The Olympic Village at Milan Cortina quickly ran out of condoms, and the region’s artificial snow–making powers have been pushed to capacity. But one Olympics commodity is never in short supply: Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr., better known as Snoop Dogg.
Unlike the Alpine slopes, Snoop has not been under deep cover: The honorary coach and ambassador for Team USA and special correspondent for NBC has been inescapable this month. He carried the flame through the streets of Gallarate, Italy, as a returning torchbearer. He was witness when Lindsey Vonn crashed and Chloe Kim settled for silver. He took a snowboarding lesson from Shaun White. He rode a Zamboni and hosted a hockey alternate broadcast. He told a starstruck Ilia Malinin, who was born after Snoop’s 2004 hit “Drop It Like It’s Hot” went to no. 1, “You got the whole world watching you right now,” before the world watched the Quad God fall twice and fail to medal in men’s singles. Snoop even tried curling and bobsledding, the latter of which he resolved never to do again. A child-size sled was more his speed.
As was the case in 2021, when he co-headlined a Tokyo Olympics highlights show with Kevin Hart, and at the Paris Olympics in 2024, for which he won two Sports Emmys as part of NBC and Peacock’s coverage, Snoop’s work on mic and on camera has drawn rave reviews. “Snoop Dogg Has Conquered the Olympics Again,” read a recent headline for an interview with Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Gay, while a Sportico headline proclaimed, “He’s Got That Dogg in Him: Snoop’s Olympics Return Pays Off for NBC.” The title of Snoop’s debut solo single asked, “Who Am I?” For a growing audience, the primary answer may be “an omnipresent sports commentator,” because Snoop has suddenly become the voice and face of all sports.
“I am the love vessel right now, and I love that I am the peace messenger,” the 54-year-old rapper, actor, and media mogul recently said on Today. “That’s what the Olympics is about. It’s about bringing the world together to celebrate sports and unity, and I’m glad to be at the forefront of it all, because this is what I love doing. I love putting smiles on people’s faces.”
Snoop presumably loves making money, too—he has a full-time blunt roller to pay—and the serial entrepreneur, who founded Doggy Style Records and owns Death Row Records, has leveraged the Olympics to pad his bottom line. One source claimed that Snoop was paid $500k per day in Paris—approximately the same sum Alex Honnold pocketed for climbing Taipei 101—and in Italy, he’s added to his take by collaborating with Fanatics on Snoop-themed Olympics merch and with Burton Snowboards on a signature Snoop board. Aside from that crass commercialism and a run-in between his security entourage and Dutch speed skating star Marianne Timmer, who’s also working as a commentator, the vibes surrounding Snoop have been impeccable. Snoop says that he’s studied his new broadcasting craft—his self-cited influences include legendary Lakers voice Chick Hearn—but his unstudied air is central to his appeal. Perpetually laid-back, he’s also unfailingly respectful, positive, and inquisitive. Asked by one athlete whether he’d ever seen a moguls event, Snoop responded, “No, and I’m anxious to know about it. Can you please teach me?”
That curiosity, combined with irreverence and perceived authenticity, creates viral moments. Snoop has a knack for improvisation and adaptation, too: When his credit card was declined on a takeout order in Livigno—which, given his numerous income streams, couldn’t have been because of a lack of funds—he turned even that into a feel-good story by sending five tickets to the men’s snowboard half-pipe final to the restaurant owners who let him have the food for free. The U.S. could use some positive PR on the international stage, and Snoop, who’s become an American mascot of sorts, has supplied plenty of it.
Fellow NBC personality Mike Tirico, who often smiles while talking to Snoop on camera, told reporters on a recent call, “I just know at some point in my life I want to come back to the Olympics as Snoop. Snoop is having the greatest time … and his enjoyment of everything that is the Olympics, not just in Paris but also here, has been infectious for all of us.”
