Turin or Torino? Depends on whom you ask
The official name of the games is “Torino 2006,” and the International Olympic Committee refers to the city by its Italian name. When the games were awarded in June 1999, then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch announced, “The hosts of the 2006 Games will be Torino.”
After NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol took a trip to Turin, he decided the network would go with Torino, too. NBC has the U.S. broadcast rights to the games.
“Dick was hearing the way the locals were saying Torino, and how it’s so magnificently Italian how it rolls off the tongue,” said Mike McCarley, vice president of communications and marketing for NBC Sports.
“He decided on that trip that we would call it Torino.”
And with as many as 200 million people tuning in to watch the games, that means there’ll be a lot of Americans speaking at least one word of Italian for a few weeks.
USA Today also went with Torino because that is the official name, said Monte Lorell, the paper’s managing editor for sports.
“We had to decide what is the least confusing to our readers. You could say the Torino Olympics in Turin, but that just leads to confusion,” Lorell said. “We decided to just make it uniform all the way throughout.
“I feel a little bit better that NBC is using Torino,” Lorell said, “because that’s what readers will be seeing on TV.”
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Either way, the Winter Olympics will simply call the city home next month.
“I think,” Jolly said, “people will be able to figure it out.”
Until they do, confusion is sure to be the rule.
“I had this woman call me up,” said David Ledford, executive editor at The News Journal in Wilmington, Del. “She said, ‘Don’t you even know how to spell it? It’s in huge type on the front page. On the front page!’ I didn’t get a chance to say anything, she hung up on me.”
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