Why Kylie Kelce Is at the Olympics: Inside NBC’s Digital Play for Milan-Cortina 2026

Milan—When the Opening Ceremony of the 2026 Winter Games lights up northern Italy next February, the most unlikely member of football’s first family will be working from inside the Olympic bubble. Kylie Kelce—wife of recently retired Eagles All-Pro Jason Kelce and sister-in-law to Chiefs tight end Travis—has been tapped by NBCUniversal as a featured creator in the newly formed “Milan-Cortina Creator Collective,” a 25-person digital squad charged with re-imagining how American audiences experience the Olympics.

Kelce, 31, will trade the familiar autumn roar of Lincoln Financial Field for the hush of curling sheets in Cortina and the crisp alpine air of the downhill start house. Her mandate: produce first-person, mobile-first storytelling that spotlights U.S. athletes and demystifies winter sports for the millions who follow her across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

“Unrivaled access is the phrase NBC kept using,” Kelce said in a brief interview outside the network’s Rockefeller Center headquarters after the announcement. “They want the behind-the-scenes stuff you can’t get from a broadcast camera—bus rides through the Dolomites, 5 a.m. skate sharpenings, whatever humanizes these athletes.”

The partnership crystallized during the Paris Olympics last summer. Kelce, in the French capital to support the U.S. field-hockey squad—her sport of choice since second grade—cold-emailed NBC’s digital team to pitch herself as an Olympic storyteller. Weeks later she was invited to a creator summit in New York, where executives from NBC, YouTube, Meta and TikTok were vetting personalities who could speak authentically to Gen-Z and millennial audiences without alienating the traditional prime-time viewer.

Kelce’s résumé checked multiple boxes: collegiate All-American defender at NCAA Division III Cabrini University, back-to-back conference titles in 2015-16, former head varsity coach at Lower Merion High School, and host of the chart-topping podcast “Not Gonna Lie,” where she has interviewed everyone from snowboarders to figure skaters. Add in 2.7 million social followers and a self-shot curling tutorial that cleared half-a-million views in 48 hours, and NBC saw a ready-made Olympic novice who could still speak fluent athlete.

She will be embedded full-time in both competition clusters—Milan for figure skating, ice hockey and curling, and Cortina for alpine, bobsled and Nordic events. While rights-holding broadcasters are typically restricted to designated mixed zones, Kelce’s creator credential grants her entry to athlete villages, training venues and even the gondolas that shuttle competitors between mountains. Content will post in real time to her own channels as well as to NBC’s aggregated Olympic feeds on YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and TikTok.

Joining her in the collective are “Saturday Night Live” scene-stealer Bowen Yang, automotive YouTuber Matthew Meager (MMG) and lifestyle creator Anna Sitar. Each will focus on a different narrative lane; Kelce’s brief is “rookie-to-rapport,” chronicling her own crash-course in winter disciplines while guiding viewers from first exposure to full-fledged fandom.

“I’ve already fallen on the curling ice more times than I’d like to admit,” she joked during a recent episode of her podcast. “But if I can explain the hammer and the hack in plain English, maybe we’ll hook a few first-time viewers before the first draw.”

For NBC, the strategy is part insurance policy, part growth play. Traditional Olympic ratings have softened among viewers under 35; short-form vertical video now accounts for more than 60 percent of Olympic content shares. By seeding the zone with recognizable creators, the network hopes to funnel casual scrollers back to its long-form coverage on Peacock and the flagship broadcast.

Kelce insists her football lineage won’t dominate the storyline. “I’m not there as a WAG,” she said, invoking the acronym for wives and girlfriends of athletes. “I’m there because I’ve lived the grind of 6 a.m. practices and postseason heartbreak. Whether it’s field hockey or freestyle skiing, the language of sacrifice is universal.”

Still, the Kelce brand carries undeniable heft. Within minutes of NBC’s press release, #KylieInMilan trended on X (formerly Twitter), and her follower count spiked by six figures. If the experiment works, executives see a template for future Games—Paris 2024 will already feature a similar cohort—and a potential pipeline of crossover talent that blurs the line between fan and broadcaster.

For now, Kelce is cramming. She has booked a curling clinic in Denver, scheduled an introductory luge session at Lake Placid and binge-watched every episode of the “Road to Milan” docuseries. Her luggage, she says, will include both a GoPro and her old field-hockey stick—”a reminder that every Olympian starts somewhere.”

When the flame is extinguished in Milan next February, NBC will measure success in views, shares and minutes watched. Kelce says she’ll use a simpler metric: “If one kid who’s never seen a ski jump asks to stay up late to watch the large hill, that’s a medal for me.”

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