There’s a real-life sports scenario playing out right now that goes something like this:
You’re the biggest sports brand in the world, but you’re struggling to adapt in a changing marketplace. You’re not going away any time soon, if ever, but TV ratings are dropping, as they are for almost everything, and you’re concerned that distracted young people won’t be the reliable audience that their parents and grandparents have been, if they’ll even watch at all.
Cities that used to flock to host your event now mostly shun you. A few big, brave souls are taking the plunge, but even they enter with trepidation, knowing how uncertain their future footing might be in a time of such cultural transition.
What this brand has always had going for it is an abiding level of trust, bordering on reverence. In a world increasingly unmoored, it still manages to stand out as something different, bigger, better — or at least something that’s perceived to be all of that.
By Thursday morning, that might not be the case.
We’re talking about the Olympic Games. And we’re talking about Russia, diabolical, unrepentant Russia, the worst state-sponsored cheaters in the Olympic world since the notorious East Germans of a generation or two ago.
The World Anti-Doping Agency appears poised to reinstate the Russian Anti-Doping Agency, which was suspended nearly three years ago for allowing athletes to take banned drugs and then developing elaborate schemes to cover for them, in a police helping robbers steal everything in the bank kind of way.
WADA’s expected action to let Russia off the hook comes even as the Russians have never accepted the report accusing the state of leading the massive doping effort, have never named names of the officials who were to blame and have continued to refuse to turn over evidence of the cheating done in their Moscow laboratory.
It sounds like a joke. You don’t do all of that and you’re still welcomed back? Surely this is rankling some Olympic sponsors or TV networks?
Actually, it’s not. There have been no press releases or grand statements supporting clean athletes. Coke is a sponsor. So are General Electric, Visa and P&G, among others. Someone must be saying something? Perhaps NBC?
“The sponsors and the broadcasters have been noticeably silent,” Travis Tygart, CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “All it would take would be one phone call. These U.S. companies financially prop up the Olympics. If the Games are sullied, they’re going to become worthless because people will have lost belief in the value of the Olympic brand. Hopefully sponsors and broadcasters wake up to that and make a phone call.”
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