Talking Sports Law: A Conversation with Christopher McCleary, Former General Counsel and Chief Operating Officer of the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee

Welcome to the Talking Sports Law podcast, created and produced by K&L Gates. Each episode features a discussion of legal issues from the world of sports, interviews with sports law professionals, and analysis of recent trends. Let's get this episode kicked off. Welcome to another episode of Talking Sports Law from K&L Gates.

My name is John Wilson, and I'm joined as always by my co-host, Trevor Gates. Trevor, how are you doing? I'm doing great, John. How are you doing?

I'm doing excellent. I am loving the start of the World Cup. We're recording this episode just during the first week of the World Cup. We haven't yet made it through the first round of group stage games, but the energy and excitement throughout the country is palpable, and it's just a bit amazing to see this incredible event come to the U.

S. Trevor, who is your pick to win the FIFA World Cup 2026? Well, obviously the United States, right? So I would pick the United States, of course, to make a deep run out of obligation, but also optimism.

I think Norway might be a little bit of a dark horse, too. If I had to pick the actual winner, I'd probably, I think they're still the favorite, but I'd probably pick France. How about you? I mean, I think those are all solid picks.

I can't say that I would disagree with any of them. You know, England is playing their first game today on the date of this recording, so it'll be interesting to see how the Three Lions do. But regardless, it's just going to be a really exciting summer of soccer here in the U.S.

But on to bigger and better things. On today's episode, we are thrilled to be joined by Christopher McCleary, the former general counsel and chief operating officer of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and the current president of the Sports Lawyers Association. Chris has had a distinguished career in sports law, sitting at the intersection of Olympic governance, athlete rights, federal sports law, and international sports regulations. On today's episode, we're going to dig into Chris's path to the USOPC, some of the important issues that he helped navigate during his tenure, and what he sees as some of the trends that might be coming down the line in the world of sports law.

So Chris McCleary, welcome to Talking Sports Law, and thanks so much for joining us. Hey, thank you, John. Thank you, Trevor. Good to see you guys.

Absolutely. And it's great, Chris, that you are now up in the wonderful Pacific Northwest, where Trevor and I are. It's not often that we have guests who are sort of in the same region as us, and so I'm glad that you're settling into life in the Pacific Northwest. And the PNW, I have to tell you, my wife and I, for whatever reason, we've had it on the brain for years and years, and we didn't know how or when exactly, but been here for just about a year now.

And, you know, I'm not trying to pitch it to everybody around the country, but it is as beautiful as I was hoping it would be. That's great. Well, Chris, let's start with just kind of some of your background. And, you know, can you talk a little bit about the path that you took to becoming the general counsel and the chief operating officer of the USOPC?

And how did you become interested in sports law? Yeah, man. I mean, I'll try to keep this super brief. But, you know, in retrospect, you look at what you've done in a career or in lots of other ways, and it makes it seems like, well, sure, USOPC, that's what you would do.

But that was no part of the plan when I was a law student or somebody thinking about going to law school. You know, the answer for me, I'm teaching a class at UW School of Law. Sorry, just pitching that a little bit. If you're a sports law practitioner, you'd like to get involved in a sports law class there just as a guest shot.

reach out. I'm on the faculty directory. But I'm always talking to people about how you break into sports law. And what I come to believe is there are two kinds of happy lawyers in the world.

And I'm looking at Trevor and John both. I'm going to test my theory with their facial expressions. But one kind is the kind of lawyer that finds the area of law that just absolutely does it for them. And then you can work in a number of ways for a number of clients and you can always really be satisfied.

I've got a friend who for whom bankruptcy law, I don't know why it is, but that's it. And he is so good and he knows it. So that's one kind of happy lawyer. I went to law school thinking that I was going to be an IP lawyer.

I'm going to be a copyright trademark guy. And when I came to learn, there was another kind of happy lawyer, the other kind, I think, which is it's not that you love one area of the law so much. It's that you really love who you're working for and you care about what you're working on. And that's a way for people who are not the most brilliant legal people in the world, and I'm talking about me, to really thrive in the legal industry.

