Johnson’s faux pas was not, as one might suppose, setting a bad example for teenage athletes by admitting that he occasionally likes a beer. (Beer, after all, contains carbohydrates-aren’t jocks supposed to carboload?) No: as everyone present knew, Johnson had committed the far more serious crime of casting a prime Olympic sponsor in an Unflattering Light. The prime sponsor, to the tune of many million dollars, is of course The Coca-Cola Co., soft-drink purveyor to the world. (To make matters worse, Coke has already signed on as a prime sponsor of the 1996 Summer Olympics, which will be held in hometown Atlanta.) So this is what it comes down to, in the 2,700-year tradition of the Olympic Flame and the spirit of friendly competition that unites all nations, all creeds, all races: the Games have become a big multinational business whose first law is Thou Shalt Not Take Thy Sponsor’s Name in Vain.
The world of Olympian business is very, very complicated. The International Olympic Committee, headquartered in Switzerland, sells world TV rights to the Games -for $600 million in 1992, a new Olympic record. The IOC also has a deal with a company known as ISL Marketing of Lucerne, Switzerland. ISL sold this year’s Olympic sponsorships to a select list of companies that includes Coke, Visa and Panasonic and nine other international firms. Prices for these sponsorships are going up, from about $15 million for the ‘92 Summer Games in Barcelona, to about $40 million for 1996. ISL also negotiates subsidiary deals with the 170-odd national Olympic governing bodies around the world. These national committees–the U.S. Olympic Committee, headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colo., is a prominent example–in turn cut their own deals with corporate sponsors. The USOC, in fact, now raises almost half of its revenues-which total $300 million, give or take, for the four-year cycle that will end in Barcelona-from commercial sponsorships with firms like Reebok, Hilton Hotels, Anheuser-Busch, McDonald’s and Bausch & Lomb, the makers of Ray-Ban sunglasses. " Today," says John Samuelson, the USOC’s chief financial officer, “we conduct ourselves in a much more businesslike manner than we ever did before.”
Groups that organize particular sports on the national level, meanwhile, are free to seek their own corporate sponsorships, and many do. The Athletics Congress, which governs track-and-field competition within the United States, has endorsement deals with Nike, Mobil and Gatorade–and Gatorade, in turn, also backs U.S. gymnastics, U.S. swimming and diving, U.S. basketball and U.S. team handball. The U.S. swim team has a deal with Speedo, the swimsuit manufacturer, and the U.S. Badminton Association has a deal with Yonex, a racquet manufacturer. If croquet catches on as an Olympic sport-and why not?-look for a bidding war between Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers, with possible competition from Smith & Hawken.
And finally, there are the athletes themselves. Dave Johnson and his fellow decathlete Dan O’Brien, who double as Dan and Dave in Reebok TV ads, are each featured by sponsors like Oakley Sunglasses and Fuji Film. Swimmer Matt Biondi has deals with Evian and Arena swimwear. Sergei Bubka, the Ukrainian superstar who is the undisputed king of the pole vault, is endorsing Nike this year: his contract includes bonuses every time he sets a new world record. (Nike also designed new uniforms for the Ukrainian Olympic team, but that’s another story.) The rising star, endorsement-wise, of the U.S. swim team is 15year-old breaststroker Anita Nall, who has a deal with Hasbro toys for a new Cabbage Patch doll. (Hasbro says the selling point is the fact that this doll somehow gets a suntan, although it apparently does not breaststroke.) " There are tons of market data that show the Olympic association to be a significant enhancement of a product’s appeal," says John Krimsky Jr., deputy secretary general of the U.S. Olympic Committee.
