The Price of Five Rings
In September 2017, the International Olympic Committee did something it had never done in 123 years of existence: it awarded two Summer Games simultaneously. Paris would host in 2024, Los Angeles in 2028. The dual award was presented as visionary planning — a recognition that two world-class cities deserved the honor, that certainty served everyone. But the deeper truth was more uncomfortable. The IOC had run out of bidders. The 2024 race had started with five candidate cities — Hamburg, Rome, Budapest, Paris, Los Angeles — and one by one, through referendums, political reversals, and taxpayer revolts, three dropped out. The most exclusive franchise in global sports was reduced to a seller with exactly two buyers, and the only way to avoid the humiliation of a contested vote between the last two standing was to give them both what they wanted. Thomas Bach, the IOC president who engineered the solution, called it a "win-win-win." He was not wrong. But the triple win papered over a structural crisis that had been building for decades: the Olympics, the most valuable recurring event on Earth — a property that generates more than $7 billion per quadrennium in broadcast rights alone — was becoming an event that fewer and fewer cities wanted to host.
This is the paradox at the center of the Olympic machine. The brand is peerless. The five rings remain the most recognized symbol in global sport, more universally known than the logos of Nike, Apple, or the NFL. The Games command audiences that no other event can match — 3.05 billion unique viewers watched some portion of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics across linear and digital platforms, a reach that dwarfs the Super Bowl by an order of magnitude. NBC paid $7.75 billion for U.S. broadcast rights through 2032, a deal struck in 2014 that valued each Games cycle at roughly $1.3 billion in American television money alone. Discovery (now Warner Bros. Discovery) paid €1.3 billion for European rights through 2024. The IOC's total revenue for the 2017–2020 quadrennium — which included Tokyo 2020, delayed a year by COVID — reached $7.6 billion. For a nonprofit headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, with approximately 600 employees, those are extraordinary numbers.
And yet. The cost of hosting has spiraled beyond what most democratic governments can justify to their voters. Every Summer Olympics since 1960 has exceeded its initial budget, with an average cost overrun of 172% in real terms, according to research by Bent Flyvbjerg at Oxford's Saïd Business School. The 2014 Sochi Winter Games cost an estimated $51 billion, the most expensive Olympics ever staged. Rio 2016 left behind $12 billion in infrastructure costs and a city already in fiscal crisis. Tokyo 2020, played to empty stadiums during a pandemic, cost at least $13.6 billion — more than double the original bid estimate of $7.3 billion. The economic literature on Olympic hosting effects is, at this point, brutally clear: the Games do not reliably produce lasting economic benefits for host cities. The multiplier effects are overstated. The infrastructure is routinely overbuilt. The "legacy" is often a collection of white elephants rusting in the subtropical sun.
The IOC sits at the center of this contradiction — an organization that captures billions in revenue while distributing the costs to sovereign hosts, that commands unmatched cultural resonance while struggling to attract the cities necessary to stage its product, that preaches amateurism and Olympism while operating one of the most sophisticated commercial machines in global sports. Understanding how this works — how the five rings became simultaneously the world's most valuable sports brand and a franchise with a hosting crisis — requires understanding a business model unlike any other: a 130-year-old nonprofit that functions as a rights-licensing monopoly, a geopolitical actor, a media company without content production costs, and a brand whose value derives precisely from its refusal to behave like a brand.
By the Numbers
The Olympic Machine
$7.6BTotal IOC revenue, 2017–2020 quadrennium
$7.75BNBC's U.S. broadcast deal through 2032
3.05BUnique viewers, Tokyo 2020
206National Olympic Committees recognized
172%Average cost overrun for Summer Games since 1960
~90%IOC revenue distributed to the Olympic Movement
$1.2B+TOP sponsor revenue per quadrennium (est.)
130+Years since founding in 1894
A Baron's Invention
The modern Olympics began not as a sports event but as a philosophical project dressed in Hellenistic costume. Pierre de Coubertin — a French baron, aristocratic reformer, minor pedagogue — had become obsessed with the English public school system and its emphasis on athletics as a vehicle for moral formation. He was, by all accounts, a man of consuming ambition and limited self-awareness: convinced that international athletic competition could foster peace between nations, prevent the physical degeneration of French youth (the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War still fresh), and, not incidentally, place himself at the center of a grand civilizational project. In June 1894, at a congress at the Sorbonne in Paris, he persuaded delegates from nine countries to establish the International Olympic Committee and revive the ancient Games. The first modern Olympics were held in Athens in 1896 — 241 athletes from 14 nations, competing in 43 events. There were no gold medals. First-place finishers received silver medals and olive branches.
Coubertin's genius — and it was genius, however grandiose and self-serving — was to understand that the Games needed a mythology. Not just a schedule. The Olympic Charter, the rings, the torch relay (actually a 1936 invention, but retroactively absorbed into the founding narrative), the elaborate protocol of opening and closing ceremonies — all of it served a purpose that transcended athletics. The Olympics would be wrapped in the language of peace, brotherhood, and human excellence, and this wrapping would become inseparable from the product itself. The idealism was real, but it was also, from the very beginning, the brand.
The early decades were fragile. The 1900 Paris Games were a sideshow to the World's Fair, poorly organized and barely noticed. The 1904 St. Louis Games were worse — tacked onto the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, featuring bizarre "Anthropology Days" that subjected Indigenous peoples to pseudo-scientific athletic tests. Coubertin, who didn't attend, later called the affair a disgrace. It wasn't until the 1912 Stockholm Games that the Olympics began to resemble a serious international sporting event, and not until the interwar period — particularly the 1936 Berlin Games, which Hitler transformed into a propaganda spectacle of staggering technical sophistication — that the world understood what the Olympics could become as a platform for national projection.
The IOC governed all of this as a self-selecting aristocratic club. Members were not representatives of their countries to the IOC but, per Coubertin's design, representatives of the IOC to their countries. This inversion — the Committee as sovereign entity, not democratic assembly — would prove to be the organization's most durable structural feature. It meant the IOC answered to no electorate, no shareholders, no public body. It was, and remains, a private association under Swiss law, its members chosen by existing members, its president elected by the membership, its finances opaque by the standards of any publicly traded corporation. The structure was designed for independence. It also created the conditions for corruption.
The Brundage Doctrine and the Amateur Fiction
For most of the twentieth century, the Olympics operated under a financial model that was, by modern standards, almost quaint. Revenue was minimal. Host cities bore the costs. The IOC subsisted on modest membership dues and the organizing committees' contributions. There was no systematic broadcast revenue until the 1960 Rome Games, when CBS paid $394,000 for U.S. television rights — a number that seems almost fictional now. The Olympic brand was not yet a commercial asset because the Olympic ethos, as enforced by IOC president Avery Brundage from 1952 to 1972, was explicitly anti-commercial.
Brundage — a Chicago construction magnate, former decathlete, authoritarian in temperament and rigid in ideology — enforced amateurism with a zealot's conviction. Athletes who had received any form of compensation were barred. Sponsorship was nonexistent at the IOC level. The Games were supposed to be pure: a contest of unpaid athletes competing for glory alone. Brundage's amateurism was, in practice, a class system. It privileged athletes from wealthy nations who could afford to train without income, penalized those from developing countries, and created an elaborate fiction in which Eastern Bloc "amateurs" — state-supported, full-time athletes in everything but name — competed against Western athletes who had to pretend they didn't need to eat.
The fiction collapsed gradually, then all at once. Austrian skier Karl Schranz was barred from the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games for receiving endorsement income. The Soviet hockey team that dominated Olympic ice hockey for decades was composed entirely of military officers whose full-time job was hockey. By the 1970s, the contradiction was indefensible. But Brundage's departure in 1972 didn't just end the amateur era. It opened the door for the IOC's transformation from a gentlemen's club into a commercial empire, and the man who walked through that door would remake the Olympics more fundamentally than anyone since Coubertin.
The Samaranch Revolution
Juan Antonio Samaranch became the seventh president of the IOC in 1980, and for the next 21 years he rebuilt the organization from a financially precarious aristocratic society into a global commercial juggernaut. A Spanish diplomat, former ambassador to the Soviet Union, and — a fact that his hagiographers tend to elide — a former official in Francisco Franco's government, Samaranch understood power in a way his predecessors did not. He understood that the Olympic brand was vastly undermonetized. He understood that television was the key to unlocking its value. And he understood that the IOC's independence — its freedom from democratic accountability — was not a weakness but a weapon, because it meant he could cut deals without consulting electorates.
The Olympic Movement is like a great ship. We must navigate it through dangerous waters, but the destination is clear.
