The 2026 Winter Olympics were already on track to make viewership history and were pushed over the top by the U.S.-Canada gold medal men’s hockey game on Sunday.
The long-time rivalry matchup that saw the Americans top Canada 2-1 following a thrilling overtime goal from Jack Hughes, had a total of 20.7 million viewers across NBC, Peacock and USA Network on the final day of the Milan Cortina Olympics, NBC announced Tuesday.
Viewership peaked at 26 million live viewers during the game-winning goal.
The metric marks the most-watched pre-9 a.m. ET sporting event in U.S. history and as NBC Sports’ second-most watched hockey game ever, just behind the USA-Canada men’s gold medal game at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics (27.6 million viewers), which started at a more favorable time of 3:15 p.m. ET.
The world was locked in as they watched the U.S. win its first Olympic medal in 46 years following the “Miracle on Ice” in 1980.
On Monday, NBC Sports reported the Olympics brought in 23.5 million viewers from the United States across NBC, Peacock, NBCU Digital Platforms, USA Network and CNBC to watch Team USA bring in a national record of 12 gold medals.
That is the highest viewership metric for a Winter Games since Sochi in 2014 and is a 96% increase from the 2022 Beijing Olympics (12 million).
Additionally, 15 days of the Olympics topped 20 million viewers.
In large part, Americans were not short on any Team USA success in Milan.
To kick off the Olympics, Lindsey Vonn’s captivating comeback story came to an unfortunate end following a major crash during the women’s downhill and the U.S. surprisingly found itself taking home its first medal in mixed doubles curling. Later on, Ilia Malinin’s up and down Olympics captured a lot of attention, along with Mikaela Shiffrin’s Olympics revenge and Alysa Liu breaking the 20-year-long U.S. women’s figure skating Olympic medal drought.
It also only spiked more when the U.S. women’s hockey team defeated Canada in the gold medal final, 2-1, in overtime after trailing by a goal until two minutes left in regulation.
The matchup went down as the most-watched women’s hockey game ever, NBC announced Friday.
Megan Keller scored the dazzling game-winner as the game’s audience peaked at 7.7 million viewers between 3:45 p.m. and 4 p.m. ET.
Prior to the gold medal game on Sunday to conclude the Games, Milan was already doing record numbers for NBC. The women’s hockey gold medal game, paired with Liu’s gold medal performance in the women’s free skate, made the day the most-watched Winter Olympics weekday coverage since Feb. 17, 2024.
The network averaged 26.7 million viewers for the afternoon broadcast “Milan Prime” window from 2-5 p.m. ET and “Primetime in Milan” from 8-11 p.m. ET across NBC, Peacock, NBCU Digital Platforms and USA Network.
