I’ll take a selfie for a lot of reasons, from a shiny hair day to a chance get a shot with a cute dog. Nice moments, for sure – but not necessarily the most memorable times in my life. But you know what is indisputably selfie-worthy? The moment you win a medal at the Olympics.
And yet, you’ve probably never seen an Olympic podium selfie. That’s because Olympic athletes haven’t been allowed to take them, according to rules from the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
The official “IOC social and digital media guidelines for athletes” from the Paris 2024 FAQ addresses the question, “Can athletes record a video on the podium receiving their medals?” And the short, disappointing answer is: “No.” They’re not even really supposed to have their phones on them during these medal ceremonies or during their competitions, and they’re also forbidden to take and post any pics or videos from within an hour of the start of their competition.
I mean, this sort of makes sense. What if they saw a disturbing “we need to talk” text right before their big event?
But the fact that athletes can’t take a selfie or their own pics after they’ve won feels like a bummer. For them, but also for us, since most of us have been enjoying athletes’ original social media content at least as much as the “official” content that’s being taken of them – if not more so.
Samsung apparently thought this was a missed opportunity too. And to give athletes a solution to the huge problem that is selfie deprivation, the electronics company – an official partner of the Olympics – is offering the athletes a chance to take selfies on the podium using a borrowed phone. They can later download their pics through the Athlete360 app, which is a content hub for athletes participating in the Games.
“We understand how meaningful the medal ceremony is for the athletes,” says Jamie Park, head of the experience marketing group of Mobile eXperience. “However, sadly, they are not allowed to bring their own devices to the ceremony, so they cannot capture this special moment. That’s why we introduced the ‘victory selfie’ program to the IOC.”
Answering follow-up questions through a translator, Park said that the IOC was “quite supportive of this program,” partially because it coordinated with the IOC’s agenda of promoting “young viewership.”
Of course, it also feels like an opportunity for the Olympics to help out a sponsor while also pacifying athletes who wanted more podium content. But hey, capitalism be like that sometimes.
Park speculates that a single athlete will hold the loaner phone and take a selfie of all three medalists (Gold, Silver, and Bronze). She also acknowledges that an athlete who’s sponsored by a competing tech company like Apple may not ultimately be the one to hold the Samsung phone. But still, we can look forward to more, and more candid, Olympic athlete content – and that’s something to get excited about.
The IOC’s current social media guidelines were actually just updated in Dec. 2023, and are the least restrictive they’ve ever been, as outlined by Forbes. But athletes still can’t share content within an hour of their competition, live-stream content, share content longer than two minutes, or share content from the actual competition.
The rules are largely meant to protect broadcasters’ media rights; in the US, NBCUniversal hold media rights for the Olympics through 2032.
Not only that, but apparently the Olympics are also a hotbed of cybersecurity threats. At the Beijing Winter Olympics, US athletes were warned by the FBI to use burner phones and leave their usual devices at home. This was because hackers used services designed to look like official Olympics providers to email spoof and phish people. At the Tokyo Olympics, there were an astonishing 450 million attempted cyber-related attacks and issues, “though none were successful due to cybersecurity measures in place,” per the FBI.
In the future, it’ll be interesting to see how the rules around social media rights evolve. While image rights at the Olympics are worth a lot of money, the content athletes post is also worth a lot, especially if they can work with a sponsor on their posts, considering Olympic athletes are historically underpaid in the US in general, per CNN.
The latest IOC rules about social media use seem to “strike a balance between protecting the media rights holders while still recognizing the value of a participant’s image rights,” writes Layckan Van Gensen, a legal scholar with a focus on sports law and image rights at Stellenbosch University, in The Conversation. It allows them to show more content than before and, more importantly, to acknowledge their personal sponsors, who play an important role in commercializing their images and building their brands.”
So, while the rules are still rules, things are getting a bit better for athletes in general.
And now that they’re allowed to take at least the sponsored selfies, they just gotta leave time to practice their podium smize.
Molly Longman is a freelance journalist who loves to tell stories at the intersection of health and politics.
Travel and expenses for the author were provided by Samsung for the purpose of writing this story.
