Public health advocates push Olympics to drop Coca-Cola sponsorship : Shots

When Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo slid two bottles of Coca-Cola off digicam and raised a bottle of water to toast his lots of of tens of millions of social media followers throughout a information convention in 2021, he prompted a $4 billion drop within the soda large’s market worth.

“Such is the ability of sport,” write public well being advocates Trish Cotter and Sandra Mullin in an editorial revealed this week within the BMJ International Well being. They urge the Worldwide Olympic Committee to chop its monetary ties to Coca-Cola and cease utilizing its energy to push sugary drinks which might be linked to rising world charges of weight problems, diabetes, coronary heart illness and hypertension.

“Within the curiosity of well being for all, selling unhealthy sugary drinks clearly has no place in sport,” write Cotter and Mullin, who work for Very important Methods, a nonprofit world well being group. “Regardless of the proof of well being hurt and the contradiction to the IOC’s mission to champion athletes’ well being, Coca-Cola stays a top-tier sponsor of the Olympic Video games.”

In 2023, Coca-Cola had extra energetic sponsorship agreements than some other model, together with a multi-billion-dollar take care of the IOC, the editorial says.

The deal provides the soda maker “entry to unparalleled advertising and marketing alternatives,” its pink brand emblazoned on the partitions of stadiums and broadcast throughout the globe. It permits Coca-Cola to “benefit from youngsters by beaming messages into their digital worlds that exploit their emotional vulnerabilities,” the editorial says.

Certainly, this yr’s summer season Olympics have reached unprecedented audiences on broadcast and on-line, NBC stories. On-line viewing exceeded 17 billion minutes of streaming video, greater than all earlier Olympics mixed.

The commentary echoes a “Kick Huge Soda Out of Sport” marketing campaign launched the week earlier than the 2024 Olympics opened in Paris and supported by 80 public well being and sustainability teams around the globe, from Mexico’s Nationwide Institute of Well being to Australia’s Public Well being Affiliation.

A video advert for the marketing campaign opens with a younger man downing a Coke and spitting it out. “Hey Huge Soda,” it begins, “your sports-washing doesn’t wash with us.”

Just like the BMJ editorial, the advert hyperlinks soda to the dual epidemics of weight problems and diabetes, and it criticizes soda corporations for depleting water sources and littering oceans with plastic bottles. It fingers the trade for preventing legal guidelines geared toward defending well being and claims that soda makers use sports activities “to intentionally goal youngsters.”

The advert concludes: “The sport’s up.”

But the end line is nowhere in sight.

In response to the BMJ commentary, the IOC replied with a press release to NPR. “The IOC is pleased with its practically century lengthy partnership with The Coca-Cola Firm,” it stated. The corporate makes different drinks with much less sugar than Coke, the assertion stated, together with sugar-free choices. It goes on to quote Coca-Cola’s Accountable Advertising Coverage,which says the corporate doesn’t immediately market its merchandise to youngsters underneath 13.

The IOC’s response to the editorial got here as no shock to Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of diet, meals research and public well being at New York College.

“An excessive amount of cash is at stake for the IOC to refuse it,” she stated in an e mail.

She referred to as the Accountable Advertising Coverage “a joke.”

“The coverage itself is predicated on an absurd notion, that youngsters underneath age 13 don’t watch any Coke-advertised tv applications, sports activities occasions or music occasions during which 70% or extra of viewers are over age 13,” she stated.

“In fact they do,” she added, “which is why the Olympics sponsorship is so vital and so efficient.”

The IOC’s continued partnership with Coca-Cola dangers making the Olympics “complicit in intensifying a world epidemic of poor diet, environmental degradation, and local weather change,” the BMJ editorial says.

In a latest speech, IOC President Thomas Bach promised to guard youngsters from the advertising and marketing of unhealthy merchandise, the writers observe. They name on the IOC to acknowledge that its continued affiliation with Coca-Cola contradicts Bach’s promise and “the foundational values espoused by this iconic sporting occasion.”

Ronnie Cohen is a San Francisco Bay Space journalist targeted on well being and social justice points.