Beijing Games Are Fiscal Triumph, Moral Failure: John Helyar

Commentary by John Helyar

Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) -- We got our full measure of Olympic moments in the just-completed Beijing Games, topped by Michael Phelps's eight gold medals and Usain Bolt's lightning sprints.

Nonetheless, some of the greatest feats took place in corporate suites, where the Olympics' global sponsors calculated huge returns on their investments.

General Electric Co.'s NBC soared past its $1 billion ad revenue target by delivering the biggest TV audience for a non- U.S. Summer Games since Barcelona in 1992. Its industrial divisions sold $700 million of equipment to Olympics venues and other Beijing customers.

Coca-Cola's Olympic-themed ``Red Around The World'' campaign yielded 17 percent and 18 percent volume gains in China the past two years. Coke not only cut into Pepsi's market share lead, it also induced Yao Ming, China's iconic basketball player, to leave Pepsi and endorse Coke.

I could go on and on about the Olympic sponsors as hustlers -- perhaps McDonald's super-sized ad campaign, ``I'm loving it when China wins'' or Adidas's new four-story retail emporium in Beijing, the shoemaker's biggest in the world. Yes I could, except I know my astute readers don't need Kodak to get the picture. (If you did happen to need Kodak, Beijing is awash with this Olympic sponsor's latest digital imaging products.)

Corporate Land Rush

Let me be blunt. What has unfolded in China the past two weeks is less a global sports festival than a corporate land rush into the world's No. 1 growth market. In those terms, the Cha-Ching Games of Beijing have been a huge success.

In terms of the vision of Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, Beijing represents a total bastardization. His credo was ``The important thing is not to win but take part.'' The Beijing Games' motto was: ``Do you take Visa?'' (Of course they do, silly; Visa is another global sponsor which plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into the Games.)

I'm no naif. Sure it's been many an Olympiad since there were pure amateurs. Sure the Games have been big business ever since the Los Angeles Games of 1984, when Peter Ueberroth showed how lucrative they could be.

What Beijing did was remove the last fig leaf from the Olympic ideal. Put it right up there among the laurel leaves on the winners' heads and that was that.

The International Olympic Committee sold out the Games' soul -- even if at a handsome price -- to accommodate a host that didn't subscribe to basic Olympics values and sponsors that didn't seem to care.

Berlin Games

Not since the worst moments of Avery Brundage, the longtime Olympics autocrat who appeased Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Games by pulling American Jewish runners from a track event, has there been such pitiful leadership.

IOC President Jacques Rogge and his cohorts repeatedly let the Chinese play them for patsies. In part, the suits from Lausanne, Switzerland -- IOC headquarters -- were victims of their own egos.

They awarded Beijing the Games in 2001 under a dearly held conceit: that the Olympics are a great geopolitical force for good. It's why they prefer to call this a Movement, not a sports property. That's why Juan Antonio Samaranch, the longtime imperious president of the IOC, liked to be called ``Your Excellency.''

Beijing represented both a grand commercial opportunity for sponsors and a grandiose gesture for the Movement. The Olympics were supposed to be, at once, a welcoming of China into the international community and a means of changing China's uglier practices. The Beijing delegation pledged human-rights reforms if awarded the Games.

Business China's Way

Alas, this proved to be less the stuff of a Nobel Peace Prize than of a Faustian bargain. The closer the 2008 Games grew, the less sway Lausanne held over Beijing. In the seven years between bid and Games, China had become a fast-emerging economic power, which did business the way it did government: in its own didactic way.

By the time it was clear China had its own ideas about what constituted human rights, media access, peaceful dissent and other such western values, it was too late. A predictable, recurring pattern developed.

NBC and other broadcasters would scream about China's severe restrictions on where they'd allow cameras outside athletic venues. IOC officials would ``tsk, tsk.'' China would do as it bloody well pleased.

Internet Access

Journalists would scream about China's restrictions on their Internet access during the Games. IOC officials would ``tsk, tsk.'' China would do as it pleased.

The IOC was at its most feeble when it refused to stand up for Joey Cheek, the gold-medal speed skater at Turin. He's become a prominent advocate for Darfur and wanted to come to Beijing to enlist other Olympians in the cause.

China, which is Sudan's biggest oil customer and has been accused of complicity in that country's Darfur slaughters, could see no good in that. Cheek was refused a visitor visa and the IOC declined to stand up for him.

In the same non-Olympic spirit, IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies repeatedly deflected reporters' increasingly hostile questions about why no permits had been issued for protests that were supposed to be allowed in designated areas.

The Chinese government finally provided an answer of sorts. It threatened two elderly women who'd submitted repeated protest applications with a sentence to re-education camp if they persisted. With such hosts, the Olympics were about as much fun as the cultural revolution.

Rogge's Status

Thus did Beijing wind up being less a coming-out party for China than a shakedown of its many visitors. Olympic sponsors may nonetheless have done very well by the Games, but the IOC has not. Rogge's alpha status in the Olympic movement has been weakened.

And even sponsors who did great business in Beijing should worry about the way these Games played out. The Olympic rings are the world's most recognized brand, but they have been dinged.

(John Helyar, co-author of ``Barbarians at the Gate,'' is an editor-at-large for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: John Helyar in Atlanta at jhelyar@bloomberg.net