How Is Colin Jost the Guy With the Most Olympic Injuries?
Another day, another malady for NBC’s Olympic surfing expert, er, surfing correspondent, Colin Jost.
Despite not pushing his body to the extreme limits required of the events’ athletes and spending most of his time in a Hawaiian shirt sipping tropical drinks, the Weekend Update anchor has managed to be the guy who’s logging the most hours in the medical tent. His latest ailment: an inner ear infection. “My new goal is to have as many infections as there are Olympic Events,” Jost told Mike Tirico.
He’s on his way. He recently told this banger of a riddle on the air: “Why did the chicken cross the road? To peck at the staph infection in my foot.”
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Jost’s first injury, the result of a surfing accident gone Benny Hill, has become the unheralded star of his Olympic Instagram feed.
Is Jost a good surfer? “I think I did pretty well until the first wave,” he told Tirico on the Games’ opening night. “And then I ended up standing on the coral reef, much like the coral reef safety expert but without coral shoes on. And so I got a little scraped up.”
The razor-like reef did a number on Jost’s foot, and it just got worse from there. Reporting from a yard full of strutting chickens, Jost told NBC’s Maria Taylor, “I have some open wounds on my foot from hitting coral reef, and I have actually been walking in place in this yard because if I stand still, ants begin crawling inside the wounds.”
Cue the Michael Che jokes! But punchlines aside, staph infections are serious business. “I’ve been visiting the medical tent regularly,” Jost told Taylor on Monday. “They started saying, ‘We need to see you every day,’ which at first I was like, ‘Oh my god, guys, I like you too.’ And they were like, ‘No it’s because the infection hasn’t improved.’”
At this point, Jost is probably ready to head back to New York — a flight doctors aren’t allowing him to make until the inner ear infection clears up. But that’s okay because the finals of the competition have been delayed a day or two due to hazardous surf conditions, giving Jost more time to shatter an elbow or lose a finger.
Expect a coconut to drop on Jost’s head as he once again delivers a familiar sign-off: “After another glorious day of surfing, none of which was done by me, I’m Colin Jost saying au revoir.”