Garth Brooks has been paying very close attention to the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris.

The country singer spoke with NBC’s Maria Taylor during for a piece that aired on Monday night (Aug. 5). At the end, he got emotional talking about one particular (and particularly obscure) Olympic event.

• Taylor hosts NBC’s Late Night in Paris coverage of the Olympics.
• Aside from his Las Vegas residency, Brooks is off the road in 2024.
• His last single was “Rodeo Man,” a duet with Ronnie Dunn.

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In college at Oklahoma State University, Brooks competed in the javelin, where he was limited and certainly not an Olympic contender. Several years ago, the Dallas Morning News quoted a Country Weekly article that had his personal best at 211 feet. The world record is a bit over 323 feet, set in 1996.

“He was OK,” his coach told the now defunct magazine. “He was adequate, he wasn’t outstanding, he wasn’t terrible … he was just a good kid. Garth came to practice all the time. We never had any problems with him.”

In that same article, Brooks expressed apathy for the sport, so if you guessed javelin as the sport that triggered his emotional outburst, you’re wrong.

Instead, it was fencing – specifically, women’s team sabre, where the Ukraine won Gold.

“God, it was just awesome,” Brooks tells Taylor with tears in his eyes. Even the memory cracks him up!

“God, it was just awesome to see them involved in that anthem.”

Brooks understood the context for the moment, as so much of the Ukraine experience at the Olympics has run parallel to a war in their home country, where some athletes chose to fight instead of compete. The actual sporting event was pretty intense, too: Ukraine’s final fencer staged a pretty epic comeback to edge South Korea.

Brooks and Taylor’s friendship goes back a little ways, as he asked her to help introduce Tailgate Radio on TuneIn last summer. She also hosted programming on the Garth Channel.

Billy Dukes is a Senior Editor and Executive Producer of Video Content at Taste of Country. He specializes in country music interviews, trend analysis and the Secret History of Country Music. Additionally, Billy covers Yellowstone, 1923 and related television shows through the Dutton Rules podcast. To date, he’s written more than 13,000 articles for Taste of Country and produced over 3,000 videos for the Taste of Country YouTube channel.