Tirico is famed for his own versatility—he just became the first person to call a Super Bowl and serve as main Olympics host in the same year, he does play-by-play for NBC’s Sunday Night Basketball, and he’s called virtually every other sport over the years. But he’s no more ubiquitous than Snoop, who has been everywhere, not just at the Olympics but in the culture at large—perhaps especially in sports and sports media. Tirico is ostensibly the standard-bearer of NBC’s Olympics coverage, but in the U.S. and worldwide, internet interest in Snoop over the past month has outstripped interest in Tirico by a factor of 30-40 times or more.
Snoop still makes music—his 21st studio album, Iz It a Crime?, came out last May and received a 6.1 from Pitchfork—but he’s most visible and most famous these days as an all-purpose presence on-screen. The longtime TV and movie cameo maker is part of the star-studded cast of PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie, coming to theaters this summer, and plays the part of Bow Wizzle on the children’s animation YouTube channel he cocreated, Doggyland. He’s an actual coach, not just an honorary one, on The Voice. He presented the award for Best Podcast at the Golden Globes—or as he called them, the double Gs—while “high as a motherfucker” last month. He performed at the BET Awards last year and at the Game Awards in late 2024, after becoming a character in Fortnite and Call of Duty. He also starred at a pre-inauguration event for another inescapable sports fan, fellow WWE Hall of Famer Donald Trump, whom Snoop had previously feuded with but eventually embraced. That last gig elicited a backlash that inspired last year’s album, but thus far Snoop has exhibited a somewhat Trumpian tendency to evade lasting consequences, thanks in part to his own intersections with sports.
Snoop is a sports lover who roots for his hometown Dodgers, Lakers, Rams, Kings, and USC Trojans, as well as for the Pittsburgh Steelers, whom he imprinted on as a child during their ’70s dynasty. In 2016, Snoop was inspired to freestyle about Ben Roethlisberger on Instagram, and in 2023, the Steelers announced that they had signed Snoop as a wide receiver. It was only an April Fools’ joke, but had it not been April 1, it almost might’ve been believable—such is the extent of Snoop’s connection to sports.
That connection is partly personal: In the early 2000s, Snoop coached his son’s youth football teams and launched the Snoop Youth Football League (which preceded Snoop esports and boxing leagues). That nonprofit football league has helped a lot of kids in California, including current Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud, but it’s also aided Snoop’s sports-media ascendance by providing fodder for a 2018 Netflix documentary called Coach Snoop. Not long after that, in 2020, Snoop provided commentary for a fight between Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr., and The Hollywood Reporter declared, “Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr. Boxed—but Snoop Dogg’s Commentary Won the Fight.” That performance prompted LeBron James to tweet, “My Unk @SnoopDogg is simply the greatest at whatever he does man!! Swiss Army Knife++++++”
Snoop Dogg, Ilia Malinin, and Martha Stewart in the commentator booth for the women’s single figure skating short program
LeBron’s scouting report on Snoop as a sports-talk prospect has been vindicated time and time again, across all kinds of competitions. In football, Snoop appeared in and recorded a song for Madden NFL 20, performed at the Super Bowl halftime show in 2022, teamed up with Chris Stapleton and Cindy Blackman Santana to cover Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” as a Monday Night Football theme song, gave the opening monologue at the 2025 NFL Honors awards, performed during Netflix’s 2025 Christmas Day NFL broadcast, and has appeared on multiple episodes of Sunday Night Football, in addition to guesting on Monday Night Football’s ManningCast. He also lent his stage name to a bowl game, the Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl, which is presented by his cocktail line, Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop.
In baseball, he’s thrown out several first pitches, played in a celebrity All-Star Game, and joined the Milwaukee Brewers booth in 2024 to contribute commentary for a Brewers vs. Reds game. In hockey, he’s appeared in NHL 20, served as MC at a Kings-Penguins game, and guested in the Kings broadcast booth on a few occasions. In basketball, he’s starred in LeBron’s dreams: In 2024, the King revealed that he’d had a dream about suiting up for Coach K at Duke, only for the game to morph into a concert featuring Snoop and Dr. Dre. In reality, Snoop made his debut as an NBA analyst last month, when he took part in pregame activities at a Clippers-Warriors matchup before joining Terry Gannon and Reggie Miller on the call for the second half of the game. That was a Peacock NBA Monday game and the latest instance of Snoop parlaying his NBC affiliation into a broader sports role. “He can find his way anywhere in any environment,” Steph Curry said. “It was cool to see all the different versions of Snoop.”
