Bob Costas, NBC’s convivial host, will step aside from prime-time Olympics telecasts for the first time since 1988 because of an eye infection that shocked viewers during the Opening Ceremony and has grown progressively worse.
Matt Lauer will replace Costas, who now appears to be having a problem with both eyes. “We’re going to the bullpen,” Costas told Lauer, “and you’re Mariano Rivera.”
On Friday night, Costas was wearing glasses and his left eye was obviously irritated. His assistant told Deadspin over the weekend that he “has some sort of infection which has his left eye completely red and almost completely closed, making it impossible to put a contact lens in it. It just came on within the last 24 hours, the NBC doctors in Sochi are treating it, and they think it should resolve itself by the weekend. Until then, he has no choice but to go with the glasses on air.”
With no improvement, the buzz about “what’s wrong with Costas’s eye” increased across social media and spawned all sorts of memes. On Monday night, he treated the condition with a shot of vodka on the air. That didn’t help, either.
“I’m not really that much of a vodka guy, I’m looking at it this way though—my eyes can’t get any redder—no matter what I do,” he said (via Guyism.com). All right? Down the hatch!”
Now, Lauer will step into NBC’s Fortress of Solitude.
