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Saturday’s men’s basketball gold medal game drew its largest audience in almost 30 years.
The U.S. narrowly defeated France in a thriller that averaged 19.5 million viewers on NBC and Peacock. That mark is the highest viewership for the game since the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, when the U.S. men led by Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, Scottie Pippen, and David Robinson trounced Yugoslavia.
Several things led to the high viewership. The game tipped off at 3:30 p.m. on the East Coast, a late night in Paris (9:30 p.m. start) but ideal for U.S. viewers. Combine that with the game itself, where the U.S. was by no means in control throughout the affair. That led to a fourth-quarter peak viewership of 22.7 million viewers. Stephen Curry exploded at the end of the game with a burst of threes to seal the victory for the U.S. (His performance also boosted his comedy show Mr. Throwback, which ranked No. 1 on Peacock on Saturday.)
To put this into perspective, the NBA Finals averaged only 11.31 million viewers this year. In fact, viewership in any single game of the Finals hasn’t passed the 19 million mark since the 2017 Warriors-Cavaliers series, according to Sports Media Watch. Curry, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant remain the kings of basketball TV ratings.
Olympic viewership had been inconsistent in the years before Paris, even for marquee events like the men’s basketball final. The sport’s gold medal game in Tokyo in 2021 averaged 9.3 million viewers, and 11.7 million in Rio in 2016. That’s far from the 25.8 million viewers that tuned in to the 1996 game.
The final was also the most-streamed event of the Games with 2.7 million average viewers on digital platforms. Peacock is arguably the biggest winner of the Olympics, with a much-improved offering that provided viewers full access to the Games for the first time.
Saturday was also a viewership milestone for women’s soccer, scoring its biggest audience since the 2004 Athens Games. An average of roughly nine million viewers tuned in on NBC and Peacock as the U.S. defeated Brazil.
