Olympic Reflections #10: Rosangela’s Tattoo

Paul Freed on August 5, 2024

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

I hadn’t set out to stare at somebody’s thigh just five minutes after meeting them – let alone direct a TV camera there – but natural curiosity took us on an unexpected path.

Any guesses what we were all so transfixed by here? Feel free to guess in the comments then read on…

How an Olympic athlete’s thigh became the centerpiece of a globally distributed TV feature

It started out as so many of my Olympic Games TV features did.  Start researching a good story to tell. Find your angle. Interview the subject/s. Turn your material into compelling TV. 

On the face of it, a feature about veteran 100 meter sprinter Rosangela Santos was obvious enough.  Here was one of Brazil’s biggest track and field hopes, about to compete in her home Olympics in Rio de Janeiro – the pinnacle of her career. Yet I knew that alone wasn’t going to be enough to hold the viewer’s attention.

So as we arrived at the Team Brazil training center in a steamy Rio suburb, I made a mental plan to dig deeper. To be as curious as possible about what the occasion meant and the mark it would leave on Rosangela’s storied career.

The thing about interviewing people at such a gigantic event is that you don’t get much time with them to build trust or rapport.  A few hurried minutes of conversation while the camera is setting up is typically the norm.  Before the tape rolled I asked Rosangela the standard “how are you doing?” question and she revealed she was slightly sore, not because of her training routine but because of a tattoo she had just got in time for the Olympics. My natural curiosity kicked in as I asked her to explain and she talked about how she got a tattoo on her thigh at her first Games in Beijing in 2008 to commemorate her achievement of becoming an Olympian. She was determined to add to it as her career progressed and inked London artwork four years later and so a Rio 2016 addition was a must-have.

I knew this would be a great piece of visual storytelling but was faced with an awkward dilemma. With her legs completely covered by her training gear I toyed with the uncomfortable question of asking Rosangela to peel back her clothing for us to film the tattoo. I politely found a way to ask and luckily she was all too willing.  We got the visuals we needed for our story as she explained the indelible legacy of her tattoo and how she would proudly carry the memory of her home Olympics everywhere she went.

It was a solid reminder for me to be curious during every interview and to allow the conversation to branch in an unexpected direction. Also to be prepared to ask something out of your comfort zone – like if it’s ok for us to focus a close-up camera shot on your thigh for a full minute as we get every last detail – because you never know where it might lead.  It could just be the breakthrough you are looking for.

#olympics #storytelling

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People
Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing
Olympic Reflections #3: Across Sectors
Olympic Reflections #4: Resilience
Olympic Reflections #5: Fun
Olympic Reflections #6: Meeting Matthew
Olympic Reflections #7: Transport
Olympic Reflections #8: Bolt
Olympic Reflections #9: Communications

Olympic Reflections #9: Communications

Paul Freed on August 5, 2024

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

Great communication is a vital part of what we do in recruiting. It was the same for every Olympic Games I worked at – even more so when the inevitable language barriers hit. 

As a reporter at the 2010 Singapore Youth Olympics I was paired with a fresh-out-of-college camera operator from Guangzhou, China called Pu Ke. He told me the way to remember his name was by calling him ‘little puke’. He only spoke a few sentences of English, which was still better than the haphazard Mandarin I picked up at the Beijing Games in ‘08. 

After 48 hours of orientation meetings, we set off to news gather. We worked together every day for nearly three weeks and I still can’t quite understand how we managed to make the relationship work so well. I do remember there was quite a bit of gesticulating. It was also a lot of fun embracing our obvious challenges.  

We made films in flea markets, asked the FIFA president questions at a press conference in a swanky hotel, and filmed soccer and 3-on-3 basketball like we were made to work together. We shared a common understanding and a common goal. And through the monsoons, sapping humidity and long days and nights we made sure to laugh at the moments when we came unstuck. 

I often think of that time in Singapore and how with a little persistence and the right attitude, you can break down a lot of barriers. 

#olympics #communication  

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People
Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing
Olympic Reflections #3: Across Sectors
Olympic Reflections #4: Resilience
Olympic Reflections #5: Fun
Olympic Reflections #6: Meeting Matthew
Olympic Reflections #7: Transport
Olympic Reflections #8: Bolt

Olympic Reflections #8: Bolt

Paul Freed on August 5, 2024

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

If you were looking for a great quote at the Olympics, Usain Bolt was a treasure trove. I had the great fortune to interview the fastest man on the planet by the finish line after six of his gold medal successes at the 2012 and 2016 Games. Total thrill. 