So the story is, John, I started a law firm, IP stuff, went in-house at Visa to do advertising law. Visa was really growing its sponsorship portfolio back in those days. They had been Olympic sponsors. They just had signed on with the NFL.

I got involved in that work and slowly realized that sports in general, but the Olympics for me, the Olympic work was so meaningful to me. As I was getting along in the careers, my little kids were growing up and I could see what sport was doing in their lives. And then I'd look at Olympic athletes that we were supporting as a sponsor, even way over on the edge of the Olympics as a sponsor. I could see how important sport was in their development as humans, in the development of the people that they inspire and that care about them.

And so I'm standing here now as a believer in the power of sport. So over years, I found my way to the center of sport or one of the centers. And that was signing on at the U.S.

then Olympic Committee to try to wrangle its legal operations together. And then we added the name, the rest of our name, U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee.

and it's the most fun work I could imagine doing. So I'm standing here now on the back end of that, full of gratitude. Well, I think, Chris, your theory absolutely checks out. I think that is a really great articulation of happy, satisfied, and fulfilled lawyers.

And I think speaking for myself and hopefully for Trevor too, we are grateful for the clients that we get to work with and that helps make our day life very interesting and we also get to work with great people So thankfully we sort of check the box on both of those criterias Now Trevor may dispute that he has to work with me So that doesn qualify as working with a great colleague but we save that conversation for another time. The great clients we have make up for the working with you, John.

So that it's not the end of the world. We get through it. But yeah, I mean, I couldn't agree more. It's also a great way to put it in perspective, Chris, particularly for maybe our listeners that are trying to decide, okay, how do I get into sports?

What type of law do I want to get into? What do I want to do with the next five, 10 years of my life? So I appreciate that. Jumping more into sort of, I don't know, the nuts and bolts of the legal profession, could you give us a brief overview of your role as general counsel of the USOPC and maybe what a typical day looked like if there ever was a typical day?

And if you could throw in and maybe for our audience explain how the USOPC's legal function might differ from other more traditional professional sports franchises in the U.S. or elsewhere? Yeah, I mean, it's a great question.

And it's a, you know, it'd be a whole class. I think I'm thinking about back in school. To be super brief, the USOPC is a national governing body created by the federal government at a time when Olympic sports in the U.S.

was all over the place. And the model is each sport has its own national governing body. We call them NGBs. So volleyball and baseball and soccer.

And there is USA handball. Every sport has one of those things. And the USOPC coordinates among those sport entities to find support, develop and celebrate the greatest athletes in those sports, right, at the very elite level. So it's a kind of an organization of organizations, if you will.

So the job at USOPC was so interesting because there was direct sports support stuff for athletes, including the training centers and other specific training work we're doing. And there are the kinds of legal work that go along with that. We had somebody who is so good on operations on our little legal team. Our economic model was Congress said, we're not going to fund you as other countries do.

We're going to give you exclusive rights to the rings in the U.S. so you can fund your own selves. So we have lawyers who are so good on sponsorship and licensing.

And then Congress informing us said, you need to manage this sport community in the United States, including by resolving disputes and supporting athletes when they're having trouble with their national governing body. So we had somebody who is so good on alternative dispute resolution and creating the rules by which you do that. So there's governance of our sport ecosystem. And then there's being a commercial entity selling sponsorships.

Then there's an operations company trying to support athletes through training and all that sort of thing. And then you get to events, games that we send teams to. So then it's security and travel safety and foreign jurisdictions, including their legal regimes and what goes and what doesn't go in those places and diplomacy of all types. And so, you know, I think everybody will say this to you when they're a general counsel, but there is no typical day and that's the fun of it.

But all those areas were diverse enough that I felt like we were getting smarter every single day. We never got used to what we were doing. There was always a new element to it. So, Chris, you kind of touched on this in your answer just now, but the USOPC kind of sits at an interesting intersection of amateur athletics.

And, you know, amateurism is a whole nother topic that we could probably discuss for an hour. International sports governance and federal law and, you know, specifically the Ted Stevens Act, which sort of authorized these exclusive rights that you are talking about. You know, maybe you could just talk a little bit about what were some of the most complex legal issues that you had to navigate through during your time with the USOPC. Well, you know, just because I don't want to bore everybody to death.

