Sawt Falasteen - Bridgestone latest Japanese firm to end Olympics sponsorship

The firms have been cryptic about the reasons for their decisions but analysts point to the ill-fated 2020 Tokyo Olympics and declining viewer numbers among young people.

Bridgestone said on Tuesday that it would not renew sponsorship deals with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for the Olympics and Paralympics, dating back to 2014 and 2018 respectively, that expire this year.

Bridgestone "strongly believes in the IOC's vision of 'building a better world through sport' and... 'an inclusive world through Para Sport'," it said.

It will now concentrate more on motorsport events where tyre products "can directly challenge performance, drive innovation, and create widespread value", Bridgestone said in a statement.

Japanese electronics giant Panasonic and auto titan Toyota said last month they had also decided to end their Olympics partnerships.

Toyota, the biggest automaker by sales, has reportedly spent some $835 million since signing a deal with the IOC in 2015.

Toyota's chairman Akio Toyoda said on a podcast last month that the Olympics were "becoming increasingly political" and questioned "whether the event is truly putting athletes first".

"For me, the Olympics should simply be about watching athletes from all walks of life, with all types of challenges, achieve their impossible," Toyoda said.

Former IOC marketing director Michael Payne told AFP he thinks Toyoda's politics remark was aimed closer to home after the 2020 Tokyo Games were delayed a year by the Covid pandemic and then took place largely behind closed doors.

"I think this quote may have had more to do with how Japanese politicians politicised the Olympics –- which was a great pity," said the 66-year-old Irishman.

"They destroyed the potential of their own Games, with their distorted approach to the whole affair.

"Lockdown for the Olympics, but no lockdown for local baseball or Sumo wrestling.

"(It was) political grandstanding at its worst, and well understandable for sponsors to be fed up with this attitude."

Panasonic, whose partnership with the Olympics dates back to 1987, was even less forthcoming than Toyota about their reasons.

It said it decided to let the contract expire "as the group continually reviews how sponsorship should evolve with broader management considerations".

- Pandemic -

The exit by the three firms means there is not a single Japanese company among the IOC's top sponsors, which include brewing giant ABInBev, Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Intel, Samsung and others.

Munehiko Harada, a sports business professor, said the experience of the Tokyo Olympics may have turned them off further involvement.

The banning of spectators from most of the Tokyo Games venues for health reasons limited the sponsors' exposure.

The Japanese public was bitterly divided about staging the Games at all and the event's image was further sullied by corruption scandals, partly involving advertising agency Dentsu, and cost over-runs.

However Harada, who is president of the Osaka University of Health and Sport Sciences, said the commercial value of the Olympics has also "dramatically fallen".

"TV viewership (of the Olympics) in the United States is very low, with lots of other competitive content available, such as X Games and the FIFA World Cup," Harada told AFP.

"The Olympic Games has a 'clean venue' principle, which means corporate logos can't be seen inside competition fields. But in other sports events you see the corporate logos," he said.

However, Payne said this was not a case of the country falling out of love with the Olympics.

"Japan continues to pull some of the highest Olympic TV audiences of any country," he said.

Payne, who in nearly two decades at the IOC was widely credited with transforming its brand and finances through sponsorship, said the reasons for not renewing may be down to issues "other than the effectiveness of Olympic sponsorship."

"Politicians made it impossible for sponsors to activate their marketing programmes around the Tokyo Olympics," he said.

"With the background of Covid, where they did not want to see any form of celebration around the Olympics, and frankly would have preferred the IOC had cancelled the Games, combined with the Dentsu Olympic corruption probe... all served to make Olympic sponsorship radioactive in Japan.

"Unfortunately the IOC was caught in the crossfire of local Japanese politics."

W.Mansour--SF-PST