The president of the International Olympic Committee didn’t have an answer to a question posed to her at a press conference on the final day of the 2026 Winter Olympics. Or to another question. Or to yet another. Ultimately, she suggested, on camera, that someone on her communications team should be fired. In this short midweek FIR episode, Shel and Neville look at the fallout, what both the president and the head of communications might have done differently, and the possible long-term consequences.

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The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, March 23.

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Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode number 503 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. Something happened at the Winter Olympics last month that set off a fierce reaction across the communication profession and it wasn’t about sport. During the final daily press conference on the 20th of February, IOC president Kirsty Coventry was asked a series of geopolitical questions. Questions about Russia and doping.

Comments linked to Germany and 2036, questions about senior sporting figures engaging in wider political activity. On more than one occasion, she said she wasn’t aware of the issue and visibly looked towards her communication team. At one point, she went further and suggested that perhaps someone should be dismissed. That’s the moment that shifted this from a routine press conference stumble into something much bigger. We’ll explore it right after this.

What makes this especially interesting is the context. A few days after the press conference, Coventry had been widely praised for her leadership at the Milan Cortina Games. Reporting from the AP on the 23rd of February described her first Olympics as IOC president as having good overall success, noting the intense political pressure she faced and the way she engaged directly with athletes during the Ukraine controversy. That controversy centered on Ukraine’s skeleton racer, Wladyslaw Hraskiewicz, who competed wearing a helmet memorializing athletes and coaches killed in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The gesture drew scrutiny and diplomatic tension around whether it breached Olympic neutrality rules. Coventry chose to meet him face to face at the track and later became visibly emotional when discussing the issue with international media. That moment was widely interpreted as defining her emerging leadership style: empathetic, athlete-facing, and willing to engage directly.

The games were even described as giving a taste of tougher challenges ahead as the IOC looks towards Los Angeles 2028. In other words, this wasn’t a presidency in crisis. There was goodwill, momentum, a sense of forward motion. And then one live moment reframed the entire narrative. Being caught off guard isn’t unusual. No leader can know everything. No briefing pack can anticipate every question.

But that’s not the story. The story is what you do in that moment. Do you acknowledge the gap and commit to follow up? Do you bridge to principle? Do you calmly say, I’ll get back to you once I’ve reviewed the details? Or do you turn publicly and imply that your team has failed you? The communication reaction was swift and pointed. LinkedIn filled up with variations of the same message. Accountability sits with the principal. Praise in public, criticize in private. You can’t outsource responsibility.

But I think there’s a deeper discussion here. Yes, leaders must own the podium. Yes, public blame undermines trust. But this also raises questions about executive readiness, about the contract between leadership and communication, and about how fragile reputational capital really is. Those geopolitical questions were not obscure. They were predictable fault lines around an organization operating in an intensely political global environment. Were holding lines prepared? We don’t know. Was she fully briefed? Possibly. Did she ignore it? Also possible. And that’s where this moves beyond a single awkward exchange.

In high-performing organizations, the relationship between a leader and their communication team is built on shared risk. The team prepares the ground, the leader absorbs the pressure. If something goes wrong, it’s owned collectively and dealt with internally. The world stage doesn’t create dysfunction, it amplifies it. So rather than pile on, I think this is worth examining as a case study.

Here’s what intrigues me. This wasn’t a leader already in trouble. She had just been praised for navigating intense political pressure, engaging directly with athletes, and projecting empathy and maturity in a complex environment. There was goodwill in the bank. And yet one live moment—a few sentences, a glance towards her team, a suggestion someone might be dismissed—reframed the entire narrative. That tells us something about how fragile leadership capital really is.

So, Shel, let me start here. When a leader appears unprepared on a global stage like that, who actually owns the failure? Is it primarily the principal? Is it the communication team? Or is it a breakdown in that relationship we often describe as the unwritten contract between leader and comms? And perhaps even more provocatively, at what point does a communication team have a responsibility to push back and say, you’re not ready for this podium?

Once a story becomes internal blame rather than the issue itself, you’re no longer managing the moment. The moment is managing you. So what do you make of all this, Shel?

Shel Holtz: Well, I think it’s a two-way street. I think both sides failed here. Coventry herself is the IOC president, has been for nearly a year. She should have been aware of these issues from a governance standpoint. It’s not a question just of media prep.

