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Arthur Solomon

When it comes to hype, one business stands far above all the others combined – the sports business. Well, maybe not. The propaganda of the “investing” business is at least as equal. But that’s for another column. This one is limited to the sports biz.

Examples:

• Major League Baseball (MLB) calls its championship event the World Series, which would be true if the world consisted of the United States and Canada.
• MLB also designates a Most Valuable Player (MVP) each season. But the MVP is often not on the championship team, so how valuable can he be?
• The National Football League (NFL) calls its championship game the Super Bowl, even though the best teams often don’t qualify. 
• Predicting the Most Valuable Player of the NFL is easy. It invariably is awarded to a player on the winning team of the Super Bowl. The only exception was in Super Bowl V (1971), when Charles Howley of the losing Dallas Cowboys won the award.
• Both MLB and the NFL also receive millions of dollars of free publicity each year when the announcement of new players to their Hall’s of Fame are announced (and also during spring training for baseball and the NFL draft.)

Unlike any other business, the professional sports industries, and its semi-professional affiliates, known as college sports, are hyped by a supposedly impartial but largely acquiescent media and sports marketing sponsors.

But nothing compares like the false hype of the Olympics, the Summer edition, which was played in Tokyo earlier this year, and the Winter supplement which will begin on February 4 in Beijing, China. 

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) says that politics has no place in sports and promotes itself as bringing the world together in peaceful harmony. But the history of the Olympic Games has a dark side -- a history of awarding its games to totalitarian countries that uses it as a propaganda tool.

Ever since the Nazi Olympics, sports marketers have joined the IOC in believing that democracy takes a back seat to international sporting events. In addition to the 1936 Berlin games, and the Sochi (Russia) Olympics in 2014, the IOC also awarded its games to the Soviet Union in 1980, Yugoslavia in 1984 and China in 2008 and 2022.  (Fueled with sports marketers’ and TV network’s money – much of it from American companies – the IOC will keep on selecting mostly totalitarian countries to host their games as increasingly citizens of democratic countries balk at footing the ever-increasing cost of playing host to a short-lived athletic event.)

During the run-up to the 1936 Olympics, U.S. sponsors stood on the sidelines, as they do today, when the U.S. Olympic officials decided to participate in the Nazi Germany, despite vocal opposition from prominent U.S. sports and government officials, including the U.S. member of the IOC. 

Among those urging the U.S. not to participate in the Nazi Olympics was Judge Jeremiah Mahoney, president of the Amateur Athletic Union, who led the efforts to boycott the Olympics, saying that participation would be equivalent to an endorsement of Hitler's Reich.

Other notables supporting a boycott included New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, New York Governor Al Smith, Massachusetts Governor James Curley and Ernst Lee Jahncke, a former assistant secretary of the US Navy, who was a member of the IOC. Jahncke was expelled from the IOC after publicly speaking out against sending a U.S. team to the Nazi Olympics. Also, U.S. Embassy officials in Germany supported a boycott.

Nevertheless, the sponsors and the IOC remained silent, ignoring the fact that the first Nazi concentration camp opened three years earlier.

As the days to the February 4 opening ceremony in totalitarian China grows closer, calls to boycott the Beijing Olympics will increase because of China’s dismal human rights record and its aggressive military actions. For months members of Congress have asked that the games be moved or that NBCUniversal should limit its coverage only to sporting events and not televise the propaganda aspects of the games, which the Chinese government is certain to emphasize. Of course that might be difficult to do, even if NBC wanted to do so, which is doubtful because they have so much money invested in the Olympic Games, as well as other  business interests in China, because much of the television content will be produced by China’s world feed.

As an individual who has been involved in many aspects of Olympic Games, I believe it is the most important of all sports events. But as an individual who believes that democratic countries must speak out about the evils of totalitarian regimes, I believe a stand must be taken. That’s why I support a boycott of the China games. It’s certainly a better method of expressing displeasure than going to war.

This article began by pointing out how important hype is to the sporting world, and how sports’ flagship event, the Olympics, has been awarded many times to totalitarian countries that use them for propaganda purposes. 

But until major U.S corporations refuse to give propaganda platforms to totalitarian countries and view the Olympic Games only as the money-making event it is, things will stay the same.

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About the Author: Arthur Solomon, a former journalist, was a senior VP/senior counselor at Burson-Marsteller, and was responsible for restructuring, managing and playing key roles in some of the most significant national and international sports and non-sports programs. He also traveled internationally as a media adviser to high-ranking government officials. He now is a frequent contributor to public relations publications, consults on public relations projects and is on the Seoul Peace Prize nominating committee. He can be reached at arthursolomon4pr (at) juno.com or artsolomon4pr@optimum.net.