Nike’s deal with drug cheat Gatlin: do the public even care?

We are assured sponsorship in sport has gone far beyond sticking telly ads on at half-time. But amidst all the digital whizz-bangs one thing remains the same: ultimately, it’s about the bottom line.

So the furore over Nike's decision to sponsor Justin Gatlin resonates far beyond outrage at another drugs-cheat prospering: Plus ça change and all that.

What's really interesting is how Nike believes not only that the move won't impact on their bottom line, but that it will in fact improve it: after all, why bother otherwise?

And since that bottom line is fundamentally about the public spending their hard-earned, and since Nike is a corporate phenomenon precisely because of being able to predict what the public wants to spend it on, there’s an obvious question hereabout whether or not the public actually give much of a damn about doping at all.

To those of us that cherish sport’s aspiration towards fair play, that’s an uncomfortable question but it is nevertheless becoming harder and harder to ignore.

The scale of Lance Armstrong’s deceit during his cycling pomp was always going to make his subsequent unmasking a singularly explosive event: sponsors, including Nike, jumped the ship with the same alacrity they’d exhibited when originally clambering aboard, even when doubts buzzed around Armstrong like persistent mosquitoes for years.

This Gatlin case is interesting though in being comparatively mundane. Having tested positive for an amphetamine in 2001, the 2004 Olympic 100 metre champion’s career looked over in 2006 when he was caught with an excess of testosterone in his system and got banned for eight years, a sentence subsequently halved on appeal.

Particularly stupid

Once can be accidental, twice looks like a pattern, especially in a culture where it is acknowledged you either have to be particularly unlucky, or particularly stupid, to get caught at all.

But once back in action in 2010, the American took bronze at the 2012 Olympics as a pulling-up Usain Bolt simultaneously smashed the world record while performing a swan impression as he crossed the line.

What’s been especially interesting though is how when Bolt eased off his appearances last year, it was Gatlin, at 32 years of age, who ran an undefeated season, setting personal bests in the 100 and 200 metres, and running six of the fastest seven times in the 100 metres.

And guess what – Nike came a-callin’. The same Nike that dropped Gatlin in 2006 reckon he’s worth their while again, a valuable tool in the job of targeting what advertising types call “exploitable commercial potential” or as we in the crude vernacular call it, more money.

Since corporate concerns are financial, not ethical, Nike can hardly be said to be wildly offside. And Gatlin is hardly offside for getting back into bed with them. But we, the disposable-income public, at least theoretically have choices here. And what Nike is really doing is betting enough of us are only concerned with Gatlin as winner now, rather than cheat of the past.

Now, there is definitely some primal survival instinct within the beast which forgives winners damn near anything. But it’s depressing to ponder how even in the rancid world of top-class track & field, that instinct can be so shamelessly, and presumably profitably, exploited.

There are Pyongyang Ponzi schemes with more credibility than track & field. Only the hopelessly naive or those with an agenda believe most of what they’re looking at given levels of cheating which are widely believed to be only part of the real picture since so many have a stake in not upsetting the grubby applecart.

The financial foundations to those various stakes however are fundamentally based on flogging success to us, the public, which in turn makes it hard to avoid thinking many of us must prefer to not ponder the doping issue at all and instead simply tune in for the show.

Expectations really do appear to be that low. Even now there are American sports fans who will insist that baseball with steroids is a helluva lot better than without, preferring to ‘woo-hoo’ pimple-ridden hulks flaking the ball ‘outta here’, relishing the spectacle while the sport itself gets reduced to panto.

Maybe the very clever can put this in some post-modernist context about belief and worship but boil it down and a lot of us don’t seem to care whether what we’re watching is kosher or not.

One US advertising executive has summed up the less than discerning appeal of sports sponsorship to business – “It (sport) may not be the last place to find an attention-focused consumer – but it’s close. What matters more is that people will always watch live sports, and they’ll engage with their friends and other fans unlike any other activity.”

Does context matter then? Clearly not enough to dissuade Nike from getting involved with someone who has twice been found to cheat, and is now running faster than ever before.

It’s easy to paint Gatlin in bogeyman terms in this but he’s only playing the game. He has done the crime and served his time and according to the rules is entirely deserving of his third chance.

Full picture

And Nike are playing the game too, jumping on board the winner train ahead of August’s World Athletics Championships, tying their brand to a potential gold medallist it in order to squeeze more out of a public they presume simply doesn’t really care about the full picture, just the golden money-shot.

And for all the reforming zeal that is out there, arguing that weary “they’re-all-at-it” resignation is a cop-out, if enough of that corporate presumption is correct, where will the hard, financial motivation to change anything actually come from?