ESPN announced on Thursday that it will not send news personnel to the Winter Olympics in Beijing next month owing to worries about Covid and Covid-related restrictions. The announcement comes a day after rightsholder NBC said that majority of its announcing teams will remain in the United States throughout the Games, which will take place from February 4 to February 20.

ESPN intended to send four reporters to China, after sending five to last year's Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Because NBC owns the rights, ESPN and other U.S.-based news organizations are limited in their video usage, but they nevertheless cover the Olympics through SportsCenter and a dedicated Olympics vertical.

“With the pandemic continuing to be a global threat, and with the Covid-related on-site restrictions in place for the Olympics that would make coverage very challenging, we felt that keeping our people home was the best decision for us,” ESPN’s EVP Event and Studio Production Executive Editor Norby Williamson said.

With its rights deal, NBC will have by far the largest number of American journalists in Beijing.

“We’ll still have a large presence on the ground in Beijing, and our coverage of everything will be first rate as usual, but our plans are evolving by the day as they are for most media companies covering the Olympics,” NBC Sports’ SVP Communications Greg Hughes told USA Today earlier this week.

Organizers in Beijing have been scrambling to meet the changing demands of staging an Olympics during a global pandemic. Officials announced last week that they will not sell tickets to events in person, instead picking "groups of spectators" with little other specifics.