Producer Leaves "Today" Show After 7 Years to Direct Olympics for NBC Universal When Jim Bell was in charge of production of the London Olympics for NBC Universal, he was still the executive producer of the "Today" show. His double duty officially ended on Tuesday when he left "Today," the hugely important morning franchise, and NBC named him the full-time executive producer of the Olympics. NBC has the rights to the Summer and Winter Games through 2020. "We're looking at a unique situation," Bell said in a telephone interview. "London just happened but in 13 months, it will be go-time in Sochi," he said, referring to the Russian city where the next Winter Games will start on Feb. 7, 2014. Bell added: "We don't want to just look at London and say, "Let's do that again," but we want to look at Russia and then Rio and see how we can challenge ourselves to get to the next level. The Olympics are a signature event that dominates the attention of the world unlike anything else. The challenge is how do you improve as the media world change and people's expectations change? Bell, who ran "Today" for seven and a half years after a career at NBC as a sports producer, said that leaving the show was mostly about an "Olympic pull." The program has gone through tumultuous times lately, with Bell deciding to replace Ann Curry with Savannah Guthrie as co-host, and with ABC's "Good Morning America" often surpassing the once-unbeatable "Today" as the No. 1 morning show. "Seven and a half years is an unusually long period of time in morning television and the stars really seemed to align," he said. Morning TV is a real grind, but it can be a joyful grind. I enjoyed it, but I look forward to returning whence I came. Running NBC's Olympic production full-time lets Bell more closely follow the path of his mentor, Dick Ebersol, who resigned as chairman of the NBC Sports Group in 2011, and Roone Arledge, who masterminded the televising of the Olympics at ABC Sports. Stephen B. Burke, the chief executive of NBC Universal, said in a telephone interview: "Jim did a wonderful job on the London Olympics, which were the best Olympic Games in NBC history. Having him for future Olympics will be a real positive for the company. Mark Lazarus, the chairman of the NBC Sports Group, said that he knew before the London Games began that the network needed a full-time Olympics executive producer to oversee an increasing amount of programming over the next eight years. "I was lobbying for Jim to have a major role in the Olympics and if it could be full-time, great," he said. I felt like I was in recruitment mode. But if he still had to split his time, I would have had to hire other resources because there's so much to do. With billions of dollars invested, the Olympics demands constant attention. Bell sensed in London that he would eventually have to choose between the two positions, each of which is critical to NBC. "Continuing to do both," he said, "was not realistic." Last month, Bell was part of an NBC contingent that toured Sochi and its Olympic venues. "It's a summer resort town and physically, it's spectacular and beautiful," he said. In the way that Beijing dazzled the world in 2008, I think Russia sees this as an opportunity to show the world what it can do. In the Caucasus, it looks wintry, but not so much in the city, where a lot of the indoor venues will be. But I was also in Vancouver where there were a lot of 65-degree days, but in the mountains they had snow.