By Sam Mellinger, McClatchy Newspapers –
LONDON — Usain Bolt is the world’s fastest man and he would like to thank a few people who’ve helped make it possible. Ashton Eaton is the best all-around athlete in the world and he’d love to do it too. Same goes for world high jump champion Jesse Williams, the world’s strongest woman Holly Mangold and nearly every other athlete gathered here to make the Olympics the world’s grandest sports show.
But they can’t.
As in, they’re prohibited. Cut off. Banned. They could be kicked out of the Olympics for talking about the companies that help pay their bills through sponsorships — unless those companies also happen to be an official Olympics sponsor.
In other words, Olympics honchos are censoring free speech to squeeze every penny into their $6 billion industry and away from the athletes who make it popular and who often need second and third jobs to get by.
“The Olympic ideal and the Olympic reality are now different,” says American Sanya Richards-Ross, one of the gold medal favorites in the women’s 400 meters.
Richards-Ross is among a group of Olympians from around the world who are making their voices heard on this. It started with conversations at meets and in training facilities, got organized with a few meetings in the Olympic village, and is picking up steam this week including a Twitter campaign.
What they want is simple: to be able to publicly thank personal sponsors who make their training possible through social media and other avenues. Leo Manzano, an American 1,500 meters runner, was told by the IOC brand police to remove a picture of his shoes from Facebook.
The athletes’ point is impossible to argue against, except with the kind of corporate greed that’s especially offensive coming from an International Olympics Committee that pretends to be so pure.
The athletes can’t put sponsor stickers on their uniforms? Fine. But for the IOC to prohibit them from thanking sponsors on personal social media accounts? Richards-Ross is being polite when she calls it “an injustice.”
Here, we see the IOC exposed as a cold goliath actively limiting its already volunteer workforce’s ability to make ends meet. Millionaire stars like Bolt and the USA basketball team are the exception.
This is about IOC president Jacques Rogge and others like him live the life of the elite while wanting to keep every possible penny to themselves and away from athletes who for the most part make less than schoolteachers.
“Our position is clear,” Rogge said recently. “We have to protect the sponsors because otherwise there is no sponsorship and without sponsorship there is no games.”
Rogge is a functioning adult, which means that by definition he is smart enough to know that “clear” position is a wicked combination of greedy, hypocritical, and destructive. He’s running a racket. No sponsorship references allowed for the workforce, only for the 10-figure industry they make so popular.
Richards-Ross says that only 2 percent of American Olympians have IOC or USOC sponsors. That means 98 percent of them are being limited and leveraged by a fat bureaucracy — all in the name of corporate contracts that make Rogge and his minions rich while leaving the athletes who make it all possible on the side of the road.
So good on Richards-Ross and a growing number of Olympians — Manzano, Lashinda Demus, Trey Hardee, Jamie Nieto, Lauryn Williams and many, many others — for fighting the good fight. Hopefully their quest gets the attention it deserves.
The athletes aren’t asking for anything special. They’re asking for free speech that will help them make a living — and help them make the Olympics even more competitive.
That means Rogge doesn’t have to do anything special to make this right. He just has to stop running things like a greedy jerk.