When Samaranch took office, the Olympics were in crisis. The 1976 Montreal Games had left the city with $1.5 billion in debt that took 30 years to pay off. The 1980 Moscow Games were boycotted by 65 countries, led by the United States. The 1984 Los Angeles Games, which would prove transformative, had been awarded to L.A. largely because no other city bid — the Montreal debt had terrified potential hosts. The IOC's total assets were roughly $200,000. The organization was, by any commercial measure, nearly insolvent.
Samaranch's first major insight was that the IOC should centralize broadcast rights negotiations. Previously, host city organizing committees had negotiated their own TV deals, with the IOC receiving only a portion. Samaranch reclaimed control. His second insight was the creation of The Olympic Programme — TOP — a global sponsorship platform launched in 1985 under the guidance of Horst Dassler, the Adidas heir and sports marketing pioneer, and later formalized by ISL Marketing. TOP was elegant in concept: a limited number of corporate sponsors (initially nine) would each pay tens of millions of dollars for exclusive worldwide marketing rights in their product category across both the Summer and Winter Games. No competitor could use the rings. The exclusivity was the product.
The 1984 Los Angeles Games, organized by Peter Ueberroth with a ruthless focus on profitability, demonstrated what the Olympics could look like as a commercial enterprise. Ueberroth, leveraging existing infrastructure and corporate sponsorship in ways no previous organizer had attempted, produced a surplus of $215 million. The model proved that the Games could generate money rather than destroy city finances — though, crucially, L.A.'s success depended on conditions (existing venues, private financing, no new public infrastructure) that most host cities could not replicate.
📺
The Television Revolution
U.S. broadcast rights fees for the Summer Olympics
1960CBS pays $394,000 for Rome Games — the first Olympic TV deal.
1976ABC pays $25 million for Montreal.
1984ABC pays $225 million for Los Angeles.
1996NBC pays $456 million for Atlanta.
2000NBC pays $705 million for Sydney.
2014NBC signs $7.75 billion deal for all Games through 2032 — roughly $1.1–1.3B per cycle.
2023NBC extends through 2032; total U.S. rights approach $12B+ across agreements.
Through the 1990s, Samaranch expanded the commercial apparatus relentlessly. TOP sponsorship revenue grew from $96 million in the first quadrennium (1985–1988) to over $500 million by the 2000s. Broadcast revenue scaled even faster. The IOC's total income for the 1993–1996 quadrennium was approximately $2.6 billion, a figure that would have been incomprehensible two decades earlier. Samaranch also expanded the Games themselves — adding sports, increasing the number of events, pushing into new markets. He admitted professional athletes, ending the amateur pretense once and for all (NBA players at Barcelona 1992; the Dream Team as marketing spectacle). He separated the Summer and Winter Games onto alternating two-year cycles, doubling the frequency of the Olympic "product" for broadcasters and sponsors.
But the Samaranch era's commercial triumph came at a cost that would nearly destroy the organization. The IOC's self-governing structure, combined with the enormous financial stakes of hosting, created conditions ripe for corruption — and in late 1998, a scandal erupted that confirmed what critics had long suspected.
Salt Lake and the Crisis of Legitimacy
In November 1998, a local television station in Salt Lake City reported that the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Games had provided a scholarship to the daughter of an IOC member from Cameroon. The thread, once pulled, unraveled spectacularly. Investigations by the IOC, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the U.S. Senate revealed a systematic pattern of gift-giving, cash payments, medical treatment, and other inducements directed at IOC members by Salt Lake City's bid committee — and, it became clear, by other bid cities as well. The practice was not aberrant. It was the system.
Six IOC members were expelled. Four resigned under pressure. Ten more received warnings. The scandal laid bare the structural incentive: IOC members voted on host city selection, and bid cities spent tens of millions of dollars wooing them. The combination of a small, self-selecting electorate, enormous financial stakes, and minimal oversight was a textbook recipe for corruption. Samaranch survived — barely — by positioning himself as a reformer despite having presided over the culture that produced the crisis.
The culture of the IOC is a culture of corruption. It is a culture of secrecy. And it is a culture that demands reform.
The reforms that followed were real but incomplete. An Ethics Commission was established. Members were barred from visiting bid cities. Term limits were introduced. An IOC Athletes' Commission gained greater representation. The bid process itself was restructured, though it would take another two decades — and the 2017 dual-award crisis — before the IOC overhauled it entirely. The Salt Lake scandal did not destroy the Olympic brand. Remarkably, broadcast and sponsorship revenue continued to climb through the 2000s, suggesting that the commercial value of the Games was more resilient than the institution's reputation. Advertisers wanted the audience, not the governance.
