NBC correspondent Dale Earnhardt Jr. is drawn to speed events
Retired driver is making NBC debut
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea – Dale Earnhardt, Jr. has a question.
“Can I move further up the turn?” “Yes,” comes the answer. “You certainly can.”
So Earnhardt moves farther up the final turn on the Olympic bobsled track. He seems genuinely thrilled to be so close.
He pulls out his cellphone to record a video of the U.S. bobsled, which can be heard rumbling its way toward him from farther up the track.
It flashes past.
“WOW,” Earnhardt says. “That’s so fast, I can’t even film it. Can I do that?”
Now that he’s retired from that other gig that kept him occupied for the past couple of decades, he has the time.
He’ll go bobsledding. He might try snowboarding. He was on skis for the first time about a month ago. And this week, Earnhardt is covering the Winter Olympics for NBC, gravitating (naturally) to the events involving pure speed.
He was there for big air snowboarding. (“I think it’s more dangerous than what I did.”)
He was there to cover Lindsey Vonn in the downhill. (“The speed is absurd.”)
He was there for four-man bobsled practice. (“It’s the most similar to NASCAR.”)
Oh, and he also had Korean BBQ. (“American BBQ is better, for sure.”)
It’s all part of Earnhardt’s life after racing, a life the 43-year-old is embracing with enthusiasm.
It’s not that the man didn’t love NASCAR. He said Thursday that he’d still be racing if not for the concussions that forced him to retire after 18 years.
When he was racing, Earnhardt was obsessed with racing. It prevented him from doing anything else. Forget the Olympics or the Super Bowl, which he also covered for NBC. It prevented him from enjoying a movie or a concert or even a casual dinner out.
“Everywhere I went, everything I did, I was thinking about the next race, even if it was two weeks away,” he said. “I just couldn’t enjoy myself, I couldn’t set that down and just leave it alone and go do whatever I wanted to do and disconnect from it. I would worry about my performance. Am I going to perform? Am I going to reach my expectations? Am I going to disappoint everyone?”
Now Earnhardt interviews Olympic athletes about dealing with those same expectations, but with a significant twist. “I thought it was difficult to have a terrible race and you have to wait a week to redeem yourself,” he said. “That’s the way you felt if you had a bad race, you were, ‘Dang, everybody thinks that I’m a loser, gotta wait seven days to prove everybody wrong.’ To have to wait four years and do all the work and training to prepare for that and one little twitch, one little mistake and you go from gold to not even medaling? That’s intense.”
Somewhere along the way, Earnhardt struck up a social media friendship with Nick Cunningham, the pilot on one of the American bobsled teams. Cunningham invited Earnhardt to stop by practice. Thursday was the day.
Earnhardt has the gift of genuine curiosity. Watching the bobsled practice runs, he had the enthusiasm of any wide-eyed first-time Olympic spectator, alternating between wanting to try it this moment and never wanting to try it.
“That make me nervous just watching it,” he said.
But then: “I want to do it right now.” But then: “It’s the kind of thing, if I don’t do it right now, I may never do it.”
They did not let him do it this particular day. But after practice, Earnhardt met up with Cunningham and fell into a conversation about the thing that drew them together in the first place, the relentless search for speed.
“It’s as close to NASCAR as you can get,” Cunningham said. “We’re trying to find every 100th of a second out here, the same way they are.”
Cunningham even invited Earnhardt to the garage area, which wasn’t unlike what you’d find in the infield at Daytona International Speedway.
Earnhardt asks if he can sit in the bobsled. He notes — this is a trained Olympic analyst, after all — that there is no steering wheel. “Take these ropes,” Cunningham said. “Pull to the right you go right, pull to the left you go left.” Sure enough, it works.
So one of the best drivers in NASCAR history — a two-time Daytona 500 winner, a man named the most popular driver 15 consecutive years — crouches low in the sleek bobsled and pretends. He races into one sweeping turn. He banks perfectly through the next. Then he pops out of the sled and — yes, Earnhardt really did this — thrusts his arms in the air triumphantly.
“Beijing, 2022,” says Chris Fogt, another bobsledder.
Hey, it’s an idea.