IOC's AI Agenda Takes Shape: From Judging Support to Athlete Protection

How the IOC Is Wiring AI Into the Olympic Movement

The International Olympic Committee has put a single executive in charge of its artificial intelligence strategy: Alejandro Merino-Madrid, a 39-year-old Spanish engineer hired in 2024 to lead the organisation's AI area. His mandate is to implement the Olympic AI Agenda, the IOC's framework for using AI responsibly across sport — improving athletic performance, competition organisation and the experience of athletes and fans, while keeping humans at the centre of decision-making.

The most visible applications are in officiating. In figure skating, systems developed by Omega use cameras and AI to track athletes' movements and generate data on jump height, distance and rotation — deployed at the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Games to give more precise readings of performances. In gymnastics, computer vision can flag hard-to-spot infractions, such as a foot or fingers crossing the mat boundary, and point officials to the exact moment and best camera angle for review. The International Gymnastics Federation and Fujitsu have been developing the Judging Support System since 2017, but the official decision always stays with the judges.

A second front is athlete protection. The IOC uses AI to monitor posts targeting athletes and delegation members during the Games. At Paris 2024, the system scanned 2.4 million posts and comments across roughly 20,000 athlete and official accounts in more than 35 languages, flagging 152,000 potentially abusive items; after human review, 10,200 were confirmed as abusive and referred to platforms for removal. Combined with Milan-Cortina 2026, the service analysed 4.3 million posts and identified about 24,700 abusive messages. The aim is not to censor sporting criticism but to catch threats, racist and sexist attacks and other rule violations faster.

The IOC is also testing AI as a scouting tool. A project with Intel, piloted in Senegal ahead of the 2026 Youth Olympic Games, assessed the physical abilities of more than 1,000 young people through running, jumping and agility tests. The platform analysed over 1,000 biomechanical indicators — speed, acceleration, explosive strength, change of direction — and helped identify 40 standout performers who could be tracked by the Senegalese Olympic Committee. Other projects include virtual assistants for athletes and officials, tools to help fans understand lesser-known sports, automatic highlight generation and digital models of venues for broadcast and operations planning.

Who Wins as AI Moves Into Olympic Sport

The IOC's AI push is less about a single breakthrough than about stitching the technology into the Olympic movement's existing machinery — and doing so before federations, broadcasters and sponsors set their own rules. Merino-Madrid's role is essentially that of a standards-setter: he coordinates projects that touch judging, athlete safety, talent scouting and content production, while the IOC frames the whole effort around responsible use, data protection and avoiding algorithmic discrimination.

Why Omega and Fujitsu Are the Early Winners

The clearest commercial beneficiaries so far are the technology suppliers already embedded in Olympic sport. Omega's figure-skating tracking systems and Fujitsu's Judging Support System, developed with the International Gymnastics Federation since 2017, are the concrete deployments named in the IOC's agenda. For these vendors, Olympic validation is a marketing asset that can be extended to other sports and leagues. The same logic applies to Intel, whose Senegal pilot with the IOC gives it a reference case in sports-based computer vision — a field where hardware, edge computing and model training all matter.

The Judging Question: Assistance, Not Replacement

Every judging application described keeps the final call with human officials. That is a deliberate design choice, and it reflects the political reality of Olympic sport: federations guard their authority, and athletes and fans are sensitive to decisions that look automated. AI's near-term value is narrower but real — identifying the exact moment a foot crosses a line, or the angle of a jump that the naked eye misses — and handing that to a human reviewer. Expect federations to adopt these tools selectively, sport by sport, rather than as a blanket system.

Athlete Protection as a Measurable Service

The social media monitoring programme is the most quantifiable part of the agenda. Scanning 4.3 million posts across two Games and confirming roughly 24,700 abusive messages gives the IOC a defensible metric for a service that athletes and delegations increasingly expect. It also creates a template that other major events — football tournaments, athletics championships, esports — could license or replicate. The combination of automated flagging and human verification is what makes the referrals to platforms credible; pure automation would invite accusations of over-blocking.

Talent Scouting and the Equity Argument

The Senegal pilot is small in scale — 40 athletes identified from more than 1,000 tested — but strategically significant. If AI can reliably surface athletic potential in regions without developed sports infrastructure, it gives national committees and the IOC a story about widening access, not just optimising elite performance. For context, this mirrors a broader trend in sports analytics, where biomechanical data is increasingly used to identify and develop talent earlier. The open questions are data ownership, consent for minors and whether scouting algorithms travel well across populations.

What to Watch Over the Next Two Years

In the short term (0–6 months), the September 2026 responsible-AI guidelines will be tested against real deployments, and federations will decide which judging tools to adopt for upcoming events. Over 6–24 months, expect the athlete-protection service to expand to more competitions and more languages, and more national committees to pilot talent identification. Over 2–5 years, the bigger shift is structural: if the IOC's guidelines become a de facto standard, suppliers that comply early gain an advantage in bidding for Olympic and federation contracts, while those that lag face procurement friction.

What Sports Bodies and Tech Suppliers Should Do Next

The IOC is turning AI from a set of experiments into an operating standard for Olympic sport — and the suppliers and federations that align with its guidelines early will capture the contracts that follow.

For sports federations, national Olympic committees and event organisers, the practical implications are concrete:

• Audit your judging and officiating workflows now. The IOC's model — AI flags, humans decide — is the template that federations like gymnastics have already adopted with Fujitsu's Judging Support System. Identify the two or three decision points in your sport where computer vision or motion analysis could reduce review time, and pilot with a vendor that can demonstrate Olympic-grade accuracy.
• Treat athlete protection as a service, not a gesture. The IOC's numbers — 4.3 million posts scanned, roughly 24,700 confirmed abusive messages across Paris 2024 and Milan-Cortina 2026 — set a benchmark. Federations and major event organisers should budget for multilingual monitoring with human verification, and establish clear referral pathways to platforms.
• Prepare for the September 2026 AI guidelines to become procurement criteria. Data protection, transparency and non-discrimination are now explicit IOC requirements. Vendors bidding for Olympic or federation work should be able to document compliance before tenders are issued.
• National committees with limited infrastructure should study the Senegal model. The Intel-partnered pilot tested over 1,000 young people on more than 1,000 biomechanical indicators and surfaced 40 prospects. Similar programmes could widen talent pipelines, but require clear consent frameworks, especially for minors.

Metrics worth tracking: the IOC's next update on AI deployments after the September 2026 guidelines; adoption decisions by individual international federations; and whether the athlete-protection service expands beyond the Games to other major events.