Tag: olympics

The Olympian quest for control

The control freakery of the Olympics marks an organisation struggling with threats.

“Blogs or tweets must be in a first-person, diary-type format and should not be in the role of a journalist,” state the International Olympic Committee’s social media guidelines.

The London Olympics Committee betrays how their ignorance of how the Internet works with an unrealistic and unenforceable linking policy.

More worryingly, an army of ‘brand police’ are scouring Britain for renegade cake decorators or knitting clubs breaching Olympic copyrights. Council trading inspectors have been redeployed from their main role of protecting the community to guarding the sponsorship values of the IOC and the world’s biggest corporations.

All of this is about control – a country that bids to host the Olympics agrees to draconian rules and regulations on free speech and commerce. Athletes too find themselves subject to harsh, and sometimes arbitrary, controls.

The purpose of these controls is to enhance the commercial value of sponsorships – this is why only McDonalds can serve fries, except with fish, at Olympic venues and only Visa credit cards can be used to buy a souvenir t-shirt.

Like all major sporting organizations, the value of Olympic rights exploded with the growth of advertising and broadcasting rights from the 1960s onwards.

We’ve reached the logical end of that growth as broadcasters struggle under the load of funding massive rights payments and advertisers find campaigns based on what worked in the 1960s or 1980s have less resonance with the debt addled consumers of the 2010s.

None of this will stop the IOC and other sports administrators from enacting iron fisted controls on participants, sponsors, spectators and any one else they can bully, but their power is waning.

Just like the Soviet Union tried to control fax machines as their economy crumbled around them, the same thing is happening with the Olympics and other big ticket sports.

Top level sports administrators are very good at currying favours from the corporate Bourbons and political princelings who love to spend other people’s money to build their own egos which will allow the facade to continue for a few more years.

Eventually though the money will run out as shareholders question the value of billion dollar sponsorships coupled with executive gold passes to the VIP marquee and taxpayers will ask why governments have money to spend on stadiums or elite sports programs when their local school, hospital and police stations are being closed.

History shows that threatened leaders tighten controls when they are threatened. We can expect the next couple of Olympics to have even more draconian rules than London’s.

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Links of the day 16 May 2012

China, London’s Olympic bid and quit Facebook or else.

Today’s notable links are a great read with Letters of Note’s stunning letter from Ronald Reagan to his newly engaged son, worrying developments in China and an excellent read on London’s Olympic bid.

Vanity Fair on London’s convoluted, difficult and expensive Olympic bid. This was the basis of today’s blog post.

China’s currency exodus accelerates. Watch how this story affects James Packer and the Macau casino boom.

A stunning letter from Ronald Reagan congratulating his newly engaged son. This is well worth a read.

Entitled apparatchiks never learn. Dominique Strauss-Kahn sues his accuser.

China starts to crack down on foreign workers. Is this part of a bigger trend?

Quit Facebook or be expelled says a Queensland primary school principal.

 Tomorrow we’ll be looking at politicians and online media as well as the age of Facebook users. Be sure to join us tomorrow night on ABC Nightlife.

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Are the Olympics a curse for the host city?

Do the Olympics damage the hosting country’s businesses and economy?

With just over two months until the start of the London Olympics, the inevitable cold feet about the wisdom of the project have started. Vanity Fair details the convoluted bidding process while Business Insider gives the 32 reasons why they think the 2012 Olympics will be a disaster.

Conventional wisdom is the Olympics leaves the host city – and often the nation – in a collective emotional, if not economic, depression.

In the case of Athens it may even be an economic depression, although it would be drawing a long bow to suggest the 2004 Olympics are responsible for the economic predicament Greece finds itself in today.

But is true that the Olympics are “cursed”? Or is the truth more complex than that?

For cities hosting the Olympics, the core problem is the size of the event with the 2012 games expecting 10,000 athletes from 182 countries in over 300 competitions. The Olympics are several orders of magnitude bigger than any other comparable sporting event such as the FIFA World Cup.

Given the size, it’s not surprising host cities suffer an Olympic hangover – there is no way any country, even China, can sustain the frantic hyperactivity a host city goes through in the years of preparation.

China is a good example of an economy that didn’t suffer after the Olympics and the event was more a proclamation that the country had arrived as a global power.

This is common with successful Olympics – Spain in 1992, South Korea in 1988, Japan in 1960 and arguably Australia in 1956 – were all turning points for those countries and the games announced their new position in the world.

Australia though is an interesting case with the two Olymipcs they have hosted,while the 1956 Olympics did change Melbourne, and Australia’s, self image the story is different for the 2000 Sydney event.

In the run up to the 2000 Olympics Sydneysiders, like myself, were sceptical. The city couldn’t run a decent railway for crying out loud, so how could we expect to run a decent Olympic games?