Let's let's take as one of those complexities that I just think is fascinating. And we can stop after that. But just to fund it, it's sort of inherent in the model. The International Olympic Committee, the IOC, leads the Olympic movement, as they call it, from Switzerland.

That's 205 countries they're working with, where we are one of 205. But we're a pretty big country. So as we're doing our sports thing in the U.S.

, Congress passes a specific piece of legislation, the Ted Stevens Olympic Amateur and Sports Act, and created the USOPC to manage that ecosystem within the U.S. So the IOC gives the USOPC as a national Olympic committee. They give us the right to use the rings and to pick the team and to send the team.

Meanwhile, Congress gives us the right to use the rings and to use the word Olympics in the United States. And the IOC guys are saying, wait, whose rings? What rights are you giving to these characters at the USOPC? So when you talk about complexity, this is a really interesting thing about international Olympic and Paralympic sport.

It is it needs to be joined up in order to work right. The IOC has to have a line of sight on everything and they've got to have a degree of control. And in the U.S.

with the model that we've got, where we were cinching up the sports and the commercial rights and trying to make our own way, the Congress has to have oversight on that thing. And so a complexity was the never quite legislated but very healthy relationships that we're talking about between us at the National Olympic Committee and our own federal government and the IOC simultaneously. And that's where diplomacy and just ongoing goodwill, you know, with the right spirit, trying to drive the power of sport, trying to support athletes in the U.

S. and all around the world. It is an everyday task of balancing those things. And that was a fun challenge.

Yeah, that sounds like a lot of, I don't know, giants that are in the, so to speak, boardroom on some of these issues, I imagine, right? You're balancing all the countries. You're balancing what needs to be done in the United States. The IOC is balancing what needs to be done for at the broader level, right?

It's a lot, I imagine, makes a lot of these issues much more complex, right? 100%. And it really created, for me, over my career, I created a real empathy in me for people who are, you know, they are sometimes seen as the dominant or domineering overseers and the bad guys, but they've got to balance. Again, 205.

It was really good for me to see because right we think we at the top of an Olympic ecosystem in the U but we one of 205 And this thing doesn work unless all 205 are getting support and can compete on the playing field And so it is a good, I think that international sport is a great sort of device to make you feel humble and thoughtful about our role in the world and sort of the power of the United States, but also the good that comes from cooperation. Chris, switching gears a little, you are the president of an awesome association, the Sports Lawyers Association, SLA.

Both John and I attended the most recent SLA conference that took place in Chicago. It was awesome. Encourage everyone to go if they can make it for next year's event and future events. But we want to give you the opportunity and make sure we brought this up because we love SLA.

Could you talk about what your role entails as the president of SLA and what you see as sort of the SLA's most important priorities for the sports law community? Bless you, Trevor, for giving me a chance to say Sports Lawyers Association, because I really appreciate it. And it was, you know, really great to have you guys in Chicago. There were twelve hundred people there.

And, you know, the role that you're talking about, I'm really just working for the board. I was added to the board of the Sports Lawyers Association and took this role as president to kind of serve it and help it get its important work done. And that's what I would love to make sure people are aware of. If you would like to be a part of the sports law industry, if you're a student thinking along those lines, if you're early in your career and you want to develop and build your network as a sports lawyer, whether as an in-house practitioner at a team or a league or a players association or at a law firm or in academia, this is the one place where all the people doing the most interesting work mix it up.

And, you know, John and Trevor, you saw it. In person, people are literally mixing it up and bumping into each other and renewing old friendships. But I just want to underline, all year long, the Sports Lawyers Association is putting on programming, in-person events, webinar events, other kinds of content online in different parts of the country and in all different areas of sports law. And our little industry of sports law now has become so diverse and so dynamic, I think, telling people it's get in, get better, give back.

That's what we do. So I'm at that part of my career where my priority is sort of is helping people get in is who's next in this area. Because you guys both know that your friends who are not touching sports law look at Like you're the lucky one. You're sports law.

