Some of the best fencers in the world were competing on Sunday night at the Grand Palais, a 124-year-old exhibition hall with soaring arches that had been repurposed by organizers to serve as one of the most spectacular venues at the Paris Olympics.
The setting was so inspiring that Chris Matthews, a basketball trainer with more than three million followers on Instagram, and Jeenie Kwon, a fellow content creator with more than 10 million followers on her Jeenie Weenie YouTube account, wanted to get in on the action.
Behind a bank of bleachers, as several Olympic volunteers studied them with — how to put this? — great curiosity, Matthews and Kwon pretended to sword fight while a friend filmed them.
,
Matthews soon whipped out his iPhone to film himself.
“So, I just got to fencing,” he said. “Wow!”
As part of its effort to engage with a younger audience, NBC Universal has recruited a small army of online content creators to work with the network in Paris. The creators’ mission? Film themselves visiting venues, chatting with athletes, cheering at events and otherwise enjoying the grandeur of the Games, all with an exhaustingly theatrical joie de vivre.
,
“One of the most amazing things about the Olympics is that we, in some ways, use it as a little laboratory,” said Geo Karapetyan, the senior vice president for platform partnerships at NBC Universal. “And we’re very fortunate to have forward-thinking senior executives who have allowed people to try new things.”