Faced with a quote machine like Bolt it should have been easy to get what you needed. But part of the challenge at the Olympics was that you rarely had more than a minute with him, before a media liaison officer tapped you on the shoulder to wrap it up.  And fair enough, when scores of other reporters were waiting to have their bite. So being short, sharp and targeted on your outcome was key. 

While he’s the least shy guy on earth I’m pretty proud of getting him to call himself ‘a legend’, and then four years later describing himself as ‘immortal’. I love the art of the interview and I really enjoy that through recruiting, I still get to work on it every day. 

#olympics #interviewing

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People
Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing
Olympic Reflections #3: Across Sectors
Olympic Reflections #4: Resilience
Olympic Reflections #5: Fun
Olympic Reflections #6: Meeting Matthew
Olympic Reflections #7: Transport

Olympics Reflections #7: Transport

Paul Freed on August 5, 2024

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

Transport headaches.  

At any Olympic event, they’re inevitable. 

Beijing in 2008 was, shall we say, a challenge. Figuring out the subway system (entirely in Mandarin) from the fifth-ring road business district to Tiananmen Square was fun. Less so the return three-hour bus ride at 10mph from the main press center to the Canoe Slalom venue (‘it is for your safety’). 

Rio was an altogether different beast. If our local driver had to use the main city freeway at rush hour they would deliberately turn off early just to keep moving, even if it added an extra 40 minutes to our journey.  They explained it was to avoid the risk of carjacking, as we would be sitting ducks in a brand new, brightly marked ‘Olympics 2016’ car along with our $50k camera equipment. 

But my favorite was Buenos Aires and the 2018 Youth Olympics. We drove ourselves, getting used to the chronic traffic around toll booths. We figured out that if enough impatient drivers honked their horns as loudly as possible, the toll operators would give in and lift the barriers, letting us through for free! We later learned they actually did it for safety reasons but it didn’t burst our bubble, and I prefer my version of the story anyway 😊 

#olympics #honkyourhorn 

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People
Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing
Olympic Reflections #3: Across Sectors
Olympic Reflections #4: Resilience
Olympic Reflections #5: Fun
Olympic Reflections #6: Meeting Matthew

Olympic Reflections #6: Meeting Matthew

Paul Freed on August 5, 2024

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

One of the best bits about creating content at the Olympics was the opportunity to tell stories that you never set out to. Sometimes you really had to dig to find the right story.  Other times, like in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, an Oscar-winning Hollywood A-lister would just turn up in your work zone and ask to hang out with you for a couple of days. Honestly…  

The location was Deodoro Stadium. A functional, temporary construction on the fringes of a dangerous favela, an hour outside of central Rio. This unglamorous setting was my work home for the first nine days of the Rio Olympics, where I’d be the pitchside reporter at the Rugby Sevens competition. My job was well defined – watch six games of rugby union a day and interview the key players after the final whistle. But as a journalist, you were always keeping an eye on what else was happening around you. 

A couple of days in and everything was pretty routine until the USA men showed up to play. It was early in the game when I noticed something odd.  There was a handsome, vaguely familiar guy dressed in USA team clothing with a backpack on and by himself. He was leaning on the end of the American coaches’ bench but looked like he didn’t belong. A few moments later my colleague, a delightful French lady in charge of that area, went over and checked his credentials. There was obviously a problem. I pointed it out to Adam, my camera operator, who said “hang on a minute, I think I know who that is.” 

“Who?” I asked. 

“It looks like Matthew McConaughey“, he said. 

“What do you mean Matthew McConaughey? As in the Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey? What do you think he’s doing all the way out here?“

We found out soon enough.  My colleague escorted him away from the team bench and over to the media row, where we were standing in our ten-by-ten foot pen as part of a long line of international broadcasters. As he got closer, the crowd started to catch on, as did the rest of the assembled media. As we were all staring slightly open-mouthed, my colleague marched him straight to my area. 

“Ross this gentleman would like to watch the rugby but he does not want to sit in the stands on his own.  He is a VIP but can’t be over by the coaching staff. Will you let him stay with you for a little while?” said my French colleague, with eyebrows raised and in her most charming Parisienne accent. 

I couldn’t really say no could I?  

“Hi I’m Matthew” said Matthew, the Oscar-winning Hollywood A-lister. Play it cool Ross. I said hi in the most casual voice I could muster, as the envious eyes of my international colleagues glared straight at me, wondering how they weren’t the ones to have this opportunity fall into their laps. 

