Jim Bell
President, NBC Olympics Production and Programming
NBC Sports Group
Jim Bell was promoted to President, NBC Olympics Production & Programming, in January 2017. He oversees all day-to-day editorial production and programming aspects of NBC Olympics’ linear coverage of the Games, as well as Olympic Channel: Home of Team USA, a partnership between the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee and NBCUniversal. Bell was also named Executive Producer, Telemundo World Cup, in January 2017, and he oversaw the Spanish-language network’s first-ever coverage of the event in Russia in 2018. Bell reports directly to Mark Lazarus, Chairman, NBC Broadcasting & Sports. He has worked on every Olympics since the 1992 Barcelona Games with NBC Sports (1992-2004, 2012-2018) or NBC News (2006-2012) – 12 in total.
Bell is in his second stretch with NBC Sports, as he rejoined NBC Sports Group full time following seven years (2005-12) as Executive Producer of TODAY. He served as both executive producer of TODAY and the London Olympic Games in 2012, which remains the most-watched event in US television history, with more than 217 million viewers. Bell also served as the executive producer of the 2014 Sochi Games, the most dominant primetime Winter Games performance on record, and the 2016 Rio Olympics, the most successful media event in history.
During his TODAY tenure, the show extended its dominance in the morning ratings race to 16 years and earned seven Emmys, seven Edward R. Murrow Awards and nine Headliner Awards. Bell also won Emmys for his work on the 1992, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games and a Peabody for NBC’s coverage of the Beijing 2008 Opening Ceremony.
Prior to joining TODAY, Bell was coordinating producer for NBC Olympics, leading the production hiring for the Olympic unit and supervising nearly 100 hours of afternoon and late-night programming on NBC during the 2004 Athens Summer Games.
Bell graduated cum laude from Harvard with a BA in Government in 1989. He was an All-Ivy defensive tackle and a member of the school’s Ivy League Championship team in 1987. He resides in Greenwich, Connecticut, with his wife, Angelique, and their four sons.