For the past few years, the NBC Olympic broadcast has ended with the “Remember the Titans” anthem playing over a montage of the highs and lows of the games. To viewers, it’s a tribute to the athletes, their perseverance and their accomplishments.

To David Mazza, it’s a signal that his production team has made it through another Olympic Games — feeling those same emotions, the highs and the lows, of directing NBC’s coverage of the largest and most complex international sporting event in the world.

Mazza, a State College native, has been the senior vice president and chief technical officer of NBC Sports and NBC Olympics since 2012 and has served as the director of engineering since 1996. Now, after more than 40 years working behind the scenes, he is preparing to retire.

The 2022 Beijing Olympic Games was the broadcast industry veteran’s last experience running the show, a fitting conclusion to a career he describes as being “an interesting, challenging and hugely gratifying journey.”

Building on his childhood experiences in the AV Club of Park Forest Elementary School, Mazza got his professional start while at State College Area High School, where he interned with Penn State’s WPSX-TV working with video and audio equipment.

In tenth grade, he began helping with coverage of Penn State football games. One weekend, the technical director called in sick and Mazza was asked to step up — a leap that catalyzed his career in the broadcast industry.

From then on, he continued to channel his passion for the application of electronics with his interest in the performance industry, freelancing for almost 20 years for different networks and covering events including Wimbledon, the Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup and the MTV Video Music Awards. He eventually got his foot in the door with ABC, where he worked as a technical director at the rowing and canoeing venue for his first Olympics, the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles.

In 1994, he accepted a job with NBC to oversee engineering for the Atlanta Games, moving his wife Taylor, also a State College native, and their two young children from Massachusetts to Connecticut for what was supposed to be a two-year contract — until he was offered a full-time position after the event’s closing ceremony.

Since then, he has received 24 Emmy Awards for television excellence, the 2006 GE Edison Award for technical innovation, the 2013 Television & Film Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2018 was inducted into Sports Video Group’s Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame.

At NBC, Mazza has pioneered innovative, transportable broadcast equipment systems, comprehensive HD coverage, and guided other technological enhancements over the past two decades — continuing to adapt and evolve with the advancements in broadcasting and livestreaming.

He and his team are credited with designing and building the NBC Sports Group’s International Broadcast Center in Stamford, CT, which is now home to NBC Sports Group, NBC Sports Network, NBC Olympics, NBC Digital and management teams with the NBC Regional Sports Network.

With a career trajectory that has taken him around the globe, Mazza said one of the things he has loved about his job is that there is never a dull day.

“Each Olympics we would think, ‘this is the most difficult thing we have ever done’ and then two years later, it got harder,” Mazza said. “Every country is different, the conditions to get into the country are different, the cultures are obviously different — and figuring out how to navigate that with along with the tremendous growth of NBC’s coverage plans was always a new challenge.”

After working on 17 Olympic Games, Mazza said Tokyo and Beijing were the most difficult due to the ripple effect of the pandemic and the quick turnaround — just six months compared to the usual two years — from the delayed 2020 Tokyo Summer Games.

When viewers tuned into the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, they likely didn’t realize the journey the images and audio went on to make it to their screen.

With scenes of athletic matches traveling across fiber optic cables under the Pacific Ocean to the U.S. where announcers added commentary then back to China where the final mixing of the audio occurred, Mazza said the entire process was three times back and forth underneath the Pacific spanning about 20,000 miles in just under three quarters of a second.

This was Mazza’s first Olympics where he wasn’t on-site in the host city. Just days before Tokyo’s closing ceremony, Mazza said the decision was made to move the prime-time control room home to Stamford instead of Beijing, tasking his team with quickly diverting equipment preparing to head overseas home.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, NBC was only able to send a crew of roughly 600 onsite to China — compared to the usual 1800 — with the rest of production being based out of Stamford. A major obstacle was the late decision just a few weeks before the games to not send the venue commentators to Beijing and have them announce from Stamford, or in some cases, their home via a remote commentary system.

“It’s gratifying when you get all those things right, but when they are not working, it’s a bit terrifying,” Mazza said. “We generally try to approach the game with two or three levels of backup. With the pandemic, we had to start on Plan D and move down from there.”

Looking back on his career, Mazza emphasized that even games that promised to be hot, sticky and difficult turned out to be truly enjoyable — such as Athens, the first Summer Games since 9/11, where Mazza expected to face huge security concerns and miserable weather conditions but instead left with incredible lifelong memories.

He looks back most fondly on the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, where he and his family spent four months and were able to fully embed themselves in the culture, including enrolling their daughter in preschool.

While he described his job as being “all-consuming,” it’s also given his children a life rich in once-in-a-lifetime experiences and cultural enrichment. Now, at the ages of 30 and 33, his kids get to say they have been to 10 Olympic Games. His wife has also been to 10 and his parents went to six.

Mazza’s parents, Maralyn and the late Paul Mazza Jr., founded South Hills School of Business and Technology in State College. His mother was the director of the school for over 30 years and now, Mazza’s brother, Paul, is the president. He says his parents were supportive of the wide array of interests their six children exhibited, and that he inherited their strong work ethic.

Maralyn Mazza, 94, said she couldn’t be prouder of all that her son has accomplished — adding that he learned everything on his own and took the initiative early on to build a successful career for himself.

“I have always attributed his ability to go up the ladder to the fact that he is so good with people,” Maralyn Mazza said. “The people who work for him feel so valued and come back every year to do all the hard work over again.”

David Mazza sums up the power of the Olympics and the emotions it evokes simply — its demonstration of international cooperation and extraordinary sportsmanship is a “symbol of hope.”

“For those of us that work on the games, we see the ability for them to unite people from different countries and difficult cultures,” he said. “It’s hopeful that we don’t have to fight to get to an amicable agreement between countries.”

Now, as he passes the torch to the younger generations, he said he is excited for the newfound time he will have to rekindle relationships, spend more time with his wife and family and enjoy traveling without the added pressure of the most-viewed sports event in the world.

“I will certainly miss the people and the team effort to pull together and get something so much bigger than any of us to work in another country, but there are a lot of things I yearned for when I was too busy or too tired from the games that I am looking forward to,” he said.