Austral Risk Services are risk advisors and insurance brokers for small, medium and large business. Based in Western Australia, we provide comprehensive risk management services and leading insurance solutions to protect your business, company or organisation.

Call us on 08 9344 6650.

Risk Advisors & Insurance Brokers

Call us on 08 9344 665008 9344 6650

The Rio Olympics and Risk

The Rio Olympics and Risk

By Eddy Brett
29/07/2016

Not many people would want the responsibility of managing risks to the Rio Olympics!

Certainly, risk management is very much an important governance issue for the IOC. At the heart of risk management is the ability to reasonably foresee events that can happen. However, because each Games are organised over a long period of time, many emerging risks can materialise suddenly and are not foreseeable.

Some of the recently recognised threats that the Rio Olympic organisers are being forced to deal with from a risk management point of view are:

  • The potential exclusion of Russia and subsequent diplomatic repercussions. This is a very recent development but the use of performance enhancing drugs is a major ongoing issue for the Olympic movement.
  • Activities of hackers. Brazil is well known as a global hub for cyber-crime, according to cyberfirms. They are reporting that hackers are already attacking email addresses. Public Wi-Fi is quite often not secure allowing the possibility of theft of passwords and other information.
  • The safety and security of athletes and visitors, including the threat of the Zika virus.
  • Terrorist threats are certainly high on the risk agenda but the Nice experience adds yet another causal factor.
  • Political unrest and the depressed economy has the potential of civil unrest. There is also popular anger over corruption.

If you are going to Rio, some useful information is available on the Atrisk website as well as DFAT's Smartraveller website.

 

« back to current articles

Search Articles

 

site by Café Media