For Fernando Palomo, the Olympic Games are a lifelong passion.
The Texas A&M University graduate and longtime sports announcer for ESPN’s Spanish language outlets is covering the games in person for the fifth time in his career, traveling to Paris this summer to capture the stories of the athletes — including more than 20 fellow Aggies — who will compete in this year’s events. The Class of 1995 graduate will be broadcasting for ESPN Deportes and ESPN Latin America, while assisting with some of the network’s U.S. programming as well. For Palomo, it’s a role he’s been preparing for since childhood.
“I would consider myself a product of the Olympic philosophy,” he said. “I was growing up in El Salvador and hearing news about this event that would happen in Los Angeles in 1984. I knew that was a big event, but I wanted to find out why. So at 11 or 12 years old, I was researching the Olympics whichever way I could, looking at encyclopedias and books, trying to find as much information as possible.”
From that point on, Palomo said, he was hooked. He started following the news about each year’s games and learning about the athletes, even training himself to wake up in the middle of the night to keep up with specific events.
“It just bit me like a little bug,” he said. “I became totally passionate about the Olympics and their history, their philosophy, the politics around the Olympic movement. … So to cover an Olympic Games, for me, is always a special thing. It’s everything that built me personally and professionally.”
This year, Palomo says its especially gratifying to be covering the games in a place with so much Olympic history: Paris was the site of the first congress of the International Olympic Committee, founded by French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin in 1894, and hosted the second IOC-organized games in 1900. The city hosted the Olympics again in 1924, making it one of just a handful of cities to hold the games more than once.
“The fact that these Olympics are in Paris 100 years after the last time they were held there, the fact that Paris is such a historic place, and the iconic monuments that built the city up are now going to be decorated with Olympic rings, it’s just magical,” Palomo said. “That was the (birthplace) of it all, the modern Olympic movement.”
Capturing such a big event is always a challenge, Palomo said, but his decades of Olympic knowledge and passion for storytelling helps him bring the games to life for audiences around the world.
“I can tell you that the winner of the 100 meters ran a 9.79, but I can also tell you that that guy was not on the map to win the event at the Olympic Games 12 months ago,” he said. “I could tell you Simone Biles won the all-around gymnastics gold medal for the second time in three Olympics, but what has she done to get there? I think that’s more important.
“Every journalist’s responsibility should be to convey the stories of the athletes that have performed at the highest possible level in the most important stage in the world of sports, because on the other end, there’s a kid, just like I was at 11 years old, fascinated by the story, that might end up being bitten by the Olympic bug.”
Among this year’s cohort of roughly 11,000 athletes from around the world, 23 Aggies will compete in six sports, while Texas A&M women’s basketball head coach Joni Taylor will serve as an assistant coach for the USA Basketball Women’s National Team.
Palomo said it’s always great to see fellow Aggies representing the U.S. and other nations during the games, knowing that all of them are “a product of what Texas A&M stands for.” He recalled running into former Texas A&M sprinter Fred Kerley following the athlete’s silver medal-winning performance in the 100 meters in 2021: “I said howdy, we had a great conversation, and it just felt like we were in a small portion of College Station underneath the stadium in Tokyo.”
Kerley will be racing for the podium again this year, while several up-and-coming Aggie athletes make their Olympic debuts. But no matter the outcome, Palomo says, each and every one of them has already achieved something spectacular.
“One of the biggest prizes you get when you’re there watching the games (is that) you’re able to see the joy of somebody that just finished 15th in an event,” he said. “They are just thrilled that they prepared themselves to compete with the best of the best and will forever be called Olympians.”
