Tuesday, August 19, 2008

The Olympic junket

The Olympic games is not only about glorious sporting achievements, blood, sweat and tears and camaraderie... it's mostly about money. Money to make your athletes the best, money to get them to the games, money for the IOC officials and money in multi million dollar sponsorship deals. I see the point of Speedo sponsoring athletes and omega sponsoring the clock to time the races but I'm not so sure about some of the other sponsors that have climbed on board for the Beijing Olympics. I'd like to share some of the more unusual ones:

Here's me, officially endorsing the official noodles of the 2008 Beijing Olympics - 'They are delicious' (Yes Mum, that is my laundry hanging up behind me. I've really made myself at home!)




The official yoghurt of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games



And my favourite, the official iron of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.



Coincidentially Sach sent me this article today from the Wall Street Journal about the lengths organisers are going to to keep non sponsors out of sight. Good read.

http://www.wsj.com/article/SB121885240984946511.html

3 comments:

tim said...

I wonder how "Olympic" the official iron of the 2008 Beijing Games is? Does it rate your ironing performance from Gold to Bronze? (presuming of course, you make it through the heats). <-- Get it? Hilarious.

That being said, sponsorships are a microcosm of the games. Omega and Speedo are the Michael Phelps of the sponsorship world, whereas the official iron falls probably somewhere between that Japanese dude who fell off the rings and the entire event of curling.

Belly said...

Hey, hey, hey, HEY!!!!!

Take that back! Curling has given many of the world's sick children hope. Olympic hope. Golden hope.

The kind of hope that only the current curling world champion skip Jennifer Jones can give...

tim said...

OK.

Maybe I was a tad hasty and harsh on curling at the Olympics.

I conducted some detailed research on the history of curling at the Olympics and found it very entertaining and slightly arousing. (SFW)