At the Paris Olympics, Snoop Dogg is NBC’s ‘ambassador of happiness’

During one prime-time broadcast of the Olympics gymnastics competition this week on NBC, Simone Biles finished a vault and the camera panned around Bercy Arena in Paris to find reactions. Biles’s parents politely clapped. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo cheered with a bit more gusto.

Then the camera found Snoop Dogg, who lifted his glasses up toward his forehead, to reveal eyes wide in astonishment.

“Snoop can’t believe what he saw!” said NBC’s Terry Gannon.

There has been no better hype man for U.S. Olympians this week than Snoop, who has been everywhere in Paris for NBC — and, as a result, everywhere across the internet. Billie Jean King, a fellow Long Beach, Calif., native, snapped a photo with him; he did a swim lesson with Michael Phelps; and he narrated highlights of a spirited badminton rally.

“It don’t stop till the casket drop,” Snoop said, as the shuttlecock flew back and forth.

Since Snoop first made his mark on American culture as Dr. Dre’s running mate and then a rap star in his own right in the early 1990s, he has been many things: a boogeyman to White America, a reality TV star, Martha Stewart’s buddy, a pitchman for brands such as Skechers and Corona. Still, these Olympics have elevated Snoop to perhaps a new role.

“I’m not sure who was betting on Snoop to be America’s sweetheart in the 1990s,” said Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African American studies at Duke University. “No one saw this coming then.”

Or as Jeff Chang, a cultural historian who has written several books on hip-hop, said: “He went from ‘Murder was the case that they gave me’ to ‘What’s up, Mike Tirico?’”

NBC hired Snoop for the 2021 Tokyo Olympics to host a late-night highlights show with comedian Kevin Hart. Encouraged by the results, executives pitched him on coming back for more in Paris, as something of a roving correspondent.

The result is a “Snoop SWAT team,” as it’s called internally, with two van loads carrying 12 people, including NBC staffers and Snoop’s personal attendants. The camera and social media folks trail Snoop wherever he goes: from event to event, to the Louvre, and on the train from Paris to Lille with the men’s basketball team.

Already, he has appeared at the Novak Djokovic-Rafael Nadal match, with the U.S. judo team and the U.S. fencers, and at the swimming pool and the skate park.

The schedule was planned out months in advance, which allowed Snoop to commission bespoke outfits for each day’s activities, including T-shirts and jackets bearing the likenesses of his favorite athletes — “Snoopians,” as NBC calls them — such as Biles and volleyball stars Sara Hughes and Kelly Cheng, as well as an array of colorful track suits and swimming robes.

The segments offer comic relief, but they’re also heartwarming. Snoop is a fan, but he comes off as genuinely curious about the quirks of the Olympics and the athletes competing.

“This is what y’all gonna have around your neck,” he told the U.S. women’s three-on-three basketball team, brandishing a gold medal. “You have to imagine it. You have to manifest it. ... You have to feel it.”

During the lesson with Phelps, Snoop put on a swim cap, dog-paddled around a wading pool and joked about his strong lungs.

“He’s really an ambassador of happiness,” said Molly Solomon, the executive producer of NBC’s Olympics coverage, which is seeing a rebound in viewership through the first few days of competition.

(NBC viewers will see plenty more of Snoop after the Olympics, when he joins the “The Voice” as a coach.)

To Neal, Snoop’s mainstream pivot began in earnest in the mid-2000s, when he starred in a reality TV series that focused on parenting his kids. He was able to keep his credibility as an artist, Neal said, but also show a more universal side of himself.

“You can go back to his very first music video, where he morphs into a dog,” Neal said. “It always suggested a softness beyond the gangster persona.”

Chang noted that, for those who covered Snoop’s early career, including the murder trial in which he was acquitted in 1996, there can still be some cognitive dissonance to see Snoop chopping it up with Tirico on an NBC set that overlooks the Eiffel Tower.

“I remember for a Vibe [magazine story], he was rendered in blue” — the color associated with the Crips — “and here he is in red, white and blue,” Chang said. “And I’m still watching on TV and noticing what colors he’s wearing.”

Chang continued: “It’s a triumphal story. It’s a diverse generation of young people — many of whom were shut out of the mainstream — breaking through into the mainstream.”

In Snoop’s early years, he was a voice of a disaffected generation of young Black men. He rapped about killing a police officer, and a cover of one of his albums was once called “pornographic smut” in a congressional hearing. (More recently, he said he would not refer to women in certain demeaning terms that were once a staple of his music.)

That journey from outsider to ultimate cultural insider has been traversed by hip-hop, too; Flavor Flav of Public Enemy has also been a popular figure at these Games, if not at Snoop’s level.

“He’s our lifestyle guru,” Neal said. “He’s like Uncle Stoner in a way that Willie Nelson wasn’t able to become for the mainstream. Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead never had that mainstream appeal, either.”

He added: “I think we’re seeing something really fascinating and a kind of phenomenon with Snoop now.”

And it’s a phenomenon that shows no sign of drifting away. Pin-trading is a well-established tradition at the Olympics, and one of this year’s hottest pins celebrates neither a country nor a sport. Instead, the pin features Snoop Dogg exhaling Olympic rings of smoke.