Australia’s Olympic athletes are "facing the sobering reality that the huge sponsorship dollars that filled their predecessors’ pockets are vanishing," according to Robert Craddock of the Brisbane COURIER-MAIL. Swimmers such as Grant Hackett and Ian Thorpe "comfortably" earned four or five times a year what many of the current swimmers make. The gap is "not just down to the fact" that they were proven Olympic standouts, "while today’s crop will be very much on trial at the Rio Olympics." Thorpe and Hackett earned more than A$2M (1.44M) a year from sponsorships. The Stilnox scandal that "engulfed the Australian swimming team soon after London and non-stop stories about drug cheating in general have tarnished the Olympic brand." An example of the sort of "mega-deal once available to a swimmer but now hard to find" was the A$800,000 ($576,500) deal Stephanie Rice signed with Channel 7 in the days after winning three Gold Medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The man who brokered that deal, Chris White from Int'l Quaterback, "conceded the landscape has changed." White: "There is no doubt corporate investment across the board for Olympic athletes has dropped. It has nothing to do with the caliber of performances or the blend of personalities. More so, in my opinion, the visibility of the athletes outside competition." Many major firms "find Olympic sponsorships awkward." Athletes are only in focus for a couple of weeks and their "moment of glory in Rio de Janeiro may arrive in the middle of the night Australian time and because the Olympics and the Australian team have their own sponsors there is no on-site branding." It is "not just the Olympics." All sports "have felt the pinch." In cricket, "some bat contracts have dropped" 50% in the past decade. Steve Atkinson, whose clients include Adam Gilchrist, said that companies "wanted more bang for their buck and were very discerning about who they spent it on." Atkinson: "There will always be big deals there for the really top athletes but it is much tougher for the next level down" (COURIER-MAIL, 2/23).