All the scepticism vanished on the weekend of 20th August, 2000 when the blue line marking the marathon route appeared across the city. It was as if a switch had been flipped; the few remaining doubters skipped town and everyone else had a party.

The optimism in Sydney and Australia at the end of the games was clear; the country could pull off the world’s biggest event and the opportunities were boundless.

But Sydney and Australia squibbed it – rather than building on the Olympic success and the preceding decade of reform, the nation looked inwards, decided to invest in new kitchens and today the country is more dependent on mineral exports than any time since the 1850s gold rush.

Much of the blame for this can be put on Australia’s political establishment, specifically two men – Prime Minister John Howard and NSW Premier Bob Carr.

Both men were, or are, very effective tactical politicians who were good at winning elections but were by no means visionaries or nation builders was not their thing. So the opportunities presented to Australia in the early 2000s were squandered on Carr’s short term opportunism and Howard building his middle class welfare state.

There’s no reason why there should be an Olympic curse, for some cities it’s a timing issue. For Athens the economic cycle was against them while politics damaged the Olympics of the 1970s and 80s.

On the other hand for cities like Seoul, Tokyo and Barcelona the Olympics were a coming of age for a growing country.

The challenge for Boris Johnson and David Cameron is to translate London’s Olympics into building Britain’s confidence. While the economic tide seems to be against them, much of their political legacy will be judged against on how well they do.

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Too good to be true

The same old scams catch us all

As regular as the Olympic Games are, so too are the ticket scams. Every four years we see a ‘scandal’ of vendors, these days online, offering cheap or difficult to get tickets. This year’s London Olympics are no different.

The bait used by these scammers is the almost impossible to get tickets, the frenzy to get along to the opening ceremony or top days sucks dozens, sometimes hundreds, of enthusiastic punters into losing money.

It’s not just Olympic tickets, with the ease of setting up websites scammers can be online quickly with a credible, professional looking site and new services, like group buying and ‘penny auctions’ also offer great opportunities for the enthusiastic spammer.

While it’s sometimes difficult to spot the scams, there are some signs that can reduce the risk of your being caught out.

Check the site

How long has the domain been registered? You can quickly check the details by running a whois search, a kind of online registration check.

For .com sites, the authoritative Whois site is Network Solutions while for .co.uk sites (a likely candidate for London Olympic ticketing sites) it is Nominet. Each country has its own registration list and in Australia, for .com.au it is AuDA who run the My Web Name site.

A recently registered, or long standing, name doesn’t in itself indicate whether a site is a scam or not, but it is a good start.

What are the contact details?

A reputable site that wants your money should have a phone number and street address. A site that doesn’t have these is a warning sign.

Do a web search

The web is your friend. Use your favourite search engine to search the business’ name, for most people this is Google. This can show if there’s been complaints about the site.

Make sure you do a full name search, for instance if you are searching for Joe’s cutprice tickets put the name inside inverted commas such as “Joe’s cutprice tickets”.

Also do a search on the business address, if a company operates from the same location as dozens of others then it’s almost certainly operating from a service office.

While there’s nothing wrong with a business operating from a serviced office, if a company is claiming to be a large reputable multinational then it’s probably telling porkies.

Use a disposable password

If the site asks you to create an account or a password, use something different to your regular banking or other important passwords.

Some of these scammers are actually harvesting login details for online scams so don’t use the same password as your email or social media account as you may find your account hijacked.

Don’t use social media logins

Account hijacking is becoming prevalent on social media sites. The scammers get access to a victim’s Facebook or Twitter account and then contact all the victim’s friends posing as the victim. This is particularly effective for getting more people trapped in the scam.

Increasingly we’re seeing sites using social media logins, that is offering to use your Facebook account rather than a user name or password as a convenient way of signing up. These almost always give the site permission to post on your behalf and you should not do this unless you are totally confident in the site.

Pay by credit card

Even the best of us can get caught out by scammers, so paying by credit card means you have some protection from dodgy deals as you can dispute and reverse the transaction.

Note the words credit card, if you use a debit card many banks won’t give you the same consumer protections.

Avoid direct wire payments or online services like PayPal as you’ll probably do your cash or, at best, be bogged down in the dispute procedure.

Use common sense

The most important part of avoiding scams is common sense; if something is too good to be true then it almost certainly isn’t true.

An offer for hard to get Olympic tickets, fifty dollar iPads or a million dollars from a long lost cousin in Africa always come with a catch that leaves you out of pocket and possibly with your identity stolen.

Many of these scams aren’t new, they’ve just evolved to take advantage the online world.

During the golden era of the snake oil merchant in the 19th Century, the phrase there’s a sucker born every minute was coined. Don’t be that sucker.

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