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As the director of the International Olympic Committee’s marketing commission, Norwegian Gerhard Heiberg oversees the organization’s legendary sponsor program and more than $866 million in sponsor revenues. He is a 1964 graduate of San Jose State University and has been a member of the IOC executive board since 2003. He took time to sit down with SportsBusiness Journal staff writer Tripp Mickle and contributor Jay Weiner in Beijing last week.    Read More  >

The NBA has thrived in the land of 1.3 billion for years. Now, it’s looking to cash in by creating its own NBA China division, which is valued at more than $2.5 billion. The company, which has opened two NBA stores, is being managed by CEO Tim Chen and supported from the U.S. by Heidi Ueberroth, the league’s president of global marketing partnerships and international business operations. Both sat down in Beijing with SportsBusiness Journal staff writer Tripp Mickle to talk about the company and its plan.    Read More  >

McDonald’s is a TOP sponsor. McDonald’s is based in Chicago. Chicago wants the 2016 Olympics. A competition is under way between the Windy City, Tokyo, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro.

What’s an influential sponsor to do in the run-up to next October’s vote in Copenhagen?    Read More  >

Gold
Ad buyers
If anyone's looking good these days, it's the ad buyers who bought time during the Olympics. Ratings are exceeding expectations, garnering a 17.6 national average after the first six nights, and NBC is winning every night in prime time.

Silver
Speedo's LZR Racer
A lot has been written about the success of Speedo's new swimsuit, but they continue to shine every night in Beijing. The better news is that there's been little talk about swimsuits as "technological" doping, or about the Tyr lawsuits. All of that's keeping the focus on the swimmers in the pool.

Bronze
BOCOG EVP Wang Wei
Throughout the run-up to the Olympics, the torch relay protests and the questions about air quality, BOCOG Executive Vice President Wang Wei has kept his cool. But yesterday he began to crack, criticizing international media for coming to China to find something wrong. While he may have a point, he's not helping himself and things could get ugly fast if he remains combative.

Tin
Ticket sales
Beach volleyball was half-full yesterday. Wrestling was largely empty for the evening session. And table tennis, a favorite in China, had only a third of the stands full last night. What happened to the first "sold-out" Olympics? Many international Olympic fans stayed home this summer because there were no tickets available. Now they're looking at the TV in disappointment. Was all of the boasting about a "sold-out" Games just spin?

The combination today of blue skies, the opening of the “Bird’s Nest” for track and field, and coupons providing access to the Olympic Green triggered one of the busiest days the area has seen to date.

Sponsors, some of whom had complained about light foot traffic at the massive pavilions showcasing their brands, saw a significant increase in visitors. They credited the factors above, as well as the word-of-mouth buzz generated by their pavilions over the course of the week.    Read More  >

As the first week of the Beijing Olympics concluded Friday, many seats remained empty in many venues, and it doesn’t appear to be the Athens problem of unused corporate-sponsor seats.

Many non-premium, nosebleed-type seats are going empty. That’s not unusual at Games, except that BOCOG announced in July that tickets to all Olympic events in Beijing were completely sold out.    Read More  >

As the U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team heads into the medal round, sales of USA Basketball merchandise are heating up.

NBA officials report that for the first week of the Olympics, combined sales at the NBAStore.com and the NBA Store in New York City increased 57 percent compared to the week leading into the Beijing Games.    Read More  >

Dream for Darfur and Team Darfur have been having their problems with the Olympics.

Dream for Darfur, Mia Farrow’s organization, has been conducting alternative TV shows to NBC’s airing of the Beijing Games. Dream for Darfur is the advocacy group that’s been highly critical of International Olympic Committee TOP sponsors for what Farrow sees as their silence on China’s policy toward Sudan and Darfur.    Read More  >

Gold
Team USA merchandise
The USA House in Beijing sold more Team USA merchandise in two days here than it did during the entire Athens Games. Nike's red hoody T-shirt and Ralph Lauren's T-shirts are flying off the shelves. While the numbers represent only a fraction of total licensing revenue, the strong sales bode well for the USOC's bottom line.

Silver
U.S. table tennis program
Three Chinese-American table tennis players could win the first Olympic medals ever in that sport for the U.S. Consider it a lovely historic full-circle journey that started here 36 years ago with the Ping-Pong Diplomacy of Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong. And now, Chinese-Americans are among the world's best players.

Bronze
Amanda Beard
One of the faces of U.S. swimming, Beard has never met a camera or media outlet that she didn't adore (or that didn't adore her). But on Wednesday, after the four-time Olympian failed to get out of the first round of the 200-meter breaststroke (the only American swimmer thus far to not make the semifinals), she angrily blew off post-race interviews. Funny how Beard begged for media attention earlier in Beijing when she disrobed for a PETA photo shoot. Perhaps she should have kept her clothes on and continued to work in the pool.

Tin
MSNBC's "Olympic Update"
No one is questioning the amount of coverage that the NBC Universal family has across its various networks, but we doubt anyone would care if this program disappeared from the schedule. The show, which comes on MSNBC at 5 p.m. ET, is designed to be a casual "Access Hollywood"-style offering, but it's a little too casual. For instance, studio host Tamron Hall wondered why the "elite U.S. league" did not shut down for the Olympic baseball competition and joked that Australian boxer Brad Pitt is not attractive enough to be confused with the award-winning actor. If only they would show multiple slow-motion replays of a Hungarian weightlifter dislocating his elbow. Oh yeah, they already have.

In just two days, total sales from the U.S. Olympic Committee’s store on the ground in Beijing eclipsed the number of sales during the entire Athens Olympics. And that’s just the beginning.

The USOC expects to generate eight times the sales it did in 2004 before the Beijing Games end on Aug. 24.    Read More  >