The Cost of Cynical Olympics Marketing
How corporate America eats up and spits out American athletes
You have to feel for Simone Biles. She received an orgy of publicity for the past year, calling her the greatest in the history of her sport. NBC was counting on her for big Olympics ratings and was following her every move. Her personal life became the subject of media fascination. And then, when the moment finally came, in the team competition, something went wrong, in a sport that leaves so little margin for error, and her performances were subpar, requiring her to withdraw and regroup for the individual competitions.
Biles is a victim of the way the Olympics are marketed in this country. The Olympics are both (1) big business and (2) largely comprised of sports the public does not follow on a day to day basis. This creates a situation where corporate America and NBC, the network with the multi-billion dollar Olympic television contract, has to develop storylines that the public can latch onto, so that they will tune in and the sponsors will make money.
The way they do this is by picking a few athletes to become the faces of the Games. There are several criteria here. First, the athlete has to be American. Even an all-time great and charismatic foreign Olympian, like Usain Bolt of Jamaica, the greatest sprinter in history doesn’t get this treatment, although he did get plenty of endorsement money. Second, the athlete should be in an event that generates multiple gold medals. This is under-appreciated, but ever wonder why you don’t see one of these big marketing campaigns surrounding an Olympic boxer? Americans do quite well in that sport, but you only get to win one gold medal. Corporate America wants to see you up on that medal stand with the Star Spangled Banner over and over again. And third, the athlete has to be a big favorite to win.
Corporate America likes predictability. It has no use for longshots. When Matt Centrowitz won the 2016 Olympic gold medal in the 1500 meters, this was one of the biggest victories in American track and field history- America’s first in the event since 1908. The event itself is known as "the metric mile” and is the centerpiece of the Olympics track and field competition. And it is usually dominated by great African runners.
But while Centrowitz did get some endorsement money, he never became a household name like Biles, or Michael Phelps or Marion Jones before her. Why? Because you can’t build a year long marketing campaign around a longshot. Most longshots don’t win. Corporate America wants a sure thing.
And as a result, the darlings of the American media going into Olympic Games, the ones with all the expectations and all the pressure and the coverage of who they are dating and everything else, are always big favorites to win lots of gold medals for the United States.
This obviously creates a really warped view of what the Olympics are all about. If every event were won by the favorite, it would not be a very compelling sports competition. When you actually watch the Olympics, stories like the unheralded 18 year old Tunisian swimmer who won his gold medal from lane 8 or the Filipina weightlifter who won her country’s first gold medal are the sorts of things that keep us watching. But marketing requires predictability and longevity, and this year, Simone Biles was expected to deliver that.
The thing is, while I can’t blame the athletes one bit for taking the money and hitching their wagon to corporate America (not only is the money good, but it’s a lot of fun to be a celebrity and do magazine shoots and everything else), it can be pretty bad for their athletic careers. So much of athletic competition is about focus. And all of the hoopla is a big distraction.
Now I can see the objection to this: don’t professional athletes always compete in a high publicity environments with loads of distraction? But while they do, I don’t think it’s really the same intensity. Most professional athletes have a defined offseason and do a lot of the silly stuff like filming State Farm Insurance commercials during that offseason. And because professional athletes are full time celebrities with careers that sometimes last over a decade, there isn’t this one moment where they are completely in the spotlight. Even in the runup to an NBA Finals, cameras aren’t following every move LeBron James makes, and television broadcasters aren’t demanding every minute of his time. There’s plenty of stock footage and the public already knows a lot about him. But since sports fans don’t know Biles very well, we have to go Biles 24-7 right before the most meaningful competition she will ever enter (and really the only one casual fans care about).
I think corporate America is obviously going to do what it does, but the sports media does not have to go along with this. There’s no reason that maximum pressure needs to be placed on a single athlete for several months leading up to the Olympic Games. Rather, the media can do what it does in other sports- wait and see what is happening and cover the actual results. An athlete like Biles is always going to be under some pressure; the media, however, does not have to make it worse.
It’s easy to find reasons not to feel sorry for young, glamorous, talented people who make all sorts of money and receive tons of media attention. But these people have a job that they do, and that they do better than anyone else in the world. How well would you do your job if the cameras were following you 24-7 and journalists and marketing professionals and television networks were constantly hounding you. There’s a strong case for giving them some space and letting them do what they do best. And in that world, who knows, maybe Biles would have nailed that vault in Tokyo, as she has so many times before.