![]() “I was completely in full shock, because I had never been in a place where the female athlete was kind of like the leader of the pack.” In Tokyo, that meant focusing on the stories of Black athletes like Simone Biles and Sydney McLaughlin. “I don’t think I realized until I got there, but so much of what we do at NBC is centered around women,” she says. “I believe in and she believes in me.” As soon as she started her new job, Taylor immediately dove into covering the Tokyo Summer Olympics. “Just to have conversations with her about where she sees sports going, and the fact that she has been given so much power at NBC-that’s a great culture to be stepping foot in,” she says. One of the things that most impressed her about NBC was that it had a woman, Molly Solomon, in charge of Olympic coverage. I was promoted, given my first opportunities so many great things happened. “Everything that I’ve learned since I graduated college, everything that I learned was there. When asked if she found ESPN to be a toxic environment, she gracefully turns the question around. So I’ve learned from every single situation. ![]() ![]() But her ideal is to be a role model, someone who is always the same person “in front of and behind closed doors.” She believes every step of her career, from having issues with her coaches as a college athlete to what went down at ESPN, “prepared me to get into an industry where you’re constantly critiqued. In this political moment, “what we’re seeing is the polarizing of everything, so of course sports is not going to be left out of that,” Taylor says. “My mom said, ‘Okay, so you’ll have an NBA Finals, three college football national championships, a Summer Olympics, a Winter Olympics, and a Super Bowl before you’re 35,’” Taylor says. The 34-year-old didn’t realize that she’d already checked off every box on her sports-journalism bucket list until her family pointed it out. Taylor is not only cohosting the Super Bowl in Los Angeles this Sunday, but acting as one of the main faces of NBC’s 2022 Winter Olympics coverage-which means she’s been in constant head-spinning motion, jetting between her home in Atlanta, NBC Sports’ Stamford, Connecticut, Olympic headquarters, and Los Angeles, where she’s being fitted by Armani for her Super Bowl outfit. The broadcaster has ambitious plans for her future, but she could use a clone right now. “You can’t make up the story lines that end up leading to my very first Super Bowl,” she says now, in her first full interview since the controversy that led her to leave her longtime perch at ESPN for NBC Sports. Maria Taylor has had a wild couple of years.
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