The big take-away from the unfortunate story of the ugly portraits of Olympians is that good visual content cannot be acquired by bringing a dozen photographers into a room, and then parading a hundred subjects before their lenses.
As detailed by one of the photographers on the gig, there were a dozen stalls through which the 100+ athletes streamed. It’s difficult to make a nice photograph of a different subject every 4 minutes.
That would work well for measuring height and weight, but making a nice photograph often requires more than 5 minutes.
For sure, the shooters had a right to expect that retouching would happen, and certainly editors exist to prevent such complete crap like this ever getting printed or shared. So there’s a whole lot of failure going on here.
When you prioritize quantity over quality, you get a whole lot of not much quality.