IOC president Kirsty Coventry speaks to the media after Vladyslav Heraskevych of Team Ukraine was disqualified from competition in the men's skeleton at the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy.Richard Heathcote/Getty Images
There are a lot of things that make the Olympics unique in sport, but none quite like the Daily Media Briefing.
For the duration of any Games, the International Olympic Committee’s representatives present themselves every morning to be interrogated by their biggest critics. Often, more news is made in this venue – it’s where HelmetGate blew up on Thursday – than any of the sporting ones.
Other sports outfits do press conferences, but not like this. Those are clubby affairs, dominated by regulars who have something to lose if the people in charge turn on them. Anyone can walk into the Daily Briefing and start launching bombs that might turn into international news.
The hour-long briefing is led by IOC spokesperson Mark Adams, a silky Brit. His manner is public-school jocular. He may or may not like you, but it’s hard to tell the difference.
Each day, a special guest will appear alongside him. On Friday, it was new IOC boss Kirsty Coventry.
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As you may recall from the opening ceremony, Coventry, 42, can be magic in front of a teleprompter. She’s certainly an improvement in that regard from all the fossils who’ve run the IOC in the past.
But in this gladiator pit, she’s ill at ease. She has the tight smile and exaggerated diction of someone who isn’t used to being back-talked.
This morning, she’s taking steady jabs about the banning of Ukrainian skeleton racer, Vladyslav Heraskevych. Where did you meet with him? Who was there? What did you say? What did he say to you?
When her first take doesn’t meet the crowd’s standard, it’s put to her a second time: “Can you put some more colour on the meeting?”
The follow-up answer isn’t much better. Coventry winds herself into a corner about “safe spaces” for athletes to express themselves, as well as to be protected from that expression. She sounds like she’s dean of an art school rather than running a multibillion-dollar entertainment concern.
Vladyslav Heraskevych of Ukraine in Milan on Thursday.Alessandro Garofalo/Reuters
This goes over like a lead ballon on fire. One journalist eventually winds themselves up to the point that they’re comparing the Sochi Olympics to the “Nazi Olympics” of 1936.
“Do you acknowledge that the IOC is giving dictators a propaganda machine?”
Coventry, who is plainly beginning to regret that her car didn’t slide into a ditch on the way back from Cortina, causing her to miss this engagement: “No.”
Next up, a woman from Reuters. Venues are cash free, asks the Italian reporter. Isn’t that illegal? And if you disagree, under which Italian regulation is it legal?
Coventry looks over at Adams like someone has asked her to get up on the table and dance.
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Adams, delighted: “That’s quite a technical question for someone who is concentrating on the entire Games, but we will get you an answer on that today.”
This is another thing that makes the Daily Briefing unusual – it’s an attempt by a sports organization at radical transparency. Unlike its global colleagues, the IOC has absorbed the lesson that there is nothing worse than being caught in a lie. Better to look stupid and forthright than stupid and conniving.
The IOC doesn’t offer information up, but when caught out – as is often the case when athletes do something boneheaded or illegal at a Games – it makes a show of ‘fessing up. In some days, the Daily Briefing is a confessional.
Coventry is still getting hammered, though politely. In other press conferences in other sports, once a question is asked and answered, it is dropped. Not here. Everyone smells blood, but they haven’t got their killer quote. Coventry has actually begun to weave slightly on the stage, instinctively dodging.
What about Heraskevych’s physical credential? Does he still have it? If not, why would you do such a thing to the guy? And if so, how can he be disqualified and credentialed at the same time?
There really isn’t a good answer to a lot of this. Even if there was, Coventry can’t find it.
However, she’s up there, smiling tightly, taking her licks. That earns her a softball near the end. It’s a recitation of all the problems she has on her plate, that ends with, “It’s not an easy job, is it?”
“It’s a job only a woman could do,” Coventry says.
All the people wearing Olympic uniforms burst into applause. The journalists, women included, lean back further in their chairs. This is what a politburo presser would have looked like if there had been no state media.
There are a lot of things the Olympics would like to export to the rest of the culture. It has its own special language (e.g.: “field of play”), its own rituals, its own baroque rituals. But this may be the most useful thing it does.
Would that every other major organization felt the need to present itself every single day to explain what’s going on, rather than be chased around, attempting to hide. What if banks, tech companies and top government officials did this? Not showing up at their leisure, or to put out a fire. But every day, at a set time, without any rules of engagement other than keeping it above the belt.
The Daily Briefing is part of the reason the Olympics survived, and even thrived, during its rough patch after Sochi. Because, of all the things you can rightly accuse the IOC of, refusing to show its collective face isn’t among them.
Gary Bettman, Roger Goodell, Gianni Infantino – they don’t do this. Certainly not with anything approaching this frequency. The NHL doesn’t have a spokesperson like Adams. Other leagues are obscure, which they don’t seem to realize makes them a piñata for the press.
Adams steps in to cut off Coventry’s interrogation. But he can’t help himself: “I’m sure I’m going to regret this, but let’s have one more.”
It is an endless question about what the word “expression” means, in the context of denying Heraskevych his.
Once Coventry has weaved her way through it, Adams stacks his papers in front of him, pops up and marches off. He and his boss have both survived another day.