What? That's cool. And it is cool. I mean, we have to admit it to ourselves.

But so helping people demystify that and get involved in ways that means something to them is really my favorite. But what I want to say to anybody listening is if you're interested in this field, please go to sla.org and find us and start looking around. Get to know us.

Yeah. And I'll just echo what you said about the very helpful and informative resources that the SLA puts out throughout the year. I love watching the sports shorts series from Bobby Hacker. Next week in Los Angeles, they're doing an in-person kind of CLE event related to legal issues around the World Cup.

I wish I could be there. I don't know if this podcast episode will come out before that, but if it does and you're in the LA area, you should definitely check that out. But there's just a plethora of year-round resources and information and events that the SLA puts out. And they're just fantastic.

They're absolutely fantastic. Chris, you know, we're in a unique time here in the U.S. where, you know, we have the FIFA 2026 World Cup happening right now.

We've got the 2028 Olympic Games coming to Los Angeles on the horizon. What would you say from the vantage point of the USOPC, what are some of the biggest sort of legal or governance challenges that come along with actually hosting games here on home soil in the U.S.? Yeah, well, it's such a timely question.

And there are so many areas of sports law, I think, that are really developing and changing. But when we talk about hosting international events in the U.S., this is a great time for all of us to go to school on FIFA's experiences here during this World Cup.

And I don't know if you bumped into it, but a number of SLA members are involved in FIFA in the United States leading the World Cup 2026 specifically and in a number of cities across North America, as you know. So, you know, I think in the current climate, we can't ignore sort of the pushes and pulls that are going on overall. So immigration and the availability of visas for people to compete or to come watch or to officiate, right? We've seen those things coming up.

And I will tell you, all my career, I was involved in FIFA World Cup as a sponsor and in the Olympics and the summer games or at the Olympics, this is the second time I think I've seen them trailing FIFA World Cup in the same area. And so I can remember in Brazil, it was the 2016 Games, 2014 World Cup. And being a sponsor of World Cup in 2014, we learned some stuff in Rio that really helped when it came time to host or to play for the Olympics. So now, to your point, John, now USOPC has partnered with LA28 to organize the games in the U.

S. And you can see LA-28 is not too early for them to be trying to make arrangements that they can, trying to smooth paths where they can. And I think right now, right, they're spending a lot of time thinking about making sure that the world can come to the U.S.

and be welcome and safe and have a great time and compete at the very highest level. And that's probably the biggest thing. You know, operational stuff we can figure out, but that kind of thing takes cooperation and diplomacy. So I'll be very interested to see what they can learn here from what we see this summer.

Yeah, and never ceases to amaze me how much effort goes into some of these events. I mean, you attend them growing up, right? You sort of understand the scale. But as you, this will be my first People World Cup, right?

As you start to see it play out, you just look back at the number of hours, the number of issues you went through, everything you had to work and figure out some leading up to it. It's both exciting, but it's a lot of work, right? Well, you said it. Nobody knows.

Except those, you know, we're thinking of our friends who are at the Seattle Organizing Committee. And you know right down to putting pieces of tape on the ketchup bottle in the lounge at the stadium to protect the brand of the FIFA sponsor There no detail too small to worry over during these days Definitely So Chris for our young lawyers or maybe emerging lawyers who want to work in Olympics or international sports law specifically what experiences or credentials do you think are best prepare them for that path?

You talked a little bit about how important it is to build your network right, attend events like SLA, meet people in the industry, but are there other sort of substantive things that you most commonly see or credentials, background, do you think are particularly helpful if they want to look to Olympic work or international sports related work? Yeah, it's a really, you know, it's a, it's a great question. And it's a thing that we spend a lot of time talking about and thinking about.

I mean, this is what I would say, you, you heard me say happy lawyers, really good at an area and love that area of the law, or really like the place that you work and, and people that want to get involved in sports law are thinking about the second, right? They're thinking about, I would like to be a lawyer if it was in sports, which is totally legit. I take that point. But if you want to be in the sports law environment, you have to be mindful that, as we oldsters always say, there is no such thing as sports law.