At this stage, it’s safe to say that the most memorable version of Snoop where sports are concerned has come in the broadcast booth, not the recording booth. Few sports-media figures this side of Stephen A. Smith are as visible as Snoop—and, naturally, Snoop Dogg joined Mad Dog for a First Take debate with Stephen A. last summer. As he racks up screen time, Snoop’s most salient contributions to sports culture are no longer his late ’90s song “Hoop Dreams (He Got Game)”; or the track called “SportsCenter (Remix)” from his 2017 EP, Make America Crip Again; or his 2020 musical tribute to Kobe Bryant that premiered at the ESPYs. Snoop felt so strongly about Bryant that he posted a profane, threatening video in which he condemned CBS anchor Gayle King for bringing up the rape allegations against Bryant in the wake of his death. Snoop later apologized, and King accepted his sorry, one of many examples of Snoop stepping in it and subsequently stepping right out of it on his ever-escalating path to global sports stardom. Heck, he even headlined the Australian Football League grand final in Melbourne last September, which is quite a come-up considering he was once banned from entering Australia because of his prior criminal convictions.
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Speaking of which: Tirico’s appointment as the lead voice for the Olympics in 2017 briefly became controversial because of his past suspension amid reports of sexual harassment at ESPN in the early 1990s. So it’s striking that he’s sharing a screen with someone who has as long a rap sheet (no pun intended) as Snoop, who served time in prison in the early ’90s and faced several subsequent arrests on various charges, along with multiple reports of sexual assault, which were settled or dismissed. It’s unclear whether we should be celebrating Snoop’s sincere rehabilitation or rolling our eyes at his image rehabilitation—maybe Snoop, not Saudi Arabia, is the most successful sportswasher—but one way or another, his ability to put personal baggage behind him ranks right up there with Anthony Kiedis, who performed “Can’t Stop” with his band, Red Hot Chili Peppers, at the handover of the 2024 Paris Olympics to the Casey Wasserman–led LA28.
Snoop can’t stop, either, and his next episode in sports is already scheduled. The Olympics closing ceremony will take place this Sunday. And on Tuesday, Snoop will head to the U.K., another place that had previously banned him. He’ll be at Swansea in Wales, where he’ll watch Swansea City play Preston, "appear pitchside before the game to lead supporters in a pre-match fan display," and visit local community members. Why Swansea City? Because, of course, he became a co-owner of the Welsh soccer club in July, along with his close friend and fellow Olympics correspondent Martha Stewart. Snoop’s ties to the beautiful game are about to get deeper: The World Cup will take place partly in Los Angeles, and Snoop has been named the official community chairman for the L.A. World Cup host committee, a prelude to what one imagines will be expansive participation on his home turf at the L.A. Olympics.
Part of Snoop’s appeal as a sports pundit is that he isn’t seen as a sports pundit. As his kid-in-a-candy-store comp on an Olympics conference call makes clear, he’s a sort of sports taster or sports tourist, an everyman living an Olympic dream. (Who among us isn’t anxious to know about moguls?) He’s smooth but not overly polished; he’s an excellent hang who might, at any moment, say something that has to be censored or uncork a line like John Mayer’s “And … that happened” when the practiced musician and unpracticed play-by-play man tried his hand at calling balls and strikes. The sponsors must be pleased: One consumer sentiment survey published last year pegged Snoop as the country’s third-most relatable celebrity, sandwiched between Dolly Parton and Peyton Manning.
Will we reach a point of Snoop oversaturation? Will Snoop—like Manning, maybe—be overstretched and overexposed? Can relatability coexist with a corporate synergy strategy that might make anyone else seem like an industry plant? Perhaps the full-court Snoop press will wear thin, his act (like Tony Romo’s) will turn stale, and he’ll attain the true mark of a national sportscaster: the capacity to provoke widespread viewer resentment. For now, though, Snoop’s sensual seduction of consumers and global sports takeover will proceed as planned, and these on-screen meetings will continue until American morale improves.
