.’ I want to tell good stories, whatever is interesting. And when you see the unexpected, that brings out more emotion. It’s a natural reaction of, ‘Wow, we didn’t expect that to happen!’

“I’m one of those people, and I say this all the time, you can say you don’t like my voice or how I am as a broadcaster, but I would like to think, if you asked around, no one can say that I’m unprepared. That’s the only thing I can control – whether or not I’m prepared to do a broadcast – and I proudly can say I’m always prepared.”

Knapp credits his parents, Betty and John (who still live in Medford), and his two older brothers, John (Cherry Hill, NJ) and Jeff (western suburbs of Charlotte, NC) with giving him a strong foundation that has led to his thorough and tireless prep work.

“That work ethic is from my mom and dad. It started there and the examples set by my older brothers. I don’t know any other way to do it than to be ready. They’ve been great. The biggest thing that a family can do to support [someone who works in this industry] is they can be understanding. You might miss holidays and things and that’s because sports happen on nights and weekends. I’ve lived an untraditional life in a lot of aspects. You try to be there for as much as you can but it’s definitely challenging because you’re traveling and you’re working when a lot of people are off. But that has great tradeoffs. I can golf and ski during the week when it’s not as busy or crowded, so you try and look at the positives that way.

“They always pushed and have been supportive and I would like to think they’re certainly proud of what I’ve achieved. They’ve been awesome and they helped me develop that work ethic and a desire for learning. I did a little bit of everything growing up, music, theater, scouting, sports, student government stuff. And that’s kind of what I do now professionally.”

Knapp, who is a freelance broadcaster, has called more than 30 different sports on a multitude of networks and channels in his career, which started after he graduated from Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Public Communications in 1991. He and his wife Trish, who reside in Clarks Summit, PA, will celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary this summer in a short stretch between his Olympic work and the start of the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York. He explained how they’ve been able to make it work amidst the unique challenges of a broadcaster’s lifestyle.

“Again, support and understanding and realizing she might have to make some sacrifices of time with me. I would try and make sacrifices too. There was a time when I was flying to the West Coast a lot and I would get on a redeye because the difference between getting home at 9 a.m. versus 4 p.m. is huge. It’s almost a whole extra day.”

The challenges aren’t just personal in the life of a broadcaster. For Knapp, one of the biggest is really digging into the reams of documents that are collected by members of the NBC Sports research department.

“It’s just making sure that we’re finding stories but also in a lot of sports I do, trying to find pronunciations. In wrestling, there are not a lot of Smiths and Joneses. There are a lot of challenging names from Russia and the former Soviet Republics. There’s just a lot of pronunciations and making sure you’ve got all of that. Wherever you are (during the Games), you feel that fun intensity but it’s a grind too. It’s really, really challenging, but also for me, really, really rewarding.”.