It’s All Kicking Off…

Last Friday and this coming Friday have something in common: the phrase ‘kicking off’. 

Anyone living under a rock – or in China – will have missed one of the most widespread tech outages of all time on Friday 19th July. Far more positively, the Paris 2024 Olympics, aka The Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, kicks off at the end of this week. 

Since Beijing 2008 – the last Games to happen pre-Apple iPad – each Olympics has sought to be the most tech-forward major sporting event… since the last one. This is admirable and worthy but ultimately each major event is more tech-forward than its predecessor. It’s the nature of technology. It moves quickly.

Given last Friday’s salutary lesson in having a robust Plan B in place, the good folk at COJOP (Paris Olympic Organizing Committee) – and, at this point, LAOOC (Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee) – will no doubt be amping up focus on risk mitigation as we speak. As we all found out last week, technology is all very useful and exciting… until it isn’t.  

Having worked in crisis PR for many years, I can safely say the more the crisis is deemed to be the fault of a third party, the more wiggle room you have before people blame you. In this instance, for example,  airlines affected have a grace period in which it is accepted they aren’t the perpetrators of hell-hole airports, missed flights and lost luggage. That said, the bigger the brand, the smaller the window of empathy.  

The IOC has created sport’s biggest brand, essentially based on being the biggest show in town for four weeks every two years. That is a huge, wonderful achievement but one that carries big risks, made even more threatening given how much we all rely on technology. 

Previously, technology in Olympic and Paralympic history was largely perceived as being about performance – stat-citing on Speedo’s LZR Racer, debating ‘blade running’ and seeing how the running shoe arms race is playing out is part of being a sports fan. Now that remote production, ticketing, match officiating, doping processes and more are all innately powered by technology, heaven help the Organizing Committee if they aren’t ready for all the fails that could face them. 

The Olympics and Paralympics are magnificent and create life-long memories for those of us who adore sport, so here’s hoping that the next four weeks are remembered for kicking on, not off.