Paris will soon draw the world’s spotlight when 10,500 athletes travel down the Seine River in opening the 2024 Summer Olympics. Integrating sports and spectacle into the fiber of a major city has been years in the making, a monumental task that alum Hugh Nicholson understands firsthand.

After 11 years with the Washington Commanders, the 2009 Robins School of Business graduate joined the organizing team for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games two years ago. He helped negotiate where athletes will compete in three dozen sports.

“On a day-to-day level, my focus was on working with the venues that would be a part of the Games,” said Nicholson, who leveraged relationships built while hosting special events and concerts at FedEx Field, the Commanders’ home base.

In France, athletes will play beach volleyball in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, equestrian events at Versailles, and fencing at the Grand Palais. In L.A., swimming will take place in SoFi stadium, just a week after hosting the opening ceremony in the same building.

“It will take an incredible feat to flip the venue from a full-on opening ceremony to then hosting the world’s biggest swim meet in perhaps the world’s most well-known stadium,” Nicholson said. Other state-of-the-art venues include Intuit Dome — the Clippers new arena that’s set to open next year — and Staples Center.

“The city has an incredible coastline for aquatic-related sports and, of course, has the famed L.A. Coliseum, which will be the first stadium in history to host the Olympics three times,” he said.

After his work for the Olympics, Nicholson worked with Formula 1 racing in London last year. In November, he was named senior vice president of Australia-based TEG Sport, a global sporting event producer. His position is based in Richmond, with a focus on developing the U.S. market.

This summer, he’s expanding exposure to Premier League soccer with Manchester United, Liverpool, and Arsenal in a “Rivals in Red” tour in the U.S. Then there’s the West Coast tour by Wrexham – the Welsh team co-owned by actor Ryan Reynolds. This week, TEG will bring the All Blacks, New Zealand’s national rugby team, to a match against Fiji in San Diego — their first time on U.S. soil.

Americans are embracing these events. For a cricket match between archrivals India and Pakistan in New York, TEG built a temporary 35,000-seat stadium. Another 500 million people around the world watched the broadcast. For context, the Super Bowl drew a total global audience of 186 million, mostly domestic viewers.

“I don’t think anyone would have expected cricket to really take off the way it did, but fans of the sport did,” Nicholson said.

At TEG, Nicholson strives to engage alternative venues and locales, pointing to the upcoming Manchester United-Liverpool matchup at the University of South Carolina’s 80,000-person stadium. Tickets for the August game sold out in 36 hours.

“I’m proud of what we have here with American sport and the attention it garners globally,” he said, “but I’m equally proud of my international background and bringing other sports here.”

At Richmond, Nicholson earned his degree in marketing. He was on the Spider football team, but a third shoulder surgery ended his career.

“I’m sports through and through, but I never really thought about the business behind sports and entertainment,” he said. “Then, I took a sports marketing class with Professor Adam Marquardt, and the proverbial light bulb just went on. For someone who’d watch SportsCenter three times a day, I’d found my calling.”

He returns to campus each year to speak to that sports marketing class and described Richmond students as intuitive and thoughtful.

“The sports track is not only unique for the professional world, but, for a school like the University of Richmond, it is beyond niche,” he said. “The business side of sport is really taking off as it’s becoming such a central focus of where we are as a global community.”