/UPDATE/SPORTS-BRAZIL: Commercial Interests Entangle Competitive Desires

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Commentary Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 7 2000 (IPS) - The Olympic spirit today is increasingly a confusion of commercial and sporting interests, evident in the fact that a dispute between corporate sponsors nearly led Brazil’s top tennis star, Gustavo Kuerten, to give up his position on the national team headed for Sydney.

Kuerten, known here as Guga, had decided to stay home due to the conflict between his corporate sponsor, Diadora, and the Brazilian Olympic Committee (BOC), which has a contract with the Brazilian sports uniform company, Olympikus.

But the outcry against the BOC’s “incompetence” for potentially costing Kuerten the Olympic gold medal ultimately led the parties involved to sit down at the negotiating table once again.

Kuerten will play in tennis whites without any corporate logos visible. But if he wins a medal, he will take the podium wearing the BOC’s official uniform bearing the Olympikus trademark, according to the agreement.

“The Brazilian people put me in the Olympics,” the two-time French Open winner said as he announced his Friday departure for Sydney.

An Olympics without Kuerten would have been an “everyone loses” situation for Brazil, and for the corporations involved, because their star would lose equity if he did not appear at this most prestigious of sporting events.

Even the Banco do Brasil had announced that if Kuerten did not go to the Olympics it would make drastic cuts in the resources it provides for tennis players and matches.

This year, Kuerten was the tennis player to accumulate the most points in the world classification of the Association of Tennis Professionals and ranked second under the prior system, based on performance over the last 12 months.

The tennis star has already won nearly two million dollars in prize money so far this year, but he earns much more from corporate sponsorships and advertising.

The contract the BOC signed with Olympikus requires all Brazilian Olympic athletes, except the football team, to wear its uniforms at the Sydney Games, which begin Sep 13.

But the Italy-based Diadora wanted Guga to also wear its logo, just as the Brazilian football players will display the trademark of the US-based Nike corporation.

After extensive negotiations, Diadora agreed to renounce this prime advertising opportunity, but asked competitor Olympikus to do the same thing. In other words, Diadora wanted to ensure that Guga would play tennis in Australia without any logos on his uniform.

BOC president Carlos Arthur Nuzman had rejected the proposal, saying that such an exception would violate the rules, triggering further problems, including new trademark claims and indiscipline among the Brazilian Olympic delegation.

Nuzman criticised the tennis player for “bending to a foreign company (and) failing to behave as a national sports idol should.”

Kuerten had justified his decision to quit Tuesday saying he could not turn his back on the company that has supported him since the beginning of his career, when he was an unknown tennis player. He also stressed that he had made major concessions in the talks with the BOC.

The risk, Nuzman said, is that athletes will become “slaves to sports trademarks.” He pointed out that Michael Jordan, the top basketball player of all times, did not quit the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, despite his contract with Nike.

At the Barcelona Games, Jordan and the “Dream Team” easily won the gold medal. As they received their medals, Jordan and some of his teammates covered the name Reebok on their uniforms with the United States flag, avoiding publicity for their personal sponsors’ rival.

Nike and Reebok compete on the lucrative world market of athletic shoes. They are among the companies engaged in a media blitz in Sydney to conquer more markets, a situation that parallels the efforts of the Olympic athletes to defeat their rivals and set records.

The competition among sports champions and national teams is ceding more and more space to the battle between commercial interests.

Because the sports transnationals have sponsorship contracts with teams and with individual athletes, disputes like the one pitting Kuerten against the Brazilian Olympic Committee are inevitable.

The Brazilian football team, sponsored by Nike, will be able to meet its corporate obligations in Sydney because it excluded itself from the 1999 BOC agreement with Olympikus before the contract was signed. The problem in Kuerten’s case, according to Nuzman, is that the player’s agents did not report his ties with Diadora in time.

The sponsorship of big corporations gives an athlete resources for improved training opportunities, access to new technology and other benefits.

It also means tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, depending on the athlete’s popularity and the length of the contract period. Nike, for instance, agreed to invest 400 million dollars over 10 years in Brazilian football.

In exchange, the players assume commitments that, according to critics, distort the objectives of the sport. The sponsor’s commercial interests mean some matches take place with no benefit to the league. These interests are also suspected of influencing the composition of the national team.

The ties between Brazil’s football squad and Nike are likely to cause trouble in Sydney. A movement known as Nike Watch has announced demonstrations against the transnational corporation during the Olympic Games to protest its exploitation of cheap labour in poor countries like Indonesia.

The protest organisers accuse Nike, which claims to employ a half-million people around the world, of using child labour, moving its production operations to countries where it can pay wages of less than two dollars a day, and of failing to maintain decent working conditions.

The transnational giant has responded that it does not employ children and that it has improved wages.

The corporate battle in Sydney is not only in the advertising, but also in technology. At the games, the transnationals’ clothing, shoes and equipment – developed to improve the performance of the sponsored athletes – will be put to the test.