Tonight, Meredith Vieira will become the first woman to anchor NBC’s prime-time Olympics coverage, pinch-hitting for Bob Costas after he was sidelined with a nasty case of conjunctivitis.
“As a practical matter, I simply couldn’t do my job because my eyes had become so blurry, watery and sensitive to light,” Costas said in a statement.
Costas says he’s determined to mount a second-half comeback before the games conclude. “In sports there’s a term that they use for people that are on the injured list. They say, ‘he’s day to day,’ and I am day to day,” he told Ryan Seacrest. “The virus, they tell me, won’t run its course for two or three weeks, but the symptoms will crest at their worst and start to get better pretty soon.”
