Lawyering the Olympics

US-Japan Short Takes Series

Wednesday, November 17, 2021
6:00 PM - 7:00 PM (Eastern Time)

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About the Event

How do lawyers maintain the Olympic dream of international cooperation governed by mutually accepted rules? The recently concluded 2020 Tokyo Olympics provides an opportunity to explore select issues facing lawyers charged with hosting the games during the COVID-19 crisis or managing a national delegation of athletes. Atsushi Igarashi, a lawyer who leads the legal team of the Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and Chris McCleary, general counsel for the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, will discuss their respective experiences.

Mr. Igarashi will discuss the contractual and other arrangements needed to produce the “playbook” for the games and how he successfully navigated a minefield of stakeholders (including Japan’s government and citizens, the media, national Olympics committees, the Swiss-based International Olympic Committee, and the World Anti-Doping Agency). Mr. McCleary, responsible for the national delegation with the greatest number of athletes in the Olympics, will discuss the legal ecosystem in which the games operate and what it takes to ensure athletes are able to participate fairly, play by the rules, and do both safely -- wherever the event occurs. Both will address possible lessons for the next host country, China, which will host the Olympics in the midst of geopolitical tensions comparable to those during the Cold War.

About the speakers

Atsushi Igarashi is a partner at a Japanese law firm, TMI Associates. His main practice areas include intellectual property, sports, entertainment, IT, data protection, media, and telecommunications. Igarashi has served as senior director of Legal Affairs of the Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (“Tokyo 2020”) since 2016. In that role he oversees all legal matters including marketing, contract, intellectual property, data protection, labor, and dispute resolution. He also supported the Organising Committee of the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics as an outside counsel. Igarashi is a lecturer at Keio University Law School and teaches copyright law.

Chris McCleary has served as general counsel for the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) since January 2015. In this role, he leads a team of legal professionals responsible for all USOPC legal, contract, intellectual property, and dispute resolution matters. Additionally, he serves as the organization’s ethics officer and works with the USOPC Ethics Committee to advance USOPC’s ethics and conflicts of interest policies and practices, and to resolve ethics questions as they arise. He also leads USOPC’s governance work and serves as corporate secretary to the USOPC board of directors. McCleary oversees the USOPC’s partnerships with the World Anti-Doping Agency, US Anti-Doping Agency, and Partnership for Clean Competition. He also serves as a member of the Association of National Olympic Committee’s Legal Commission.