How the US Olympic Committee navigates crisis, culture, and institutional change

Executive overview

Leading a legacy sports organization means balancing competitive excellence with evolving cultural expectations — often under public scrutiny. Sarah Hirshland inherited a sexual misconduct scandal, a pandemic, athlete protests, and a vaccine mandate debate within her first three years as CEO of the USOPC.

The core challenge: decisions that serve athletes, sponsors, and the American public rarely satisfy everyone at once. CEOs must lead anyway, manage the outliers, and stay focused on the long game.

The essential tool is communication — and almost always, the failure mode is not enough of it.

Managing controversial decisions

• A CEO role means accepting that some decisions will have justified opponents — weigh outcomes at scale, not unanimity.
• The 2019 Pan Am Games reprimands were the hardest call: athletes were raising deeply personal issues, but rules required enforcement.
• After those reprimands, Hirshland reopened the rulebook, gathered athlete input, and revised the policy — walking the walk on inclusion.
• The COVID vaccine mandate for Beijing was driven by a single goal: balance health and safety with competitive opportunity.
• Beijing's own 21-day quarantine requirement for unvaccinated athletes made the mandate functionally unavoidable.

Sexual misconduct and power dynamics in sport

• Survivors speaking up has "changed the game" for how sports organizations must operate.
• Sport creates unusually high-trust relationships between coaches, medical staff, and athletes — which power-seeking individuals can exploit.
• The response: checks and balances, zero tolerance, and an environment where speaking up is believed and acted on.
• This is a societal issue, not unique to sport — but sport must account for its specific dynamics.

Redefining success metrics

• The primary mission is empowering athletes to reach their fullest potential — medals are a by-product, not the metric.
• Mental health is now weighted equally to physical health after Tokyo made the gap visible and public.
• The stoic "leave emotions at home" culture in sport and business harms performance and people — grace for imperfection produces better outcomes.
• Simone Biles' Tokyo withdrawal was both a wake-up call and proof of the mental health infrastructure the USOPC had built.

The startup-legacy hybrid

• 75% of athletes at any given Games are first-timers; the team essentially rebuilds every four years.
• Institutional processes and even superstitions provide continuity — you don't start from a clean slate, but the cast changes constantly.
• Beijing added complexity: three competition clusters 60–120km apart, a different country, heightened security concerns for a US delegation.
• COVID forced fundraising to pivot from on-site donor access to 17 US-based viewing events, including lighting the cauldron at the LA Coliseum.

The 2028 LA Games as a legacy moment

• LA 2028 is the USOPC's ESG moment: an opportunity to set new standards for environmental sustainability, social impact, transparency, and sport governance.
• The US automatically qualifies for all events as host — the largest American team since Atlanta.
• The goal is building the foundation now so the LA microphone can say: "This is how it's done."
• Paralympics inclusion and changing perceptions of disability are a deliberate legacy target.

Building a modern workplace

• Post-COVID talent dynamics, hybrid work, and vaccine mandates are consuming more leadership time than any prior period.
• The USOPC can't match for-profit compensation — it competes on mission, brand, and purpose.
• The four-year Olympic cycle creates a built-in "cliff" after each Games that must be actively managed.
• Communication is the single most critical leadership tool; the failure mode is almost always under-communication.
• Every constituency — sponsors, donors, athletes, the public — must be actively nurtured; none can be taken for granted.