Team USA completed a historic television moment Sunday with a 2-1 overtime win over Canada, bringing the men’s hockey team its first gold medal since the 1980 Lake Placid games. But the victory brought more than just another gold medal for the group airing the game.
NBC announced Tuesday afternoon that the gold medal game in men’s ice hockey brought 20.7 million viewers between NBC, Versant’s USA Network and streaming on Peacock, and peaked in the quarter hour of 11:45 am -12:00 pm ET (when the game-winning overtime goal was scored by Team USA’s Jack Hughes) at over 26 million viewers, according to Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel and digital data from Adobe Analytics.
“As the final medal event, the gold-medal hockey game was a fitting crescendo to a spectacular 17 days of Milan Cortina Winter Olympic competition that we were so honored to present,” NBC Sports president Rick Cordella said in a statement.
Gold For Team USA Leads To Record Rating For Early Start
NBC said for the gold medal game, the average live audience from 8:15-11:00 am on NBC and Peacock was 18.6 million viewers. That makes the game the most-watched pre-9 am Eastern sporting event in U.S. history. The game ranks as NBC’s second most watched hockey game ever shown, surpassed only by the gold medal game between Team USA and Canada in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics (27.6 million), which had the advantage of a more convenient start time for viewers at 3:15 pm Eastern.
In comparison, the gold medal game’s audience more than doubles the highest rated Stanley Cup Final game, Game 7 between the Boston Bruins and St. Louis Blues, which saw an average of 8.7 million viewers.
The network also said the streaming audience on Peacock reached 3.7 million viewers, the most for any non-NFL sporting event by NBC Sports. In addition, the network added another 2.1 million viewers for the game thanks to it immediately being available on-demand on Peacock, airing a full encore at 4:00 pm Eastern Sunday on USA Network, and condensed two-hour broadcasts provided to NBC stations following their late Sunday news broadcasts.