It turned out that McConaughey had arrived in Rio to enjoy the Games as a spectator, along with his Brazilian-born wife. He’d come alone to the rugby as he was fascinated by it while filming a movie in South Africa years back.  So we spent a few surreal hours watching the games and making small talk – about movies and sports, life in America and on the road, stopping at the end of the contests so I could do my actual day job. 

He was a gem that day. After initially politely turning down requests from the assembled media who would gingerly walk up and request a few minutes of his time for interview, he graciously gave several of them the opportunity. At which point I called my executive producer with one of the more unusual pitches I’ve ever made. 

“Hey it’s Ross. I’m honestly not making this up but I’m hanging out with Matthew McConaughey, you know, the Hollywood actor and he says he’s up for an interview. Do you want me to get something in the can?“

We did the interview, and at the end of the day’s action, McConaughey thanked me and then hit me with a request I hadn’t expected. 

“I had fun today. You mind if I come hang out here with you guys again tomorrow?“

“Err, yeah, sure Matthew, you’re more than welcome to” I stammered. 

Of course, there was no chance he would be back. Why would this world-famous actor traipse all the way back out to the edge of the city in heavy traffic to watch more qualification games of a sport he barely knew? 

The next morning on our drive to the stadium I checked social media and McConaughey was heavily featured, as the highest profile celebrity visiting the Games. He had been spotted having dinner that night and was getting lots of online attention. In the back of my mind I couldn’t help wondering whether he really would turn up again.   

Game one of the day came and went. As did game two. Then, midway through game three, I got a tap on my shoulder from behind. 

“Hey“, said the man with the distinctive Texan accent. “I’m back, I brought my wife Camila too, all good if we hang out again?” Matthew asked, as his wife pecked me on both cheeks. Unbelievable. Clearly our 100 square foot pen was the hot place to be in Rio. 

I hold the memories of those two days with real fondness. It is such a fun story to tell for so many reasons. Fast forward to today and I’m still using those storytelling abilities to match clients with their next great hire. That is one of the really cool parts of recruiting too – that you never know who you could be interviewing next. 

#storytelling #olympics  

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People
Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing
Olympic Reflections #3: Across Sectors
Olympic Reflections #4: Resilience
Olympic Reflections #5: Fun

#olympics #executiverecruiting

Olympic Reflections #5: Fun

Paul Freed on August 1, 2024

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

Working at an Olympic Games was exhausting. But it was always fun. In Beijing, I tobogganed from the side of the Great Wall of China, ran the 100 meters in the Bird’s Nest Stadium and blindly ordered food from backstreet noodle joints. London was special as my ‘home’ Olympics.

Rio was an intoxicating city and allowed me the chance to interview Usain Bolt on a historic 100-meter treble. It was tough going in Tokyo, with covid looming large – but still a fascinating cultural discovery and a month-long excuse to eat sushi.  

One of the six values we hold at Herd Freed Hartz is Fun. After all, if what we do isn’t fun then shouldn’t we be doing something else? 

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People
Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing
Olympic Reflections #3: Across Sectors
Olympic Reflections #4: Resilience

#olympics #executiverecruiting #fun

Olympic Reflections #4: Resilience

Paul Freed on August 1, 2024

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

Working at an Olympic Games was always a great privilege. Yet it often came with plenty of challenges. I learned a lot about my resilience levels at the delayed Tokyo 2020 Games.  

Due to covid, the Olympics were pushed back a year but even in July 2021 there was a very different feel to any other Games I’d covered. Precautions were understandably high.  After stringent testing and airport checks, I was allowed into Japan, where my colleagues and I would spend a significant chunk of our first two weeks isolated in our hotel room. We were only allowed out to go to our place of work and once the workday was finished, we were expected straight back in our rooms. It made for interesting mealtimes.  

At breakfast we would go downstairs, put on disposable gloves, place our food in a Styrofoam container and immediately head back to our room to eat. At dinner it was only a little less relaxed.  After signing out with the hotel security guard, we had 15 minutes to go to the next door 7-Eleven and buy dinner, to also have in our rooms. Just to clarify, Japanese 7-Elevens are actually a thing of wonder, with all sorts of unexpected delights! There were a couple of days when I only just sneaked in under the deadline. 

Eating in a Japanese hotel room alone wasn’t exactly an ideal dining experience. If you’re not a fan of New York hotel rooms, I wouldn’t encourage a stay in Tokyo.  To say an averagely priced hotel room is ‘efficiently sized’ is about as kind as I can get!   

After those two weeks were allowed a much more ’normal’ amount of movement and we got to indulge in a little bit of the amazing Japanese culture. But those first two weeks taught me a great deal about resilience and respecting processes – attributes I’ve tried to carry into my work every day since.  

