The International Olympic Committee doesn’t want you to watch hockey. Not really.
They want you to watch a broadcast package. They want you to sit through three hours of linear television, peppered with ads for luxury watches and mid-range sedans, while a commentator tells you how to feel about a "miracle" that happened forty years ago. If you try to engage with the sport the way people actually live in 2024—sharing a grainy TikTok of a filth-nasty deke or a Twitter loop of a thunderous hit—the IOC’s legal department will find you. And they will end you.
It’s a graveyard of "This media has been disabled" notices. A digital scorched-earth policy.
For a sport like hockey, which occupies a precarious spot in the global pecking order, this isn't just annoying. It’s a slow-motion suicide pact. The NHL finally agreed to send its superstars back to the Olympics for 2026 and 2030, ending a decade-long drought that robbed fans of seeing Connor McDavid and Sidney Crosby on the same sheet of ice. The hype should be astronomical. But instead of a marketing blitz, we’re looking at a copyright cage match.
The IOC’s Rule 40 is the primary culprit. It’s a draconian set of guidelines designed to protect official sponsors from the "ambush marketing" of the real world. In practice, it means that for a few weeks every four years, the biggest stars in the world become ghosts. NHL teams—the billion-dollar entities that actually pay these players’ salaries—can’t even post a photo of their own guys on the ice if there’s a stray Olympic ring in the background. If the Toronto Maple Leafs want to celebrate Auston Matthews scoring a hat trick for Team USA? Too bad. Unless they want to navigate a labyrinth of licensing fees that would make a patent attorney blush, they stay silent.
Think about the trade-off here. The NHL pauses its entire season for two weeks. It eats the loss in gate revenue. It risks the health of its $100 million assets. In exchange, it gets... nothing. No highlights to share on its social channels. No ability to build momentum for the stretch run. Just a black hole where the world’s best hockey used to be.
The price tag for this stubbornness is impossible to ignore. Look at the NBA. They figured out years ago that a viral clip isn’t a lost sale; it’s a free advertisement. They let the internet run wild with highlights because they know that’s how you hook a kid in Manila or Munich. The IOC, meanwhile, is still acting like it’s 1996 and we’re all waiting for the 11 o’clock news to see the scores.
During the Beijing Games, the "non-rights holder" restrictions were so tight that journalists weren't allowed to record video inside the venues with their phones. Not for broadcast—just for a social media post. We’re talking about a multi-billion dollar organization terrified of a 15-second vertical video. It’s pathetic. It’s also incredibly damaging to a sport that desperately needs to grow outside its traditional bunkers in Canada and Scandinavia.
Hockey is inherently cinematic. It’s fast, violent, and graceful. It’s built for the short-form video era. But the IOC’s copyright cops treat every goal like it’s a proprietary secret. They argue they’re protecting the value of the broadcast rights they sell to giants like NBC. But who is that broadcast for if the next generation of fans has been conditioned to ignore anything they can’t find on their feeds?
We’re heading toward Milan-Cortina in 2026 with the most talented pool of players in the history of the game. McDavid, MacKinnon, Bedard, Makar. These are names that should be plastered across every screen on the planet. Instead, they’ll be locked behind a digital iron curtain. Fans will try to share the magic, the IOC will issue takedown notices, and the algorithm will bury the sport under a mountain of stuff that’s actually allowed to exist in public.
The IOC thinks they’re guarding a gold mine. They don’t realize they’re just gatekeeping a museum that’s running out of visitors.
If a generational talent scores the goal of the century and nobody is allowed to post the clip, did it even happen?