It would be comforting to report that all this commercial activity has made the Olympic Flame burn brighter than ever, but this apparently is not so. Sport is sport and business is business and occasionally, the business competition gets out of hand. Take the quadrennial problem of conflicting endorsements, for example. Reebok, as a sponsor of the U.S. Olympic team, supplies the warm-up suits that all U.S. competitors will wear when they go to collect their medals–while archrival Nike has supplied the competition suits that the U.S. track-and-field team will wear while it runs, jumps and throws. “For people to stand on a platform wearing our warm-up suit is not about performance, " a Nike spokesperson sniffs. “We’ve never been interested in ceremonial garb.” Or take Matt Biondi, who (in addition to Coke, Ray-Ban sun-glasses and Evian sparkling water) has a contract with Arena swimwear. Biondi will wear Arena trunks during the competition-but since Speedo is an official team sponsor, he will wear a Speedo swim cap as well. Although he is one of very few Olympians who are cashing in big-time, Biondi complains of “exploitation” by commercial sponsors and U.S. team fund raisers alike.
His complaints are picayune compared with the titanic wrath of USOC officials over what they consider to be corporate poaching on the Olympic preserve. The recent battle between Visa and American Express is a case in point. Visa, as a USOC sponsor, has exclusive rights to use the U.S. Olympic team as a marketing symbol-and did so, in television ads that touted its support for U.S. athletes at the ‘92 Winter Games in Albertville, France. When American Express ran counter-ads that mentioned “all the winter fun and games,” an American Express official says Visa complained and the International Olympic Committee threatened to sue American Express. (No lawsuit has been filed.) “We don’t think Visa is acting in a way [that is] consistent with the Olympic ideals,” an American Express spokesman says.
The U.S. Olympic Committee’s Krimsky seems ready to do battle. Krimsky accuses American Express, among several other firms, of “ambush marketing,” and warns that “anyone who infringes on an Olympic association, we’re going to go after.” But what about an athlete who wears sunglasses other than Ray-Bans? Krimsky bristles at the thought. “At the time in which they are competitors during the Olympic period, we would frown upon any competitive eyewear,” Krimsky said. “We must preserve the integrity of the Olympic sponsorship.”
The integrity of the Olympic sponsorship? The late Avery Brundage, who as president of the IOC fought to preserve the amateur status of the Games, must be doing gymnastics in his grave. Indeed, the whole trend toward hot-and-heavy commercialization has produced a spate of bitter criticism–most recently a book, “The Lords of the Rings,” written by two British journalists, Vyv Simson and Andrew Jennings. One of their primary targets is Juan Antonio Samaranch, the 71-year-old Spaniard who is the current president of the IOC. Samaranch is denounced in the book as “a fascist” who sold out the Olympic movement to the forces of commercialization. Samaranch, interviewed by NEWSWEEK, dismissed the charges as propaganda by “two foreign journalists.” But Krimsky said the book is “very, very unfair,” and another U.S. Olympics official, IOC revenue chairman Richard Pound, said the IOC had no choice but to turn to business. “We’ve made the diagnosis that we have to look to the private sector for support,” Pound said. “Sports can be supported like a charity, in which case you’re competing with universities, cancer [and] sick children, and nobody wants to do that. Or you create value for corporations” supporting the Games.
Obviously, the Barcelona Games are creating Value for their corporate sponsors. But there are those who say the relentless marketing has already reached the saturation point, and some critics suggest that pushing it further will eventually turn the Olympiad into something like professional sports today–a gritty business whose blatant commercialism turns many fans off. Worse, some see the pressure for gold medals and world records as a contributing cause in the widening use of steroids. Robert Armstrong is a Toronto lawyer who took part in the Canadian government’s investigation of drug and steroid use after the sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal in 1988. Armstrong says, " Old-fashioned notions of fair play [and] love of the game don’t appear to mean much anymore.” If he is right, the stirring theme from “Chariots of Fire” is just nostalgia–and today’s Olympic anthem should be something like “Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes-Benz.”
U.S. OLYMPIC COMMITTEE BUDGET (in millions of dollars)
1980 $55 1984 $86 1988 $156 1992 $300 1996 $400* * PROJECTION. SOURCE: USOC