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People
Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing
Olympic Reflections #3: Across Sectors

#olympics #executiverecruiting #resilience

Olympic Reflections #3: Across Sectors

Paul Freed on July 31, 2024

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

Working at 11 different Olympics events over a 13-year span allowed me the chance to report on a huge range of sports, many of which I wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.  

Who knew that Modern Pentathlon was the most gladiatorial, captivating sport out there?  One minute the athletes are guiding a horse they barely know over fences, the next they’re facing off in a fencing competition. Similarly, I’d never have become a fan of Biathlon unless I’d been thrown into it in -4 degrees Fahrenheit in Seefeld, Austria back in 2012.  How the competitors ski their hearts out for miles and then calmly shoot targets I’ll never know. And what about track cycling? Athletes with thighs bigger than my torso racing at 44mph within an inch or two of the bike ahead of them, on crazily banked planks of hardwood.   

The prospect of variety was always a huge draw at every new Games. Here at Herd Freed Hartz there’s a similar theme. We work across industry sectors, with the company placing over 1000 executives in more than 450 businesses.  Variety is the spice of life and all that.

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People
Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing

#olympics #executiverecruiting 

Olympic Reflections #2: Interviewing

Paul Freed on July 30, 2024

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

I’ve never kept a proper count but I’m pretty sure the number of people I’ve interviewed for work in the last 25 years is comfortably over ten thousand. The biggest volume-per-day would always be at an Olympics.  From snarky Polish hammer throwers to blubbing Bahamian sprinters, there was never a dull day.

When I was making the transition from broadcasting to executive recruiting, one of the biggest draws was the continuing need to interview people. Getting to know someone’s story and their motivations keeps me fresh – call it a daily curiosity.   

A large part of my remit at an Olympic Games was to interview every medalist from every event I was assigned to cover, along with any other interesting athletes or competitors with emerging story lines. It was terrific grounding for what I’m doing now. There were so many different characters from all over world – throw in the stress of competition and it made for a powder keg of emotions and responses. 

The gold medalists were often the easiest, for obvious reasons. The British triple-jumper Greg Rutherford was a particular highlight. After storming to gold in the London Olympics in 2012 he couldn’t contain his excitement, bouncing back and forth from the microphone while repeating the phrase ‘I can’t believe it – I’ve only gone and won the Olympics in my backyard!!’ 

The emotional interviews were always a highlight. I felt privileged when an athlete would be so open, natural and vulnerable in one of the biggest moments of their lives. Shaunae Miller of the Bahamas stormed to the women’s 400-meter title in the 2016 Rio Games and proceeded to spend our entire post-race interview in floods of tears after revealing how she had secretly battled through a nagging injury that even her coach and family had no knowledge of. 

Then there were the snubs. For some reason eastern European hammer throwers rarely wanted to give me the time of day, even after winning a medal. I tried not to take it personally! We would have the comedy situation where I would request an interview, the athlete would blankly walk past me and then a poor media liaison officer would have to chase them down and plead for them to return for a chat.  There was an archer who steadfastly refused to remove his glasses because he said he wouldn’t look as cool without them.  And the translators who would listen to an athlete’s 40 second answer to my question and give a 7 second interpretation.  

So I feel like I’m pretty well prepared for whoever and whatever is thrown my way in my new recruiting world.  But I’m always prepared to be surprised – and I’d much prefer it that way! 

If you liked this, you can also check out:
Olympic Reflections #1: The People

#olympics #interviewing #executiverecruiting 

Olympic Reflections #1: The People

Paul Freed on July 24, 2024

by Ross Fletcher, Director
Herd Freed Hartz – Executive Search

Olympic Reflections and lessons learned for recruiting

I was fortunate to work at seven Olympic Games (and a few Youth Olympics) during my time in broadcasting. For the duration of Paris 2024 I’m sharing a reflection a day.

One of the most common questions I’m asked around my Olympic experiences is “what was your favorite bit”? I always come back to the same answer – the people.   

The Olympics is one fantastic, gigantic fusion of cultures.  I got to work in multinational teams with new colleagues from Beijing to Buenos Aires, learning so much each time about different pockets of the world. It was also a litmus test for how far a dry sense of British humor could travel 😊  

Just as recruiting is a people and relationships business, I know I couldn’t have been successful in the COVID-hit Tokyo 2020 games if I hadn’t developed a strong bond with the people around me, some of whom were complete strangers from the other side of the planet just days earlier. I’m glad to say most of those bonds remain to this day. 

#olympics #relationships