The Revenue Machine That Owns Nothing
The IOC's business model is structurally unlike any other entity in sports, entertainment, or media. It is best understood as a pure intellectual property licensing operation that produces no content, owns no venues, employs no athletes, and bears almost none of the costs of its core product. The IOC owns the Olympic brand — the rings, the terminology, the Charter, the right to determine where and how the Games are staged — and licenses that brand to three primary customer groups: broadcasters, sponsors, and host cities.
Revenue flows through four channels: broadcasting rights (accounting for roughly 61% of total revenue in the 2017–2020 cycle), TOP worldwide sponsorship partnerships (approximately 18%), domestic sponsorship by host-country organizing committees (roughly 11%), and licensing, ticketing, and other sources (approximately 10%). In the 2017–2020 quadrennium, total revenue was $7.6 billion. The IOC retains approximately 10% for its own operations and distributes roughly 90% to the broader "Olympic Movement" — the 206 National Olympic Committees (NOCs), the International Federations (IFs) governing individual sports, the host city organizing committees, and the World Anti-Doping Agency.
This distribution structure is both the IOC's greatest political asset and its most effective moat. By funneling billions to NOCs and IFs — many of which are entirely dependent on Olympic revenue — the IOC ensures the loyalty of its constituent bodies. The 206 NOCs each receive funding, and each gets one vote in the IOC's general assembly. Small nations — Tuvalu, Nauru, the Marshall Islands — receive the same vote as the United States or China. This creates a structural dynamic in which the IOC functions, in its internal politics, something like the United Nations General Assembly: major powers provide the revenue, but small states control the votes. Samaranch understood this. Bach understands it even better.
Where the money goes (2017–2020 quadrennium)
| Recipient | Approximate Share | Function |
|---|
| Organizing Committees (OCOGs) | ~$3.4B | Operational costs of staging the Games |
| National Olympic Committees | ~$590M | National sports development, athlete support |
| International Federations | ~$520M | Sport governance, development programs |
| IOC Operations & Programs | ~$780M | Administration, Olympic Solidarity, broadcasting |
| Other (WADA, CAS, etc.) | ~$310M | Anti-doping, arbitration, youth games |
The genius of this model is that the IOC never has to build a stadium, hire a security force, construct a transportation network, or house 10,500 athletes. It licenses the right to do all of those things to a host city that competes for the privilege and bears the cost. The IOC provides the brand, the broadcast relationships, the TOP sponsors, and the regulatory framework. The host provides everything else — typically $5–15 billion worth of everything else.
This asset-light structure gives the IOC operating economics that would make any SaaS company envious. The IOC's own administrative budget is a fraction of its revenue. It maintains a reserve fund that has grown to over $4 billion, a financial cushion that proved critical when Tokyo 2020 was postponed by a year — an unprecedented logistical and financial shock that the IOC absorbed without existential distress, in part because its broadcast contracts include postponement provisions and its sponsors were locked into long-term deals.
The Bach Era and the New Bid Process
Thomas Bach became IOC president in 2013, succeeding Jacques Rogge, who had spent twelve years in the role quietly cleaning up after Samaranch while maintaining the commercial trajectory. Bach — a German lawyer, fencer (Olympic gold, 1976), and corporate dealmaker who had spent decades in IOC politics — arrived with a reformer's agenda codified in Olympic Agenda 2020, a set of 40 recommendations adopted in 2014 that were designed to make the Games more sustainable, less expensive, and more attractive to potential hosts.
The reforms were genuine in ambition and mixed in execution. Agenda 2020 encouraged the use of existing venues, allowed events to be held outside the host city (even outside the host country), reduced the number of mandatory infrastructure requirements, and — critically — overhauled the bid process itself. The old system, in which cities spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars on elaborate bid campaigns, was replaced by a "Future Host Commission" that conducted targeted dialogues with potential hosts, essentially curating a shortlist rather than running an open competition. The process became invitation-based rather than application-based — a concession that the old competitive model had failed.
We want cities to use the Games as a catalyst for their long-term development plans. We do not want cities to build white elephants.
Bach also pushed the Games into the digital era. The IOC launched the Olympic Channel in 2016, a digital platform designed to maintain audience engagement between Games. It established the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) as the host broadcaster for all Games, producing and distributing content centrally rather than relying on rights holders. And it began, cautiously, to explore direct-to-consumer possibilities — though the bulk of its revenue remained locked in long-term broadcast deals that gave traditional networks exclusive rights.
