Who Sport What?

General Motors Hits Olympic Brakes

General Motors has announced an end to its sponsorship of the U.S. Olympic Committee. GM also announced it would no longer commit to buying exclusive automaker status for advertising on NBC's telecasts of the Olympics.

The car giant cited a need for flexibility. Ad industry pundits have pointed to a need to avoid long term commitments and a switch from traditional TV sports: the exact model that Olympic finances have been built on since 1984.

Sponsorship and sports TV rights are inextricably linked. Broadcasters count on ad revenue from sponsors to cover the enormous sums they pay for the rights to cover events and leagues.

The deal had initially been done in 1997, in the lead-up to Salt Lake City 2002. GM's pullout will leave the USOC down some $5 million, or 7.5%, of its rights income per annum. NBC will now have as much as $100 million per Olympics in ad revenue to go find another buyer for in order to help make back the billions it is spending on televising Vancouver 2010 and London 2012 .

Just losing a sponsor, even a big one like GM, is no clear sign that the sky is falling in. But sports professionals everywhere will be looking to see if this is the start of a trend away from long term commitments and away from the traditional sponsor-an-event-and-buy-TV-airtime model. Four years ago, the ink had long since dried on the key U.S. TV deal for 2012. Today, nothing looks certain for 2016.

The Olympic Games and the Wimbledon tennis championships share a rare position of not selling advertising via hoardings in stadiums, on uniforms and on equipment, forcing all the action to take place during ad breaks that are fast losing their effectiveness. How much longer will the model hold? More importantly still, where are the ideas for replacing it? 

Tour De France Turn Off

A truly remarkable thing just happened. Can anyone out there think of a precedent? The German rights holders for the Tour de France, state-owned ARD and ZDF, just pulled the plug on their live coverage of this year's race. Because of doping. Cycling in Germany has been in total disarray for some time. From Jan Ullrich having his DNA linked to bags of blood in Dr. Fuentes's office to Jorg Jacksche telling Der Spiegel how the bloood-doping operation worked. The implication of T-Mobile in systematic doping...

But to pull the plug on the broadcast after paying for the rights, and half way through the race?

Ostensibly, the reason is T-Mobile rider Patrik Sinkewitz's positive A sample (that would be testosterone, Floyd). ARD / ZDF claim they are unwilling to pay to cover a pharmaceutical race to Paris.  If his B sample comes back positive, that's it: the Tour goes completely dark in Germany on network (Eurosport will probably continue on cable, even though it is run by the European Broadcast Union, of which ARD / ZDF are key members).

Rather than just wait for viewers to vote with their remotes, the broadcaster has figured out it has a public-service duty to show something less unhealthy than a bike race. "We were in intensive discussion with the German racing teams and they swore that everything would be clean,'' Guenter Stuve, ARD's director of programming, told the station's Web site. It will come as no surprise to lean that Sinkewitz denies everything: "Me? Why me? I don't know anything about it. This can't be," he is reported as saying.

The implications for other sports are huge, demonstrating that some broadcasters still see sport as more than just gladiatorial spectacle. Imagine Disney cutting back on ESPN's coverage of the NFL following Michael Vick's indictment (instead of wall-to-wall SportsCenter coverage of the case). Or then again, no. That's just wishful thinking, isn't it?