IOC Publishes Online Abuse Report: 25,000 Abusive Messages Found Across Paris 2024 and Milano Cortina 2026 Olympics

The International Olympic Committee published its Online Abuse and Sport report on August 8, 2026, marking Safe Sport Day, and released findings from its Cyber-Abuse Protection Service deployed at Paris 2024 and Milano Cortina 2026. CAPS analysed 4.3 million posts and comments directed at more than 26,000 athletes and officials across the two Games, monitoring around 20,000 accounts and 45 languages during Paris 2024 and more than 6,000 accounts and 56 languages at Milano Cortina 2026. AI flagged approximately 242,000 posts and comments as potentially abusive for human review, of which nearly 25,000 were confirmed as abusive messages. The report highlights the scale of online abuse as a safeguarding issue across sport, noting that while it takes place online it causes real physical, psychological, reputational and economic harm.

Detecting abuse directed at an athlete in a public social-media feed is a different problem from detecting abuse or grooming in a private direct message, but both require pattern recognition at scale and both benefit from AI-powered classification combined with human review. Guardii applies the same principle to the direct-message environment where most grooming, sextortion and sustained targeting of young athletes occurs, identifying the conversational pattern that distinguishes a single critical comment from sustained harassment, escalation and coercion. The platform's athlete-abuse detection module, developed for sporting bodies and schools, flags hostile contact before it reaches the target and enables a coach, safeguarding lead or parent to intervene before the exchange drives the athlete into crisis. As a world-leading online-safety platform backed by Startmate, Guardii reports the shape and seriousness of the conversation rather than handing anyone a feed of what was said, preserving the young person's privacy while surfacing the threat that matters.