The Paris 2024 Games represented the fullest expression of Bach's vision — or at least the version of it that a wealthy Western capital could deliver. Paris used 95% existing or temporary venues. The opening ceremony was held not in a stadium but along the Seine, a spectacle that converted the city itself into the venue. The organizing committee's budget of €4.4 billion was funded overwhelmingly by private revenue (sponsorship, ticketing, licensing) and the IOC contribution, with limited public expenditure on permanent infrastructure. Whether Paris 2024 actually delivered the sustainable, cost-effective model the IOC promised is a question that will take years to answer — the full accounting of public costs for security, transportation, and urban upgrades is invariably higher than organizers initially disclose.
The Audience Paradox
The Olympic Games face a version of the audience fragmentation problem that has reshaped every media business, but with a temporal twist that makes it uniquely acute: the product appears once every two years for roughly two and a half weeks, then vanishes. There is no season. No weekly cadence. No subscription relationship with the audience. The Olympics must, every 24 months, reassemble a mass audience from scratch — and it must do so in a media environment that is structurally hostile to mass simultaneous viewership.
The numbers tell a complicated story. Global reach remains enormous: the 3.05 billion unique viewers for Tokyo 2020 and the estimated 3+ billion for Paris 2024 are figures that no other sporting event approaches. But the composition and behavior of that audience is changing. U.S. viewership on NBC's linear broadcast has declined steadily — the Tokyo Games averaged 15.6 million primetime viewers, a 42% drop from Rio 2016's 25.8 million. Paris 2024 recovered somewhat, averaging 30.6 million viewers across NBC's platforms, but much of that growth came from streaming on Peacock rather than traditional television. The audience is fragmenting across platforms, time-shifting through digital, and — particularly among younger demographics — discovering Olympic content through social media clips rather than live broadcasts.
This creates a tension at the heart of the IOC's revenue model. Broadcasting rights account for 61% of revenue, and the contracts are structured around the assumption of mass simultaneous viewership — the kind that justifies $1.3 billion per cycle from a single U.S. network. If the audience migrates to streaming, to highlights, to social platforms that the IOC does not directly monetize, the value proposition for rights holders changes. NBC's $7.75 billion deal, which was struck in 2014 when linear television still dominated, runs through 2032. The next negotiation — for the 2034 and 2036 Games — will be the most consequential test of the Olympic media model in decades.
The IOC has responded by loosening its historically strict control over digital content. Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter, which restricted athletes' and non-sponsors' use of Olympic imagery during the Games, has been progressively relaxed. Athletes can now post content on their personal social media accounts. The IOC itself has built a substantial digital presence — the Olympics are the most-followed sports entity on social media, with over 100 million followers across platforms. But followers are not revenue. The structural question is whether the IOC can capture the economic value of its digital audience as effectively as it captured the economic value of its broadcast audience.
The Hosting Economics Nobody Wants to Discuss
Bent Flyvbjerg, the Oxford professor whose research on megaproject cost overruns has become a fixture of infrastructure economics, has studied the Olympics more rigorously than perhaps anyone outside the IOC. His findings, published with Alexander Budzier and Daniel Lunn in a series of papers and in the book
How Big Things Get Done, are devastating: every Summer Olympics since 1960 has exceeded its initial budget. The average overrun is 172% in real terms. The Winter Games are somewhat better — a mere 142% average overrun. No other category of megaproject — not nuclear power plants, not dams, not IT systems — has a worse track record.
The sources of overrun are structural, not incidental. Olympic infrastructure is built to a hard deadline (the opening ceremony date cannot slip), in a context of enormous political pressure (national prestige is at stake), with a client (the IOC) that steadily expands requirements, in a competitive bidding environment that incentivizes lowballing initial cost estimates. The IOC's own demands — for broadcast infrastructure, security zones, athlete accommodations, transportation networks, accessibility standards — grow with each Games cycle. And the host city's incentive structure is perverse: the bid team that wins is the one that makes the most optimistic cost projections, and by the time the real costs become clear, the political commitment is irreversible.
🏗️
Cost Overruns in Olympic History
Actual vs. budgeted costs for selected Games
| Games | Initial Budget | Final Cost (est.) | Overrun |
|---|
| Montreal 1976 | $310M | $1.6B | ~415% |
| Barcelona 1992 | $3.1B | $9.4B | ~203% |
| Athens 2004 | $1.6B | $11B+ | ~588% |
| Beijing 2008 | $1.6B | $6.8B | ~325% |
| London 2012 |
The counter-argument — advanced by host cities, the IOC, and economists sympathetic to the Olympic project — is that the raw cost figures miss the point. The investments in transportation, urban renewal, and infrastructure have lasting value. Barcelona's transformation from a city with its back to the sea into a global tourist destination is the canonical case: the 1992 Games catalyzed a $9 billion urban renovation that remade the city. London 2012's regeneration of East London is a credible, if still debated, success. But for every Barcelona, there is an Athens (2004 venues crumbling within a decade, the country's fiscal crisis exacerbated by Olympic spending), a Rio (incomplete infrastructure, displaced communities, stadiums abandoned within months), or a Sochi (a subtropical resort city with $51 billion in alpine infrastructure it will never fully use).
The IOC's response has been to shift the model. Agenda 2020 and its successor, Olympic Agenda 2020+5, emphasize existing venues, temporary structures, and multi-city hosting. Los Angeles 2028 plans to use no newly constructed permanent venues — a first for a Summer Games. Brisbane 2032, the next Summer host, has significantly scaled back its initial venue plans. The 2030 Winter Games were awarded to the French Alps; 2034 to Salt Lake City. Both rely on existing infrastructure. The direction is clear: the IOC is moving toward a model in which the Games are hosted by cities and regions that already have the infrastructure, rather than cities that build it for the occasion. This narrows the pool of realistic hosts to wealthy, sports-infrastructure-rich democracies — which is both a practical solution and a philosophical retreat from the universalist aspirations of the Olympic movement.
The Olympic Partner (TOP) programme remains one of the most exclusive and expensive sponsorship platforms in the world. For the 2021–2024 quadrennium, TOP partners included Coca-Cola (joined with Mengniu), Alibaba, Atos, Bridgestone, Deloitte, Intel, Omega, Panasonic, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Toyota, and Visa. Each partner pays a reported $200 million or more per quadrennium — the exact figures are not publicly disclosed — for worldwide marketing rights, category exclusivity, and the right to use the Olympic rings. Total TOP revenue for the 2017–2020 period was approximately $1.33 billion, and it is estimated to have grown for the 2021–2024 cycle.
The value proposition for TOP sponsors is unique in marketing: genuinely global reach across 206 countries, association with a brand that transcends any single sport or culture, and — critically — freedom from the clutter of competitor advertising. When Visa is an Olympic partner, no other payment network can associate with the Games. Period. This category exclusivity, enforced with near-religious zeal by the IOC's legal apparatus, is the core of what sponsors are buying. It is also what makes the Olympic sponsorship model different from, say, sponsoring a football league where competitors can buy ad time during broadcasts.
But the sponsorship relationship is not without friction. Toyota, which had signed a record-setting deal reportedly worth $835 million for the 2017–2024 period, declined to air advertisements during the Tokyo 2020 Games — a stunning rebuke from the host country's largest company. The reason, according to Toyota's then-CEO Akio Toyoda, was that the Games had become unpopular in Japan due to the pandemic, and associating the brand with an event the public opposed carried more risk than reward. Toyota subsequently chose not to renew its TOP partnership beyond 2024. When one of the largest corporations in the world walks away from the Olympic sponsorship table, it is a signal worth reading carefully.
The Geopolitics of the Rings
The Olympics have always been a geopolitical instrument — from Berlin 1936 to the
Cold War boycotts of 1980 and 1984, from the "Ping-Pong diplomacy" era to China's use of Beijing 2008 as a coming-out party for its superpower ambitions. What has changed in the twenty-first century is the nature of the geopolitical pressure. During the Cold War, the Games were a neutral stage (or tried to be) on which rival systems competed symbolically. Now, the Games are themselves the contested terrain.
The decision to award the 2022 Winter Games to Beijing — making it the first city to host both a Summer and Winter Olympics — was shaped by the same narrowing of the bidding field that produced the 2017 dual award. Oslo, Stockholm, Kraków, and Lviv all dropped out. Only Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, remained. The IOC chose Beijing in a 44-to-40 vote, effectively selecting between two authoritarian states after every democratic candidate withdrew. The choice was defensible on operational grounds (Beijing had proven hosting capacity) and damaging on moral ones (the Uyghur human rights crisis made the Games a focal point for criticism of China's government). Diplomatic boycotts by the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia followed — a half-measure that satisfied no one.
