Why is there no Olympic rings symbol emoji?

You want to cheer for your country during the Olympic Games on social media, but you won’t be able to use the perfect emoji to illustrate your sentiments. An icon for the five interlinked rings that symbolize the Games is unlikely to be available on your keyboard.

More than 90% of the online world makes use of emojis to express themselves, so it could be a little frustrating not to be able to use the Olympic icon. You’d think that such a popular international symbol would merit an emoji on iPhone and Android, but you’d be hard pushed to find it on either keyboard.

Who decides which emojis are universally available?

There is a stringent approval process for emoji creation. Anyone can issue a new emoji for inclusion on universal keyboards, but it’s not that easy to have them approved. A proposed symbol can be submitted through an application to a non-profit organization called the Unicode Consortium, and this group decides if an emoji will be added, if it will continue to live, or eventually become extinct.

The Consortium follows the Unicode Standard, which keeps the emojis consistent across different systems.

One guideline states that “images such as company logos, or those showing company brands as part or all of the image, or image of products strongly associated with a particular brand” are a factor for exclusion.

The Olympic rings fall under this category, and since the International Olympic Committee is very protective of its brand, this symbol could only be used with their express permission.

Olympic emojis on X

Although the Olympic rings emoji is unlikely to be available anytime soon on mobile keyboards, the Twitter-verse, at least, will have access to some Olympic-related hashtags and emojis that are available for use for the next couple of weeks.

Typing in #Olympics or #OlympicGames will reveal a little laurel bearing Olympic colors, while #Paris2024 will bring up a miniature image of the Eiffel Tower.

You can also temporarily use an emoji for the Olympic mascot by typing in #Phryge – find out more about the 2024 mascot here – and then there are a selection of others for ceremonies, medals and records. There’s even one for the #OlympicSpirit.

All 15 sports in the Summer Olympics will also have their own icons. Just put a hashtag before each sport and you’ll see a detailed micro image with the corresponding discipline. It’s all rather neat, but still no rings in sight.