It's law applied in the sport realm. So if you want to break in, you've got to be good at something. You've got to be good at something that you can take into this conversation and into this community, right? If I grew up as an IP lawyer and tried to bring value that went through sponsorship to commercial work and then broadly into sport.

That's one path. But I think that's the way that we find most of the people doing this work. It's because they bring in expertise that is needed. So that's why getting involved in networking and talking to people in the industry is worth it.

You'll see that in the 70s and 80s, labor lawyers were needed in all kinds of ways in sport in the US as the sport economy was growing. So that was a thing to watch. Now when we, and then IP, and I think licensing still is huge because the commercial side of this industry is huge. But land use, real estate, labor law, antitrust, these areas all find their way into sport.

If you can really bring value in one of them, I think that's how you start. And then you see what you can bring to the table. What I say, if you think there's an area of sports law you want to focus on, I don't know what it looks like to you guys, but collegiate sport in the US is such a cauldron of, I don't know what. I mean, just mixing and mixing every day.

And it seems like every day something new. I don't think this is going to be all boiled out in the next five years. I think for the next five to 10 years, this may be, from a legal perspective, the most fascinating part of sport. And we can get to a long list of other ones.

But I think, you know, that the whole thing around NIL and what does it mean to be a collegiate athlete? And then when you get to is there such thing as an amateur athlete? It really is going to not only is interesting, it's going to change. As we all know, lawyer work comes when people are not sure what the rules are or should be.

And Trevor, I'll just add on one other potential credential or experience that someone could look at if they're interested in getting into sports law. And that might be taking Professor McCleary's class at the University of Washington School of Law. That could hurt as well. all right chris well that is the sound of the whistle which signifies that we have reached the end of our regular time and we're going to be going into our overtime session and in overtime we are going to toss you a few rapid fire questions that may or may not have anything to do with sports law so chris are you ready for overtime all right let me have it Now that you've moved to the Pacific Northwest, what has been your favorite activity?

Oh, I came here to be on a bike or hiking in the woods or on a kayak. And these are my three favorite things to do. Chris, what would you say is your go-to guilty pleasure snack food? It's actually a problem for me because there's no two ways about it.

What I miss the most, I miss so many people in Colorado, but what I miss is In-N-Out Burger. And the closest one is almost in Portland. I don't know what we have to do to fix that, but I'm going to be on that team. I think they're spreading across Washington, so they might be up by no time.

Come on. Chris, this might be a hard question for you to answer, I'd imagine, but what is the greatest live sports moment you've ever been a part of? Man, that's another class session, and nobody wants to hear old world stories. So let's do this.

I'm thinking of World Cup as we are here now and what it means to, we were talking about hosting an international event. Greatest sports moment at the opening match in South Africa. First FIFA World Cup on the continent of Africa, a sport that means so much to so many countries on that continent. And the atmosphere in Johannesburg and in Cape Town of the people of South Africa making this work and the world coming to see them.

I'll never forget that. That's the power of international sport. Chris, what is one book or TV show or podcast that you've really enjoyed in the past, say, six months or so? I feel like I should get to ask you guys, too, because these are great to hand around.

I'm always listening to this podcast now with these two British historians. The rest is history. I think a lot of people know about it. But these are interesting, funny guys.

And when I hear English people talking about U.S. history, it's hilarious and very enlightening. All right.

And finally, if you were not a sports lawyer, what other career do you think you would have had? Left-hander for the Tigers. That's the only other thing I wanted to be. They've got a pretty good left-hander right now, right?

Tariq Skubal, Seattle University grad. That's right. He can't have McCleary. I guess he'll do.

Well, that'll do it for another episode of Talking Sports Law from Ken Elgates. Special thanks to our guest, Christopher McCleary, for a fantastic conversation about his tenure as general counsel and COO of the USOPC and his leadership of the Sports Lawyers Association. You can find all of our episodes on our website, klgates.com, or by searching Hub Talks, wherever you get your podcasts.

If you'd like to be a guest on our podcast, or if you have ideas for future podcast topics, please don't hesitate to reach out to either myself or Trevor. And thanks so much for listening to Talking Sports Law from K&L Gates.