The Dow Olympic sponsorship controversy tests the level of ethics in the big-bucks sports industry.
The Indian Olympic Association (IOA) may be pushing its luck a little by lobbying the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (Locog) to drop US-based Dow Chemical as a corporate sponsor on grounds that it owns the company, Union Carbide, responsible for the gas leak at its Bhopal plant causing over 3,000 deaths. The IOA and other Indian activists have successfully pressured Locog to persuade Dow Chemical to drop its logo from the “fabric wrap” enveloping the Olympic Stadium in London. But given that Dow is one of several corporate sponsors that will collectively pick up more than half of the Games’ £ 2 billion budget, it is worth wondering just how far Locog is prepared to put ethics ahead of profitability by dropping the US chemicals giant as a sponsor altogether.
Locog claims it persuaded Dow to drop its logo display under its “clean policy”. But as activists have pointed out, that policy is something of a joke. Even if we accept Dow’s long-standing and much-contested explanation that it bears no direct responsibility for the Bhopal tragedy because it did not own Union Carbide when the accident occurred, it surely has a history that should encourage a committee trumpeting its “clean policy” to think twice. Dow, after all, has a toxic record of callousness about environmental degradation. But Locog, so far, has been deaf to irony; how else to explain its signing on, as a “sustainability partner”, British Petroleum — fresh off the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico? As the “oil and gas partner”, BP will provide fuel for 5,000 official games vehicles. Then again, the Olympics’ “official energy utility partner” is EDF, which will provide power to the Olympic Park. In November, EDF was found guilty of industrial espionage against environmental activists Greenpeace.
This blatant hypocrisy reinforces the general view that the global sports industry is reaching a level of amorality that other conventional businesses are anxious to jettison. Another case in point is the gradual shift of Formula 1 racing outside Europe now that strict European laws against tobacco advertising cut into a major source of sponsorship. Is a different approach possible? In 2006 football club Barcelona showed that it is. It signed a five-year sponsorship deal with children's fund Unicef under which it would pay the organisation ^1.5 million a year, every year to benefit children affected by HIV and AIDS. Unlike other European clubs, which wear lucrative corporate logos on their jerseys, Barca’s jerseys bore the Unicef logo. That deal ended this year, after the cash-strapped club signed an agreement with Qatar Sports, but the Unicef logo continues to appear on the back of the jersey. Of course, in the Dow controversy, the un- and under-compensated victims of the Bhopal tragedy are unlikely to gain much from the withdrawal of the logo from the Olympics — the company has declined to pay the enhanced compensation mandated by the Supreme Court. Still, this tiny moral victory marks a giant leap for corporate ethics in an industry that is being driven by big money almost to the exclusion of all else.