The IOC’s and USOPC’s Draconian Social Media Policies Rear Their Heads Again

For anyone who has not had the pleasure of dealing with the USOPC, this is my favorite descriptions of the organization: it is a law firm with a marketing arm.

The USOPC, which is not publicly funded in the United States, funds itself by basically being the sole owner of Olympic Games and all of its tendrils of intellectual property in America. They then sell that exclusivity to corporate partners who want to buy access to the patriotism that comes along with the Olympics but while sidestepping most of the politics that come with ‘sponsoring patriotism’ in 2026.

So the USOPC, naturally, has to spend a lot of time and energy protecting its intellectual property, because that is, ostensibly, what funds the American Olympic movement – though American athletes receive generally less funding from their Olympic committee than do athletes funded by tax dollars.

The USOPC and its international master the IOC has taken a very ‘1980s’ stance to its ownership of the Olympic movement. An army of attorneys copy and paste takedown letters and have developed social media monitoring systems exclusively to prevent corporations from glomming onto the Olympic aura without paying their toll. While they have softened ‘Rule 40’ of the Olympic Charter, allowing athletes a little more freedom to work with personal sponsors during the Games, in almost every other way the hard lines have remained.

These policies rear themselves in many, many strange ways during the Games – like covering the video screens on elevators at Games venues so that an ad that might normally run on those elevators in their normal usage doesn’t sneak through.

But as it relates to media social media – this ‘old school’ mentality can hinder the modern marketing of sporting events.

The ‘dog who ran down the track,’ which is being presented as an organic moment of virality, is a great example of this. The dog was not a planned part of the Olympics (allegedly – it’s hard to believe that any viral moment is unplanned these days). Yet the IOC and USOPC have taken ‘ownership’ over the moment and nuked most of the virality.

Removing the video of the dog going over the finish line for copyright is so ridiculous https://t.co/5vk4ZVa1lU

— super professional caitlin (@confusenthuse) February 18, 2026

The IOC is trying everything they can to engage a younger audience – including the Youth Olympic Games in Africa, adding new sports like speed climbing and breaking, and even the now-cancelled video game Olympics.

A real world example: SwimSwam can, and does, post as many clips from the Super Bowl as we want, and nobody says a word. The NFL recognizes that ‘virality drives viewership’ and that they can sell that virality to ever more sponsors.

Every Olympic year, SwimSwam receives numerous vague cease-and-desist emails from the Olympic movement demanding removal of content, and then we get to guess at what the offending content is (because the letters are never specific and the answers for more information are equally vague). We basically just start removing things until the letters stop coming.

The NFL has figured out this more modern business model, but the IOC and USOPC have yet to.

Kirsty Coventry so far has seemed willing to modernize and simplify the Olympic movement in a number of ways. While it is certainly crucial to these Olympic governing bodies to protect their business models that are used to fund the Olympic movement, even if those dollars seem to go everywhere but to the athletes, there are ways to find a better balance. Mathilda, a fan of Japanese figure skating from Sweden, is not disrupting that business model.