Death Sentence

A Beijing Olympic official was found guilty of corruption and paid the ultimate price. Beijing's Vice Mayor Liu Zhihua was fired from his job overseeing Olympic construction projects for allegedly accepting bribes. Liu was originally sentenced to death, but if he has good behaviour in prison over the next two years his sentence can be commuted to life in prison. This story was published in last week's Sports Illustrated.

Urban planning for the Olympics

Sasaki Associates is a larger urban-design firms recently completed a student recreation center on our campus. That was not as great news as their efforts to revitalize and change the campus flow and look. What does this have to do with international sport management? Sasaki won an international competition (from among 90 firms) to create the master plan for Forest Park and the Olympic district in Beijing. The project was not just a project to build stadiums. In fact, the emphasis was on designing a sustainable community hub to last for years after the games. Sasaki designers created such an environment linking stadiums, housing, museums, hotels, conference center, retail stores, and Forest park-the largest park in Beijing. The designers have been able to create an open and welcoming environment and the citizen’s of Beijing will be able to enjoy the foresight for years to come.

Ambush Marketing in Chian

In anticipation of potential ambush marketing during the Olympics, The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) and the China Advertising Association jointly issued an anti ambush marketing proposals including:

• Giving priority to all prominent advertising sites between July 11th-Sept. 17th to official Olympic sponsors,
• Companies will be monitored for illegal advertising or unauthorized use of Olympic symbols and all violators will be harshly punished,
• Individual spectators will be barred from engaging in ambush marketing and tickets have a warning indicating that patrons can be removed if, for example, a group is seen wearing the same unofficial logos and sitting all together,
• Patrons will also not be able to bring in any drinks into Olympic venues and once inside the venues they only will be able to purchase Coke products, and
• From Aug 1-27 there can be no advertisements featuring participants in the Olympics and television stations are barred from showing advertisements from unofficial sponsors during any of the Olympic related programs they broadcast.

These are the first significant anti-ambush marketing laws/regulations I have seen that can be enforced. It will be interested to see if there are any attempts at ambush marketing, or if companies might shy away from the practice to avoid angering the Chinese government and possibly hurting their potential to tap the Chinese market in the future.
Gil-