Doubts Over Olympic Legacy
London 2012 sponsors have been accused of abandoning their commitment to the Olympic legacy, with the Greater London Authority (GLA) struggling to raise funds for sports-participation projects.Brands that were involved in the Olympics may be shying away from committing significant funds to realise the legacy that was part of the original bid, despite having invested some £80million each into sponsoring the games.
It is some 7 months since the Olympics and there does not seem to be any real immediate sign of a lasting legacy but large corporate brand strategies have to keep moving and looking to the future, all eyes are very much now on Brazil 2016.
Consumer appetite for large sporting events does have a history of fading quickly, we were a nation of rugby lovers when England won the Rugby World Cup, we become tennis enthusiasts each year during Wimbledon and we were all athletics nuts during the Olympics.
One issue is the sheer dominance of football, which consumes front and back pages of media and is the staple diet for most people across the world, not just here in the UK. Athletics will always struggle in the face of football for sponsor support and consumer interest.
We have had Tom Daley's Splash show, Beth Tweddle Dancing on Ice and Jessica Ennis pop up in a few print media adverts but these are slowly coming to an end. The "mockumentary" Twenty Twelve that was shown on BBC before the Olympics had a very tongue in cheek approach to the issue of Olympic Legacy but seems to have been pretty spot on.
Its hard to find a solution, should the IOC commit more of a guaranteed percentage of sponsor revenue to legacy projects prior to the Olympics, a lot of the people involved in the original bid have taken their honours and moved on to the next project, it will be interesting to look back on legacy in the next few years and hope that we don't have another Millennium Dome on our hands in the UK.
