To welcome the 2024 Summer Olympics held in Paris, Telum spoke with Christian Klaue, Director of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs at the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

Based in Lausanne, Christian shared on how he and his team prepare for the event, especially managing a global event with many stakeholders and all eyes on them.

Could you share with us your primary responsibilities as the Director of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs for the IOC?
Let’s first take a look at the ecosystem of the Olympic Games.

We have the organising committee for the Olympic Games with their communications team. Then, you have the International Sports Federations with their comms team as well.

Then, there are the National Olympic Committees and also us, the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

The IOC sits in the middle of this grid. Our role is to coordinate with all parties and make sure that the comms and messages are aligned and that everyone is up to speed, given that the organising committees will exist for only seven to 10 years and then they will be gone. We onboard them, share knowledge from past Games, and support them throughout their delivery.

It is the role of the team at the IOC to bring all stakeholders together, help them structure the communication.

We provide the helicopter view and are tasked with getting the main messages aligned with all the stakeholders. The stakeholders then cascade it down and adapt it to their local context or the context of their organisation.

Each organising committee will bring its own DNA to the Olympic Games, since the Games always happen in a context, which is the context of the host country, host region and host city.

Therefore, it’s important each Games is not uniform, but imbued with the local flavour, but also that this local flavour is fitted into the overall communication and message of the Olympic Games.

Hence, my role here in the IOC is to coordinate all the institutional communication and ensure alignment.

The institutional communication influences the work that our digital engagement and marketing teams do. We have a team in Madrid that runs the Olympics.com platform and we work closely with them to make sure that our institution's messages are properly reflected.

We are a team of 40. About 10 of them are translators, five public affairs, and then there are 25 communicators specialising in different areas, from media relations for the Games, internal communications, institutional communication, media monitoring and so on.

With all that, how do you ensure consistent, effective messaging across all channels and audiences?
With the scale of work that the IOC handles, I’ve found that we cannot tell stakeholders exactly how to deal with things.

But what we can do is to put a frame in place, which should be respected by the stakeholders. They can then operate within this framework.

What challenges do you face in leading media relations for the Games, and how do you overcome them?
Looking at the numbers, we’re talking about around 6,000 journalists at the Games. This includes photographers, written press and online press. We also have 12,000 people on the TV broadcast side of things, including TV journalists, producers, directors and more.

They are either from our Olympic host broadcaster, the OBS (Olympic Broadcasting Services), who produce the global feed for the games, or from our media rights holders.

For example, NBC in the US or Warner Brothers Discovery in Europe, they take our feed and they also bring in their own teams for the coverage. With this ecosystem, with these 18,000 people, it tells you how big the operation is.

Therefore, we always need to think big, since within this ecosystem, small issues can become really big, really fast.

We always have to maintain the helicopter view and predict how a story might develop. Even if it starts small, we will need to quickly find out which small stories have the potential to develop into big stories and resolve these small stories even if they haven’t developed into global news yet.

Then, it’s a matter of how to address these small stories on this big stage in a big way - put out global answers to these small stories or to abstain.

To share a recent example, there was information in French social media about the IOC President considering cancelling the Games because of the political situation in France.

Initially, this rumour was only covered by the French social media, but it was spreading fast. So, what do we do? Do we try and contain it, keep it small and extinguish the flame? Or do we need to find a global solution, and put out a global communication that will alert those that have not been alerted before of the original story. The aim of this is to proactively extinguish the story.

In the end, we went for this. We put out a 10-line tweet refuting the rumours and reasserting the anticipation of the opening ceremony. We gave big attention to something that was only being circulated in the French social media but in the end, was over within a few hours. Small stories can have global impact and might need a global response / solution.

From small to big hurdles, how do you prepare for and handle potential crises?
First and foremost, being fit means being prepared.  

Doing a lot of sports yourself is important, especially when working for a sports organisation. Sports keeps you prepared and equipped with the stamina and agility that it takes to do the job.

Once you’re mentally and physically equipped, you then need to anticipate these crises. You need to speak to your stakeholders and have the right procedures in place, because ultimately, it’s impossible to predict everything in this fast-paced world.

In this day and age, you need to be agile, and you need to prepare for situations that would require bringing all your stakeholders on board. This means preparing for situations within the regular structures and frameworks so when the crisis hits, you know what process or tools you can activate and trigger.

You may not know what to say, you may not know what to do right away, but you know how to set yourself up to address the situation, and that's what we do here at the IOC.

Your journey in comms has been dedicated to sports since the beginning. What advice would you give aspiring communications and PR professionals looking to thrive in the sports industry?
Going back to what I said earlier: it’s key to do sports yourself - it keeps you fit and agile. In my view, sport is the best sort of school for life. It’s also fun!

With the Games, it’s even more imperative. 24 hours go by quickly, but the days are long, especially in the run-up to the Games. Some competitions start as early as seven or eight o’clock, and they’ll run until even past midnight. At some point, you’ll also need a little rest, but for these 17 days, you need to stay strong.

Aside from that, keep your eye on the ball - like in a tennis match. You go and follow the ball - follow the trends, see what's happening. Not only do you have to be up to speed, but you have to be one of the first ones that spots an issue and then comes up with answers. The earlier you spot it, the earlier you can address it.