The Russia question has been even more consuming. Following Russia's state-sponsored doping program — exposed by whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov and confirmed by the McLaren Report in 2016 — Russian athletes have competed under neutral banners since 2018. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led to broader sanctions: Russian and Belarusian athletes were barred from team sports and, for Paris 2024, permitted only as "Individual Neutral Athletes" after passing vetting criteria. The IOC's handling of Russia has satisfied no one. Ukraine and its allies argue that any Russian participation normalizes the invasion. Russia claims persecution. The IOC insists on a principle of individual athlete rights that critics deride as moral equivocation.
Bach's position — that the IOC must remain "politically neutral" while the Games serve as a vehicle for peace — is increasingly untenable in a world where the lines between sport, geopolitics, and human rights are dissolving. The IOC's Swiss nonprofit status, its Lausanne headquarters, its tradition of diplomatic equidistance — all of these were designed for a world in which sports and politics could be kept in separate lanes. That world is gone.
Athletes at the Bottom of the Value Chain
Here is a number that captures a structural injustice the IOC has never fully addressed: of the $7.6 billion in revenue generated during the 2017–2020 quadrennium, precisely $0 went directly to athletes as compensation for competing. Zero. Olympic athletes receive no prize money from the IOC for winning medals. They receive no share of broadcast revenue. They receive no share of sponsorship revenue. The IOC distributes money to NOCs, which are supposed to use it for athlete development — but the amount that reaches individual athletes, and in what form, varies wildly by country and sport.
Some athletes benefit enormously from Olympic success — Usain Bolt's post-Olympic endorsement income dwarfed anything the IOC could have paid. But Bolt is an outlier. The median Olympic athlete trains for years in obscure sports, funds their own preparation, receives modest or no national federation support, and competes in an event that generates billions for an institution that gives them nothing directly. A survey by the Global Athlete advocacy group found that a substantial majority of Olympic athletes experience financial hardship during their competitive careers.
The IOC has begun, tentatively, to shift. In 2024, the IOC announced a $10 million pilot program to share prize money with athletes at the Paris Summer Games — $50,000 per gold medalist, funded from IOC revenues. It was framed as historic. For context: the IOC's reserve fund exceeds $4 billion. The $10 million allocation represents approximately 0.25% of reserves. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee separately provides $37,500 per gold medal from its own funds. Other nations provide more. But the structural point stands: the athletes are the product, and the product has historically been uncompensated by the entity that monetizes it most effectively.
Olympic athletes generate billions for the IOC while many struggle to make ends meet. The system treats them as volunteers in a billion-dollar enterprise.
The Next Billion Screens
The IOC's digital transformation is less a pivot than a slow migration, constrained by the very broadcast deals that fund the organization. Long-term contracts with NBC, Discovery, and other rights holders give those networks exclusive distribution rights in their territories, limiting the IOC's ability to build its own direct-to-consumer platform. The Olympic Channel, launched in 2016, has grown steadily but remains a minor revenue contributor — it functions more as a brand-building exercise between Games than as a monetizable media asset.
The real digital action is happening at the edges. The IOC partnered with Alibaba as a TOP sponsor and technology partner, gaining access to cloud infrastructure and e-commerce expertise. It has licensed short-form digital rights to platforms including Snapchat and TikTok in selected markets, generating audience engagement (Paris 2024 content on social media reached billions of views) without capturing proportional revenue. The esports question — whether competitive gaming should become an Olympic sport — has been answered cautiously: the IOC created the Olympic Esports Series in 2023 and announced Olympic Esports Games to be hosted by Saudi Arabia in 2025, though the relationship between traditional Olympic sports and gaming remains philosophically fraught.
The strategic question for the next decade is whether the IOC can evolve from a wholesale rights licensor — selling its content in large blocks to national broadcasters — to a more sophisticated multi-platform distributor that captures value across linear, streaming, social, and direct-to-consumer channels simultaneously. The answer depends on the next round of broadcast negotiations, which will begin in earnest for the post-2032 period. If the IOC can offer rights holders a split-platform model — live event exclusivity on linear, expanded shoulder content and highlights on digital, social-native content across platforms — it may be able to grow total revenue even as linear audiences decline. If it remains locked into traditional all-rights bundles, it risks watching its most valuable content migrate to platforms where it extracts no economic value.
