The Social Media Olympics

Just moments after American wrestler Sarah Hildebrandt won a gold medal at the Paris Games, she let the whole world know what she was thinking:

“Oh my gosh I just won the FREAKING OLYMPICS hahahahah DUUUUDE,” she wrote on social media from the event venue.

The post may seem like something athletes always do. But at the Olympics, it’s part of a new twist — and one of the keys to returning to the sense of a shared national experience that defined the Games of yesteryear.

For the past decade or more, it has seemed like the Olympics have struggled to capture relevance the way they did a generation ago. Blame was assigned to a fracturing media landscape and a long string of asterisks (pandemic restrictions in Tokyo, time zone issues in Beijing, a Zika outbreak in Rio de Janeiro, geopolitical tensions in Sochi, Russia).

But the reason may have been simpler: The Olympics has largely been missing from social media. The closely guarded intellectual property of “the Olympic rings” meant video from the Games was posted only in limited ways, with broadcasters worried that they would run afoul of strict rules or anxious that they would cannibalize their own broadcasts.

New, more lenient social media rules for athletes announced before the Paris Games and a rethink among broadcasters — as well as the ability of social media companies to geofence certain content — appear to have changed virtually everything.

And audiences are cheering.

Athletes can now “create personalities just like any influencer would,” said Apolo Ohno, an eight-time Olympic medalist in short-track speedskating. “It’s unlike anything before.”

The prolific posting has fueled Olympic memes and TikTok trends, contributing to a sense that the Games are everywhere . South Korean pistol shooter Kim Ye-ji went viral for her cool composure. Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen introduced the world to the chocolate muffins in the Olympic Village. American gymnast Sunisa Lee jumped on a viral TikTok trend, mocking her jarring fall off the balance beam: “Unfortunately, I was selected for the Olympics,” she wrote.

The posts appear to have had an effect. NBCUniversal, which owns the American rights to the Games, says Olympic viewership on its Peacock streaming platform and traditional television is up 77% over the Tokyo Games. In the company’s internal studies of new Olympics viewers, 36% said they tuned in after watching events in social media clips.

Rigid social media restrictions were meant to protect the big money. Since the 1980s, fees for TV rights have been the largest generator of revenue for the International Olympic Committee, which has done just about everything in its power to protect its partner broadcasters and official sponsors.

An athlete streaming video from the Games could threaten the value of broadcasting rights that cost media giants billions of dollars. A competitor who, intentionally or not, promotes relationships with brands that haven’t paid millions to be official Olympic sponsors could infringe on those sponsors’ exclusivity. And so the IOC enforced strict rules for social media.

That created a tough situation for athletes. At the London Games in 2012, a group of American track athletes campaigned against rules that prevented them from mentioning personal sponsors during a “blackout” period around the Games. And superstar swimmer Michael Phelps found himself in a whirl of controversy after a photo shoot he had done with Louis Vuitton, which was not an Olympic sponsor, leaked early.

“It’s this impossible situation,” Peter Carlisle, Phelps’ agent at sports agency Octagon, said about the restrictive social media rules. “So, at some point, pressure mounted.”

Under the more permissive rules, athletes can post videos from Olympic-accredited events. (There are still some caveats: No livestreaming, and videos must be shorter than two minutes.) That has unleashed a windfall of content that would have otherwise been absent, such as Simone Biles’ take on the viral “get ready with me” TikTok trend, which she filmed before winning a gold medal in the individual all-around artistic gymnastics final.

Today’s athletes may be particularly well suited to leverage the new flexibility around social media. “They were the first digital, social, native-born participants and athletes from the Olympics,” said Elizabeth Lindsey, president of Wasserman, a sports and entertainment marketing agency.

Broadcasters aren’t mad about it. They’ve switched to embracing social media as a tool to promote the Games rather than seeing it as a threat to prime-time viewership.

Jennifer Storms, chief marketing officer of entertainment and sports for NBCUniversal, told The New York Times that the network “tore up the playbook” for its social strategy at the Paris Olympics, pumping out real-time highlights that it supplemented with longer-form and exclusive videos on streaming and traditional TV. It brought in swarms of celebrities, including Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart, as well as an army of content creators.

Viewership for videos shared through the NBC Sports social accounts increased 432% compared with Tokyo in 2021, according to NBC.

“What we’re seeing is 17 days of combustible moments, where the Olympics are creating and owning the cultural conversation,” Storms said. “The athletes and their ability to have a little bit more access and opportunity to post during the Games is just adding to this conversation.”

Given that the next Summer Olympics is set to take place in Los Angeles — the unofficial content capital of America — executives, athletes and others have said they are expecting an even bigger social media push.

The IOC is “going to come back and say, ‘OK, what do we have to do in preparation for ’28? What’s our takeaway? How badly did any of our sponsors complain about athletes’ social media? How much did our broadcast partners complain?,’” said Rick Burton, a professor of sport management at Syracuse University. “But my read so far is that everything’s going swimmingly or is going about as well as the IOC could have hoped.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .