Spinello (left) and Deloitte colleague and Air Force veteran Josh Fournier proudly held up the American flag before team USA hockey took to the ice against Canada.
When it came to the Milano-Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Games, SJP’s own Chris Spinello ’07 quite literally put points on the board.
Spinello is a Senior Manager in the Olympic, Paralympic, and Major Events practice at Deloitte Consulting. He and his firm were chosen as the Worldwide Technology Service Integration partner for four editions of the Games beginning with the Milano-Cortina 2026 Olympic & Paralympic Games. Spinello has spent the past six years reimagining the way the Games makes its way to you, traveling between Austin, TX, and Italy working on “end-to-end” technology integration. In other words, everything it takes for the Olympic Games to get from a computer, camera or screen in Milan, to a screen just about anywhere else in the world.
As many likely know, Deloitte works with businesses around the globe across a range of services focused primarily in finance, tax services, and consulting. Spinello has built his career around the latter, starting at Deloitte as a consultant first before moving into his current role. He’s taken this experience to his latest client: the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
To get even more specific, Spinello’s team is focused on three categories of work: application development, technology integration, and cyber security. Think: the ability to run and operate the event, bring it all together, and keep it safe. While these categories of technology may seem broad, they are an integral part of a massive mobilization effort to deliver the Games to you either in person or at home.
In 2020, the Olympics sought out a new adviseto‑operate partner to advance the use of technology delivery within the Games. Deloitte will work with the IOC to deliver the Olympic Games through 2032, culminating with a summer edition Games in Brisbane Australia.
Q: When forming the bid to the IOC to be their official partner, what was most important to you?
A: We are two market-leading, mission-driven organizations in our own spaces so the resonance and alignment was clear from the early on. But it remained to be seen if anyone could take over the operations and evolve it at the same time. Akin to building a plane while flying it, you must be confident in your ability to pilot even though this is new territory for you. In the Olympic ecosystem, there is a healthy tension between enduring tradition and evolving the game—a balancing act we’d need to respect to be successful on one of the largest global stages. For instance, the first time the results of the Games came to the internet was in 1996, Now, more than half (about 60% for the Paris 2024 Olympic & Paralympic Games) of all Games consumption is digital. That’s technology stressing the balancing act: we needed to stay disciplined and mission-focused on the fundamentals in our first run‑through.
After the Games, people would ask, “So how was it?” My reply was often, “How’d it look on TV?” Their response was, “It looked good!” I’d respond, “Then that’s how it was.” We were proud that the work we did was largely invisible, which is strange to say, but this event is about experiencing sport, not talking about technology.
Q: During the Games, what were you and your team responsible for?
A: The best way I can explain it is like this: the moment when an athlete throws a curling stone, finishes a speed skating lap, or crosses the mogul finish line, a sensor triggers an automated results process that gets handed off between multiple teams, systems, validation engines, and gets sent off to your device instantaneously. My team supports the orchestration, design, and integration of those different handoffs and provides some of the underlying systems that you interact with on the internet or your phone. Most days of the Games I was in the Technology Operations Center with our operations joint team, ensuring that all these fast-paced updates were firing off as smoothly as possible.
Q: What was the process like stepping into the Olympic Games and bringing in all this new technology and expertise?
A: We started six years ago with that original bid, and since then we built the team for Milan which included more than 1,400 Deloitte team members from across the globe. What was important to me was that we made a single team with all these people and created a cohesive vision for the Games.
Q: What was your favorite memory from the experience?
A: Of course, we had lots of visitors and interested parties who wanted to see what we had been working on. It’s a special time to highlight your work and be proud. But you work on something for this amount of time and you really want to see it through, especially with the people who made it happen. I deferred as much as possible but got an amazing opportunity to watch the USA vs. Canada hockey game. I’m glad we went because it was an amazing game to see live. For a few of my Canadian colleagues, it was less amazing, but it was all taken with the Olympic spirit. Being there with the team as the US scored that gamewinning overtime goal was electric.
Q: What parts of your St. John’s Prep experience did you find yourself drawing on during your time at the Olympics?
A: I remember humility being a core thematic throughout my time at the Prep: I like to think getting the honor to support the Games is something that one should approach with grace and humility. As a freshman, I remember [religious studies teacher] Mr. McDaniel saying to our class, “To truly know something, you have to have experienced it,” which is something I was constantly reminded of as I navigated the Olympics for the first time with the team. To come in assuming we knew how to do everything perfectly would be a mistake, and because of that we got a lot of lessons out of it which we’re excited to bring forward into 2028 with the Los Angeles Games.
Q: What do the Olympics mean to you?
A: “Building a better world through sport” is the mission of the Olympics, and I can say I got to experience it firsthand. The world needs a movement like this more now than ever, at least it feels that way—something we can all get behind. Of course, I get lots of questions and debates about the movement and as consultants, we quantify everything: ROIs, costs saved, and so on. But how do you put a dollar value on a memory? Or an experience that inspires a young athlete to compete at the next level? I’m not sure you can. The Olympic Games, to me, is a place where these memories get formed for everyone watching and involved—5 billion viewers got to experience the Games—including my kids. Living in Texas, it’s the first time they really got to see a winter sport and the motivation to try it all has never been higher in the Spinello household.
P.S. At Holy Cow Ice Cream Café, the flavors are anything but typical. Read more about how a rocky road led alumnus Rodney Nyborg '19 to a pretty sweet career.
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