The pulse behind the Olympics

This story, written by UNC Hussman student Lauren Schutter ’26, was originally published at alumni.unc.edu.

On the surface, it’s the kind of broadcast moment you can miss if you blink: a small graphic tucked near the corner of the TV, a number climbing fast, a pulse you can almost feel through the screen.

But inside that number is the story of the Olympics — not just the athlete who trained for years to skate, slide or jump under the brightest lights but the people who helped them get there. The parents holding their breath in the stands. The coach living and dying on every split-second decision. The sibling watching someone they’ve known forever suddenly become a global name.

That’s where Jackson Jones ’18 comes in. He is on-site in Milan for the Olympics with Durham-based Sports Media Technology, helping power a biometric initiative that brings fans closer to the most human part of sport: emotion.

SMT works behind the scenes across some of the biggest stages in sports, such as the Super Bowl, NASCAR and horse racing, to provide data services, software development and hardware solutions for major television network sports broadcasters and leagues. Jones works on everything from enhanced graphics and statistics integration to real-time tracking across events.

That data can mean an entire ecosystem: timing feeds, tracking devices, tags on athletes in certain sports and systems that translate raw numbers into clean, readable information that viewers trust. In the Olympics environment, where every hundredth of a second matters and every graphic needs to match the moment perfectly, that translation has to be seamless.

One major part of SMT’s Olympic footprint is “interface data” — taking official time keeping and results and converting them into broadcast-ready elements.

Jones explained that SMT’s team connects to Omega Timing, the Olympics’ official timing provider, then routes that information through software tools so it can appear in the specific formats that NBC Sports requested. From there, SMT’s developers code the data to match graphics packages that appear across multiple venues and sports.

Their Olympic operation is split between the International Broadcast Centre and remote production support in the United States, with staff working out of Stamford, Connecticut.

But Jones’ personal assignment in Milan is different and, in many ways, more intimate.

He leads a broadcast initiative called “biometrics,” which relies on 27 heart rate kits positioned across select Olympic venues, including curling, figure skating, aerials and moguls, the snow park and alpine skiing. The heart rate monitors aren’t for athletes; they’re for the people watching them.

“These are on spectators,” Jones said. The kits use a wristwatch-style monitor that connects to an Android phone via Bluetooth, transmitting heart rate data every second to a cloud server over cellular networks. Graphics machines in Stamford then pull that data down so producers can display it live during NBC’s broadcast.

Before leaving North Carolina, Jones said he ran full checks on all 27 kits in Durham to make sure each one connected properly, transmitted reliably and would hold up internationally.

Jones also worked with NBC Sports to design updated graphics and adjust software based on lessons learned from the Paris Olympics, where the biometric effort used only five kits, meaning Milan’s rollout is more than just an upgrade; it’s a leap.

To keep the rollout clean in a moving, multi-venue Olympic environment, Jones said he built setup guides for producers and coordinated with venue contacts, which is especially important because he can’t personally travel to every mountain site.

“I’m the only one here supporting this,” he said, noting that for the venues he can’t reach directly, he provides remote support while crews handle on-site setup.

His main on-the-ground focus is figure skating, a premier sport that comes with its own dedicated production crew, and a spotlight that doesn’t allow for mistakes. In a sport defined by razor-thin margins and soaring emotion, the biometric overlay turns the broadcast into something closer to a shared heartbeat.

That emotional payoff is why Jones is doing this.

“For competing athletes, the Olympics are even more so driven by friends and family and coaches,” he said. “It’s very difficult to do that without a strong support system… so to see the raw emotion of a parent, of a coach, of a sibling who’s watching someone who’s been competing in their sport for a long time do so at the highest level really adds a more human element to the broadcast.”

It’s a subtle shift, but it changes what viewers are watching. Instead of only tracking the score, the time and the placement, the broadcast also captures the stakes around that performance — the nervous laughter, the held breath, the moment the heart rate spikes when a jump is landed or a routine slips.

In a Winter Games packed with speed and spectacle, it’s a reminder that the Olympics are still, at their core, about people.

Jones, who majored in media and journalism as well as exercise and sport science, said the UNC connection remains a living part of his professional world. He stays involved through mentorship and keeps in touch with students, including those who covered the 2024 Paris Olympics.

“We are very much intertwined with the University and love working with it,” he said. “UNC really paved the way for me to be working in this position for such a company.”

Jones is in Milan for the full stretch of the Olympics, a long haul of technical checks, venue coordination and troubleshooting that most viewers will never notice unless something goes wrong.

“It’s been great,” Jones said. “The city’s beautiful… I’m really fortunate that this is my second Olympics at NBC. From Paris to here, the summer and winter [events] can be definitely different… It’s a fantastic place, and I’m really fortunate to be able to do it.”

In the end, Jones’s work is about invisibility: building systems that disappear into the broadcast so the story can take center stage. But the result is something viewers can feel, even if they can’t name the technology behind it: a heartbeat, live on air, proving that the Olympics aren’t only measured in medals.

Sometimes, they’re measured in pulses.