The Olympics are making unusual bedfellows this year.

Log onto ESPN.com and you’ll find NBC’s peacock logo displayed with a link to NBCOlympics.com, NBC’s online coverage of the Winter Games that begin Feb. 10 in Italy.

Throughout the games, ESPN.com will promote and link to NBCOlympics.com and will have access to NBC video highlights from the previous day’s events and a two-minute video narrated by Bob Costas. Olympic features on NBCOlympics.com will include links to ESPN.com.

The arrangement gives ESPN.com original content it otherwise would not have access to, and perhaps more importantly exposes ESPN’s coveted male 18-to-34 demographic to NBCOlympics.com. The NBC site logged nearly 14 million users during the 2004 Olympics in Athens; ESPN.com records 15.5 million individual visitors a month.

“Their challenge is they have the biggest event in the world for two weeks, but they’re looking for partners to help cross-promote,” said John Kosner, ESPN senior vice president and general manager of news media. Kosner said NBC had a chance to reach beyond an audience that includes lots of women to ESPN, which he calls “a hub for young guys.”

“There are a lot of people as a matter of habit who go to ESPN for their sports information,” said Gary Zenkel, president, NBC Olympics. “We want to get in front of that audience and put in front of them our content and promotion we do for the Olympics on television and the Internet.”

Not only are the two networks competitors in sports coverage, what makes the relationship even more unusual is ESPN is owned by the same company as ABC, a rival of NBC’s.

“These are unusual times,” Kosner said.

“It was good for us, and it was good for them,” Zenkel said. “I don’t think the fact that we compete on certain levels as television networks was a factor in deciding we could broaden our Internet audience.”

It marks the first time a company not broadcasting the Olympics will have access to the content from the games, but Kosner said ESPN has had partnerships with sporting events it didn’t have the broadcast rights to, such as the Masters with masters.org and tennis tournaments with the USTA.