Looks like it’s going to be Silver medal for NBC’s coverage of the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. Hosted for NBC by Today’s Matt Lauer and his former morning partner Meredith Vieira, the network’s 
primetime XXII Olympic Winter Games tape-delayed coverage of the Opening Ceremony garnered a 18.5/30 in metered-market results. That’s down 8% from the 20.0/33 overnight rating that the live 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony garnered on February 12 that year. However, last night’s result is an 26% rise from the 14.7/23 overnight that the last tape-delayed Winter Games Opening Ceremony pulled from Torino in 2006. Still, on a night of almost all repeats on every other network but Fox, the Opening Ceremony guarantees NBC a Gold medal in terms of ratings and viewership. To that end, we’ll update later with fast nationals numbers as they come in.
Related: Winter Olympics’ Soft Launch Scores NBC Best Thursday Since NFL 2013 Season Opener
To give some context to that, in national ratings, the Vancouver Winter Games opener pulled a 17.3/30 result with 32.7 million viewers watching, according to Nielsen. That fast nationals result was the best ever for a non-U.S. Winter Olympics, beating the 12.8/21 rating and the 22.2 million audience who watched Torino’s Opening Ceremony on February 10, 2006. The Winter Olympics champ is still the beginning of the Salt Lake City games on February 8, 2002. In a time before smartphones, tablets and multi-platform streaming that domestic Opening Ceremony had a 25.5/42 rating and pulled in 45.6 million viewers for NBC. Salt Lake still stands as the most watched OP ever Winter or Summer Olympics, coming out ahead of the 2012 London Games which had a U.S. audience of 40.7 million.
Related: Sochi Olympics Opening Ceremonies Semi-Live Blog
Despite a well-watched bonus day on February 6, the Opening Ceremony actually officially kicked off the Sochi Games last night, which run until the 23rd. The ceremony followed back-to-back Bob Costas’ interviews with President Obama and former Olympian and torchbearer Maria Sharapova – the pro tennis player lived in Sochi as a child. There were no pop stars like Vancouver or the 2012 London Summer Games but the Opening Ceremony last night did have DJs and a lot of Russian history. Yes, the organizers bypassed the bad bits but amidst the pageantry there were giant skating mascots of a polar bear, a hare and a leopard, a symbolic baby boom, some Tolstoy, some space race, Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a ton of performers and fireworks and lot of flag waving from the host country and all the nations participating.