Neville Hobson: Mm-hmm.

Shel Holtz: As one commentator put it, it’s not the PR team’s job to inform the president of things she should know simply from a management perspective. So I don’t think there’s a problem with piling on here a little bit, but throwing your team under the bus publicly is not the approach to take. I think there are some lessons that I hope Coventry learns here. She turned what should have been a really unremarkable closing press conference into a global story about dysfunction at the IOC. The press conference actually became the story and that’s the exact opposite of what any comms professional looks to achieve with this type of press conference.

The right move from Coventry would have been to acknowledge the question, note that she’d want to look into it, and then commit to following up. That buys time for her without revealing this gap between what she knows and what she should know. And she could have gone behind closed doors afterwards and she and Mark Adams, the guy who’s in charge of the communications team, could have had whatever conversation she wanted to about briefing protocols. But when a leader publicly humiliates their comms team, it poisons that relationship and makes future counsel less likely—the exact opposite of what the communication requires.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. I mean, there’s lots—and everyone with an opinion has been doing it on LinkedIn in particular. PRWeek had a really good assessment, which is where a lot of this kicked off. But what you’ve outlined is what she should have done, basically. And I totally agree. I think an additional comment I’d add to that is demonstrating in a sense the executive ownership of the issue overall. She could have said something like, you know, ultimately the responsibility sits with me. That would have dampened down anything, would have changed the tone of the entire story. She didn’t do that.

But there’s also, I think, worth pointing out what the PR team should have done. And maybe they did do it. Let’s add that caveat. We don’t actually know who did or didn’t do what.

Shel Holtz: She may have not read a briefing book that was given to her, right? That’s exactly right.

Neville Hobson: Or she may or she may not have been given one. Now, that’s the other element. We don’t know. So this conversation therefore gets more interesting if we exempt from that point of view.

So the issues raised weren’t obscure. And I agree with you that the geopolitics of it all is actually in the kind of daily news. If she reads newspapers she would have seen a lot of this discussion that would have been kind of an alert to her. So the issues were not obscure. Russia and doping, geopolitical symbolism of 2036 Germany—including one of the questions she got: why was the IOC merchandise website selling t-shirts with emblems of the 1936 games in Nazi Germany? And she said, I wasn’t aware of that kind of thing. Infantino and Trump—that’s a dynamic between the president of FIFA and Trump. Predictable lines of questioning.

Shel Holtz: Okay.

Neville Hobson: A robust prep document—what might that have looked like? Well, likely hostile questions. Again, briefing her on the kind of questions she might get. Top-line holding statements. Thirty-second bridges. “If you don’t know” language. If that didn’t exist, that’s a team failure. If it did exist and she ignored it, that’s a leadership failure.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, well, she said, “I was not aware” on three separate occasions in one press conference. I can’t remember ever hearing about anything like that before. And every time she said it, it compounded the damage from the last one.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, she did.

Shel Holtz: And even if she wasn’t briefed, a seasoned executive would have bridged to what she could say: the IOC’s position on political neutrality, their commitment to anti-doping integrity, the process for evaluating future host city bids. She could have leaned on what she did know and then offered to get back to people with more specific answers later, but she just kept revealing what she didn’t know. This is a textbook case for why pre-briefing documents and Q&A anticipation matter and what you would expect from your comms teams. And before any high-profile press event, they should have—and again, we don’t know whether she was or not—but she should have gotten a briefing book that covered not just what you want to say, but what you’re likely going to be asked, with a—

Neville Hobson: Precisely.

Shel Holtz: With Germany 2036 on the centenary of the Nazi games, a sitting IOC member appearing at a Trump political event, and an NYT investigation into Russian doping. These are all foreseeable questions during a closing Olympic press conference. You know, I don’t think that Mark Adams gets to skate here. He’s a 17-year veteran of the IOC. He used to work at the BBC, ITN, and Euronews and the World Economic Forum. He’s earning 420,000 pounds a year for this job. When the Germany 2036 question came up, his response was simply that he hadn’t seen it either. And I’ve got to tell you, for someone at that level and that salary during the final press conference of the Olympic Games, I think it’s an understatement to call that a significant lapse. The media monitoring function alone should have flagged those issues.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I agree. I mean, there’s a ton of questions I’ve got here that might be rhetorical now, actually. But nevertheless, let me rattle these off and see what you think. Can a comms team ever fully protect an unprepared leader—that’s one. Where does responsibility truly sit? And that’s something that could occupy the rest of this podcast discussing that one alone.

