“Do you cook, Jean-François?” Nils Oliveto’s question takes us by surprise. After all, we were the ones who had just asked him about his complementarity with Kéven Breton during the last Olympic Games.
But we turn to Nils Oliveto. And with Nils Oliveto, everything is possible.
“I compare our relationship to teriyaki sauce,” he says on the other end of the line.
Insert here the image of an exploding brain. Ours. The verbomotor is explained, with the intensity that joyfully filled the airwaves of Radio-Canada during the broadcast of athletics competitions on the field at the last Olympic Games.
“What is teriyaki sauce? It’s sweet and salty. It’s sweet and sour. It’s the extremes, it’s creamy, but it works well together. That’s exactly it.”
We are, him and I, two extremely different people, who have extremely different backgrounds. But we complement each other very well. He has the sweet side, me, the salty side… or even spicy!
Nils Oliveto
Breton reinforces the point. After having described his analyst for the last three Olympics as a “ball of energy” with “multiple talents”, he admits to having a “really different temperament”.
“I am much more relaxed in life,” Kéven Breton tells us during a meeting with The Press. I don’t seek the spotlight at all. He likes to shine in the spotlight. He doesn’t hide it, he likes it. It was still necessary to find the balance between the two.”
Common denominators
They succeeded. You probably noticed these two friends during the Paris Games. They commentated on, among other things, the pole vault and the hammer throw. This last event is Oliveto’s favorite competition, as he himself is a former athlete in this discipline — we’ll come back to that.
We traced Breton’s journey in a previous article.
Read The “culmination” of a passionate person
Here, Nils Oliveto’s CV would take up all the space. So let’s quickly summarize: this former NCAA athlete holds a master’s degree in exercise physiology from the University of Oklahoma. He is also an actor. A director. An author. He has been a speaker for 20 years. Since 2017, Radio-Canada has hired him as an analyst for its Summer and Winter Games programming. He will be there again for the next Paralympic Games, which begin Wednesday.
Breton and Oliveto have just finished their third Games together, after Tokyo 2021 and Beijing 2022. But for the analyst, there was no doubt that their partnership would work from their first training session. What are called, in the jargon, “screen tests”.
At Radio-Canada, he says, the distinguished describer René Pothier is “responsible for making the duos work together.” Paired with Kéven, for whom it was a very first experience in description, Oliveto was “immediately” “struck” by the talent of the man who would become his friend.
You know my style: I’m loud, spicy, I put intensity. But it’s heavy if it’s just that, we understand each other. He had a nice voice, it complemented each other well. He is very comfortable with animation, playing on words, presenting things. […] He listens very well to his analyst.
Nils Oliveto
For Oliveto, their common ground is three “common denominators”: their sense of humor (“we laugh all the time, before, during and after a broadcast”), their general knowledge (“he is a very cultured person”) and consistency (“these are long hours, it is very physically demanding and tiring”).
But at the beginning of their association, Kéven quickly had to adjust, says Nils.
“I remember that René Pothier, in this first meeting, he said [à Kéven] : “Listen. Here you are sitting next to a guy who is going full throttle all the time. You have no choice but to put your foot down and turn it up.” It’s unnatural for him. He’s not usually a very vocal guy. He’s able to do it now.
“Pumped and cranked”
And how. This summer, their descriptions of the Canadian gold medals won by Ethan Katzberg and Camryn Rogers in the hammer throw, in addition to the world record won by Armand Duplantis and the bronze medal won by Alysha Newman in the pole vault, have been all over Canada. At least.
Moments that Canadians experienced live, with all the emotion of the Breton-Oliveto duo on air.
“When you have these historic moments, I, who am someone who is calm and reserved, told myself that I would go all-in,” recalls Breton. “Sometimes, we stepped on each other’s toes a bit. But for a condensed 10, 15 seconds, I think the viewer is ready to live with that.”
Anyway, try to contain Nils Oliveto on this August 4, 2024, date of the hammer throw finals that he had circled several months before, knowing full well that Katzberg was the big favorite for gold in her sport.
“I knew that this was my peak,” he said. “The most important day of my career.” broadcaster. I told Kevin: “Listen to me! Today, we’re hot! Don’t let anyone come and put a spoke in my wheels.” I was so pumped and fired up. He understood that we had to be at our best.
See the description from inside the cabin
He’s a former athlete. Performance is super important. When we go on air, he wants us to be fucking good.
Kéven Breton, about Nils Oliveto
But it’s not just the boundless, infectious energy the duo displays. There’s the work, too. Oliveto spoke to us about “centrifugal force” or “mass inertia” to describe the hammer throw, using scientific terms to popularize and explain unconventional sports.
“Nils is a really hard worker. This guy gets up in the morning, he’s like, ‘I want to be the best version of myself.’ He’s a really motivating guy. I’m really happy that his work has been recognized.”
Their complicity paid dividends. The hammer throw final with Ethan Katzberg, just before the men’s 100m final, was the most-watched sporting event of the Games on Radio-Canada, with a peak of nearly a million viewers.
“We are very proud of that,” says Nils Oliveto. “That was my gold medal.”