2028, 2032, and the Narrowing Funnel
Los Angeles 2028 is being positioned as a proof of concept for the IOC's reformed hosting model: a city that already possesses world-class venues, a deep sponsorship market, and the operational capacity to stage the Games without significant new public infrastructure. The LA28 organizing committee has projected a budget of approximately $6.9 billion, funded primarily through private revenue, with the IOC contribution, domestic sponsorship, and ticketing covering costs. There is no public construction subsidy in the plan. The Games will use the Coliseum (originally built for the 1932 Games), SoFi Stadium, Crypto.com Arena, and the swimming and diving facilities at USC, among others.
The risk is that LA28's cost projections follow the historical pattern of Olympic underestimation. Security costs alone — in a city with the geographic sprawl of Los Angeles, hosting tens of thousands of athletes and millions of spectators — could exceed $2 billion. Transportation infrastructure, in a city notorious for its car dependence, will require massive temporary investment. And the broader political environment — homelessness, housing costs, public skepticism about elite sporting events — could erode the social license that LA28 needs to operate smoothly.
Brisbane 2032, awarded in 2021, has already experienced the gravitational pull of cost escalation. The original A$5 billion plan has been revised upward, with the Queensland state government scrapping plans for a new 50,000-seat stadium — the centerpiece venue — after cost estimates ballooned. The revised plan relies more heavily on existing and temporary venues, an approach consistent with Agenda 2020's philosophy but one that has generated public frustration about what, exactly, Brisbane will get in exchange for hosting the world.
The pipeline beyond 2032 is the IOC's most pressing strategic concern. The 2030 Winter Games were initially awarded to Sapporo, Japan, before the bid collapsed amid a corruption scandal involving Tokyo 2020's organizing committee — a grim echo of the Salt Lake affair. The IOC reassigned 2030 to the French Alps and moved quickly to lock in Salt Lake City for 2034. For 2036 and beyond, the candidates remain uncertain. India has expressed interest. Turkey is a perennial aspirant. Several European and Middle Eastern nations have signaled willingness. But the structural dynamic is clear: the pool of cities capable of and willing to host a Summer Olympics is shrinking, and the IOC's leverage — its ability to choose among competing hosts — is diminished.
The Church of the Five Rings
There is a reading of the IOC that treats it as a cynical enterprise — a cartel that exploits nationalistic sentiment and athletic labor to extract rents for an unaccountable Lausanne bureaucracy. This reading is not entirely wrong, but it is incomplete. It misses the thing that makes the Olympics different from every other sporting property on Earth, the thing that sustains the brand even as the institution stumbles: the Games actually work.
Every two years, for a few weeks, something happens that no other event replicates. Athletes from 206 countries march into a stadium together. A sprinter from Jamaica races next to a sprinter from Bahrain. A gymnast from a country of 300,000 people can become the most famous athlete in the world overnight. The narrative factory of the Olympics — the underdog stories, the rivalries, the sheer improbability of individual human achievement — produces emotional content at a scale and intensity that no scripted entertainment can match. This is not sentimentality. It is the product. The five rings work because they stand for something that transcends any individual Games, any individual scandal, any individual cost overrun.
The IOC knows this. It is the one asset that cannot be replicated, that no competitor can build, that no amount of FIFA World Cup expansion or NFL international growth can duplicate. The Olympics occupy a unique position in global culture — not just a sporting event but a secular ritual, a festival that marks time in the way religious holidays once did. The question is not whether the brand endures. The question is whether the institution that stewards it can adapt fast enough — to the economics of hosting, to the migration of audiences, to the demands of athletes, to the geopolitical fractures that make neutrality impossible — to preserve what makes the ritual possible.
On August 11, 2024, the closing ceremony of the Paris Games unfolded in the Stade de France. Tom Cruise rappelled from the roof of the stadium carrying the Olympic flag, a stunt that served simultaneously as Hollywood spectacle, American soft power, and an advertisement for LA28. Somewhere in Lausanne, the IOC's reserve fund sat at over $4 billion. Somewhere in Brisbane, a stadium plan was being scrapped. Somewhere in a training facility in a country most viewers couldn't locate on a map, an athlete nobody had heard of was preparing for 2028 — unpaid, unsponsored, chasing a dream invented by a French baron 130 years ago.
The rings don't care about the institution. They outlast it.
