Corporate America the big winner in Beijing
Nonetheless, some of the greatest feats took place in corporate suites, where the Olympics’ global sponsors calculated huge returns on their investments.
General Electric’s NBC soared past its $1 billion (€700m) ad revenue target by delivering the biggest TV audience for a non-US Summer Games since Barcelona in 1992. Its industrial divisions sold $700m (€480m) of equipment to Olympics venues and other Beijing customers.
Coca-Cola’s Olympic-themed Red Around The World campaign yielded 17% and 18% volume gains in China the past two years.
Coke not only cut into Pepsi’s market share lead, it also induced Yao Ming, China’s iconic basketball player, to leave Pepsi and endorse Coke.
I could go on and on about the Olympic sponsors as hustlers — perhaps McDonald’s super-sized ad campaign, “I’m loving it when China wins”, or Adidas’s new four-storey retail emporium in Beijing, the shoemaker’s biggest in the world.
Yes I could, except I know readers don’t need Kodak to get the picture. (Beijing is awash with this Olympic sponsor’s latest digital imaging products.)
What has unfolded in China during the Olympics is less a global sports festival than a corporate land rush into the world’s No. 1 growth market. In those terms, the Games of Beijing have been a huge success.
In terms of the vision of Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, Beijing represents a total bastardisation.
His credo was: “The important thing is not to win but take part.”
The Beijing Games’ motto was: “Do you take Visa?” (Of course they do, silly; Visa is another global sponsor which ploughed hundreds of millions of dollars into the Games.)
I’m no fool. Sure it’s been many an Olympiad since there were pure amateurs. Sure the Games have been big business ever since the Los Angeles Games of 1984, when Peter Ueberroth showed how lucrative they could be.
What Beijing did was remove the last fig leaf from the Olympic ideal.
The International Olympic Committee sold out the Games’ soul — even if at a handsome price — to accommodate a host that didn’t subscribe to basic Olympics values and sponsors that didn’t seem to care.
IOC president Jacques Rogge and his cohorts repeatedly let the Chinese play them for patsies.
In part, the suits from Lausanne, Switzerland — IOC headquarters — were victims of their own egos.
They awarded Beijing the Games in 2001 under a dearly held conceit: that the Olympics are a great geopolitical force for good. It’s why they prefer to call this a Movement, not a sports property.
The Olympics were supposed to be, at once, a welcoming of China into the international community and a means of changing China’s uglier practices. The Beijing delegation pledged human rights reforms if awarded the Games.
By the time it was clear China had its own ideas about what constituted human rights, media access, peaceful dissent and other such western values, it was too late.
IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies repeatedly deflected reporters’ increasingly hostile questions about why no permits had been issued for protests that were supposed to be allowed in designated areas.
The Chinese government finally provided an answer of sorts.
It threatened two elderly women who had submitted repeated protest applications with a sentence to re-education camp if they persisted.
With such hosts, the Olympics were about as much fun as the cultural revolution.
And even sponsors who did great business in Beijing should worry about the way these Games played out.
The Olympic rings are the world’s most recognised brand, but they have been sullied.
John Helyar, co-author of Barbarians at the Gate, is an editor-at-large for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.
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