But that’s a question that I wonder: is this part of a broader trend? I mean, some people—notably on LinkedIn, so let’s just put that out there—have hinted, if not explicitly noted, the increase in executive blame-shifting, diminishing personal accountability, and a culture of scapegoating communication. Is that anecdotal or systemic? That’s the kind of rhetorical question, I suppose.

Should comms professionals refuse to front leaders who are not ready? It takes a brave person to do that, and maybe Mark Adams isn’t that person, I don’t know, but that’s pretty provocative. Is there a professional duty to push back from the comms people? At what point do you say you’re not ready to do this live? Is this a case study in leadership under geopolitical complexity? The Olympics isn’t sport alone—it’s politics, it’s war, it’s symbolism, it’s national legitimacy. A modern IOC president must be politically literate at the highest level.

So there’s lots there. I guess you could summarize it, I suppose, in the sense: when a leader is caught off guard on the world stage, who owns the failure? Because let’s just go back to what actually happened. She was caught off guard—not once, twice, three times at least. And one of those three times, the last one, is when the bus emerged under which she threw the PR team by saying someone needs to be dismissed.

So when a leader is caught off guard on the world stage, who owns the failure—the principal or the communication team? Question.

Shel Holtz: Well, I think you can look at it both ways here. I think people who are looking to shift that blame to the PR team need to recognize that it’s not like she had no experience. She has governance experience. She chaired the IOC Athletes Commission. She served on the executive board. She held a ministerial portfolio—

Neville Hobson: Yep.

Shel Holtz: —in Zimbabwe. But this suggests that she hasn’t either fully adapted to the demands of the presidency or her team hasn’t adequately supported the transition. But they need to get on the same page because I think one of the bits of fallout on this is questions about the IOC’s ability to handle the bigger issues that are coming up in the LA 2028 summer games.

Neville Hobson: Mm-hmm.

Shel Holtz: They’re going to be exponentially more complex politically. And if the team can’t handle media monitoring and an executive briefing during a winter games, how are they going to manage the geopolitical minefield of an Olympics in Trump’s America? Adams has already been linked to potentially leaving the IOC for a role with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He was one of Starmer’s best men at his wedding. So there’s another layer of instability, which I guess means if she needs to fire someone, he’d be a good candidate.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, there’d be a vacancy there, wouldn’t there? So, I mean, some of the comments on one of the many LinkedIn posts I saw do talk about—let’s call it a possible deeper misalignment between leadership and communication at the IOC. Questions people are speculating—because this is all speculation, I would hasten to add. Did this show that there was a pre-existing tension between her and the comms team?

Shel Holtz: Yeah.

Neville Hobson: I mean, I watched the video of her being asked those questions and there was no hesitation in her glance to the comms team where they were sitting, I guess, to say, I wasn’t aware of this. And she did it again. And then the third time it was, someone needs to be dismissed here. So was there some kind of tension? Did the team try to brief her and just get ignored? Is this a case of leader-comms misalignment long in the making? I mean, these are all unknowns. I’d like to think not.

She’d only been in the job a year. She had got all this praise because of how she had handled all these other things going on. That doesn’t mean therefore that this is not right. Something happened clearly, and we witnessed the kind of jaw-dropping moments when she said “I wasn’t aware of this” three times and basically said someone should be fired. So overall the tone is not good. The optics are dreadful.

I’ve not seen any further reporting on this since the initial flurry. It’s all kind of—

Shel Holtz: Well, you know, if your executive gets surprised at a press conference, I think that’s a process failure that can be fixed. But if your executive blames you for it on camera, I think that’s a leadership failure that may not be fixable. You know, the relationship between a communications professional and their principal depends on mutual trust, honest counsel, understanding that you protect each other publicly and hold each other accountable privately. And that’s the opposite of what happened here. So I don’t know whether there was tension before this happened or not, but there is certainly tension now and I’m not sure it can be repaired. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

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