Billionaire property developer Harry Triguboff is what you might call a dream benefactor.
The Meriton founder, worth an estimated $8 billion, shelled out $645,000 in one-off payments to Australia’s 2021 Tokyo Olympic medallists last year, despite having no formal arrangement with the Australian Olympic Committee, any sport or any athlete.
Australia’s top athletes are in high demand with sponsors.Credit:Sydney Morning Herald
The only thing Triguboff wanted in return? To meet swimming golden girl Emma McKeon and see a picture of them together in the next day’s papers. “I just want to meet her,” he said according to a source involved in the exchange. “And can someone take her photo and put it in the papers?”
The AOC and McKeon were happy to oblige. The pair spent an hour together and were pictured with McKeon’s seven medals draped around them both. Triguboff hasn’t been in contact again since.
Cadbury were similarly uncomplicated after the announcement of the confectionary company’s five-year principal partnership with the Wallabies and Wallaroos.
One insider said the executive who spearheaded the deal, the boss of Cadbury’s parent company Mondelez Australia, Darren O’Brien, was a rugby fan. Outside the contractually defined terms of the relationship, which specified player appearances, marketing shoots and community events, O’Brien was only delighted to take his seat in the corporate suites each time the Wallabies played.
No mid-training meet-and-greets or unwanted dressing room visits. Just mutual respect for the unique gifts of the elite athlete and the central role of the sponsor in an athlete or sporting code’s financial survival.
Gina Rinehart with Swimming Australia President John Bertrand at the Australian titles in 2016.Credit:Getty
The dynamic between sponsors, “partners” in modern marketing parlance, sports and their athletes has come in for scrutiny after the Herald revealed that swimmer James Magnussen was pulled from the pool deck less than an hour before a race so that Dolphins sponsor, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, and her daughter, Ginia, could have an audience with the former world record holder.
Rinehart’s niche is as a donor to underfunded sports, such as Rowing Australia, a number of individual swimmers, the AOC and, recently, Netball Australia, whose financial struggles made headlines midway through this year.
The West Australian, through Hancock Prospecting, signed a four-year, $15 million deal to fund Netball Australia’s high-performance programs, but concerns raised by Indigenous player Donnell Wallam have prompted the Diamonds players to refuse to wear the Hancock logo on their dress in the side’s upcoming three-game series against England.
Alinta Energy’s sponsorship of the Australian Cricket Team is to be cut short.Credit:AP
For the majority of sponsorship arrangements in Australian sport, particularly in the major football codes and cricket, interactions between athletes and donors are carefully managed, often through their sport’s governing body. Players are well-represented by unions and agents, their sports are well-funded and the partners the sports attract are large companies with established corporate practices.
“All most sponsors are after are the player’s image, their name and the occasional appearance,” one source told the Herald. Another, with a long history in the football codes, said relationships and obligations were almost always well-defined and written into contracts.
There is tension between the high-performance imperatives of teams’ and a sport’s commercial and marketing departments, to which fall the responsibility of bringing in revenue to fund the sport. Coaches always want more time on the field, in the gym or on the court for their athletes and less time preening for photo sessions or making small talk at cocktail parties.
Cricket Australia, which this week parted ways with energy company Alinta, uses a points system to encourage players to contribute off the field, handing out cash bonuses from a marketing fund to players who max out their obligations. Captain Pat Cummins racked up a nice tally of marketing points by shooting a year’s worth of Alinta material earlier this year, a source told the Herald.
Even when the arrangement is with an individual athlete, as in the Rinehart and Magnussen case, there is no reason it can’t be mutually beneficial.
Billionaire funds manager David Paradice has directly sponsored Cadel Evans, Jarryd Hayne and David Pocock over the years. Evans, Austalia’s first Tour de France winner, was Paradice’s first foray into the space. Under the terms of their arrangement, the cyclist would visit the Paradice Investment office to speak to his staff.
When there is trouble, it is not always from outside the sporting organisation. In the American landscape, which is dominated by private ownership, demanding owners can be an athlete’s worst nightmare.
Enter Donald Sterling, disgraced former owner of NBA franchise the Los Angeles Clippers. He was slapped with a lifetime ban from the competition after an investigation into racist comments. Among the most confronting of the allegations made against him over a four-year period was that he fostered a “plantation mentality” in the organisation and would take women into the Clippers’ dressing room while players were showering to “look at those beautiful black bodies”.
He sold his team in 2014 after an audio recording was leaked of Sterling berating his wife for “associating with black people” and taking NBA legend Magic Johnson to Clippers games.
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