Every two years there is a free lesson in public relations. As the summer and winter Olympic Games get underway, the eyes of the world turn on the athletes. Cameras capture every moment of the two week spectacle, broadcasting successes and failures to billions of viewers.

In the midst of this craziness are the athletes. Many of them participating in such an environment for the first time. The ones who win get the glory. Their pictures are shown around the world, they are interviewed, and their life story is told in magazine articles. The ones who lose are soon forgotten. But the ones who make stupid mistakes get to experience the worst. Lucky if it's just a bad miss - not so lucky if it's unruly behaviour or something else the media will jump on and make it a scandal.

Most of those people are in their early twenties. And because most of the disciplines are only broadcasted on such a scale during the Olympics, they are hardly used to the media attention and lack the PR training to handle it. On such example is the German athlete Christoph Harting, winner of the gold medal in discus throw. His behaviour during the medal ceremony was deemed inappropriate by German media and he experienced a lot of criticism from back home.

The lesson in PR out of this (and all the other examples from the current and past Olympics) is that there's two, and only two, ways to respond to such criticism. Either one agrees that a mistake was made, or one is convinced that one has done the right thing. In the latter case, you'll need to live with the criticism (and potentially re-evaluate how you judge and value your own behaviour - you may still come to the conclusion that you're right).

If however, you do agree that you have done a mistake, you should be the first one to admit it. And you should offer an unconditional apology. No one has a credible foundation for continuous criticism, if the person who made the mistake admitted it and apologized.

What does not work however, is an apology with a "but". As soon as excuses such as "but that's just how I do things", "but it wasn't that bad after all", etc. follow the apology, it loses at its credibility. An unconditional apology is a proof of values. An apology with an excuse is only proof of the attempt to please critics and the media.

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Please share your comments and inputs (via comment function, twitter, e-mail, etc.). In my short write-ups I address topics that I am particularly interested in because they align with my values and beliefs. As such, they are always a reflection of my ideas, thoughts, and opinions. The only thing I am positive in that regard is that I do not have all the perspectives, all the knowledge, or all the facts - help me be better tomorrow.