COMMENT
The days of athletes having their cake and eating it too are dead.
No matter what your philosophical stance towards the commercialisation of sport is — it is impossible to ignore that mining magnate Gina Rinehart delivered some inconvenient truths this week as netball’s sponsorship storm rages on.
Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting last week ripped up a $15 million deal supporting the Diamonds national team after a dressing room push back against the sport’s biggest financial backer.
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According to reports, Diamonds players gave Indigenous star Donnell Wallam their full support after the goalshooter voiced concerns about wearing a Diamonds dress that included branding from Hancock Prospecting.
Rinehart’s father Lang Hancock, the founder of the mining giant, had infamously suggested Indigenous Australians should be sterilised to “breed themselves out” in coming years.
After pulling the sponsorship deal off the table Rinehart dropped a brutal truth that even the most zealous of Diamonds supporters can’t ignore.
Australia’s richest woman declared the sport should not have become engaged in “virtue-signalling” or allowed itself “to be used as the vehicle for social or political causes”.
The comment exposes the widening gap between sport in its purest form — and the reality of professional sport in 2022.
The netball furore spread to cricket last week when it was revealed Australian Test captain Pat Cummins would no longer feature in promoting major sponsor Alinta Energy.
Alinta Energy ended a $40 million sponsorship deal prematurely after speculation emerged Cummins took issue with the energy provider’s parent company Pioneer Sail Holdings, one of the Australia’s biggest carbon emitters.
The paradoxical nature of the divide is the same one at the centre of netball’s storm.
Sport and athletes need sponsorships to survive and sponsors need athletes willing to be ambassadors for them at a time when both parties are being held to account more forensically than ever.
There are no answers to the problem, as Aussie cricket legend Adam Gilchrist touched on this week.
“It’s a complex area,” Gilchrist told news.com.au’s I’ve Got News For You podcast.
“How wide do you spread the invitation list to the negotiating table of the marketing and sales team. Using the example of Pat and anyone else who feels strongly about a sponsor, what are the alternatives? Do they bring alternative sponsors to the table for the health of the game?
“The question that needs to be asked is, ‘Are you willing to forego the financial component that sponsors puts in? And then what?’
“I’m not saying that for Pat, I’m saying that as a holistic question for any player that takes that point of view. It’s so complex and there’s so much more discussion needed in this area. I don’t think there is one definitive right or wrong. You just need to tread wearily about the knock-on effect to the game. There is a lot to take on.”
The same goes at the other end of the operation.
Rinehart’s suggestion that the Aussie netballers should stay out of politics while accepting the role of mining company ambassadors is embarrassing.
Mining is a political and societal battleground in 2022 and taking on the Hancock Prospecting sponsorship would have been by definition a step into the political sphere. There is a reason the mining giant wanted to hitch its public image wagon to the Diamonds and the team’s position as a source of national pride. Just another classic case of “sportswashing”.
There is perhaps nothing sinister about it, but every case of betting, alcohol and fast food advertising is in the same boat. And in 2022 athletes and companies can’t get away with that so easily. They are, of course, still getting away with it, but the door is closing.
Greg Norman’s rebel golf league and the players involved have been widely condemned for choosing cash over their conscience in linking with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf.
There is a reason Saudi Arabia has spent $1.5 billion to host sporting events recently.
There is a reason Woodside, one of Australia’s biggest exporter of natural gas, sponsors the Fremantle Dockers.
More than ever, the world sees through it, just as former Fremantle players did last week when the club was urged to end its rich partnership with Woodside.
And more than ever — across the entire political spectrum — there is a growing hypersensitivity and a growing predisposition to vocalising views about anything and everything.
Almost 30 years ago there was a landmark moment in the commercialisation of sport at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
The Games had effectively become known as “the Coca-Cola Olympics” with the soda giant plastering itself all over the competition. It was the sheer brazenness of it all. The purity and innocence of “Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger)” completely forgotten.
There seems to be no changing the commercial hegemony of sport any time soon while all parties have cash in their pockets — but, increasingly, fans go into sporting events with their eyes wide open.
As Golf Channel’s Brandel Chamblee said earlier this year when LIV began to snatch up some of the world’s best golfers: “We’re not watching a golf tournament. We’re watching a sportswashing operation”.
It’s at this point that athletes are exposed for what they really are at times — walking, talking billboards.
Rinehart knows this better than most.
“Hancock and its Executive Chairman Mrs Rinehart, consider that it is unnecessary for sports organisations to be used as the vehicle for social or political causes,” the mining giant said in a statement.
“Firstly, because sport is at its best when it is focused on good and fair competition, with dedicated athletes striving for excellence to achieve their sporting dreams and to represent our country at their very best.
“Secondly, because there are more targeted and genuine ways to progress social or political causes without virtue signalling or for self-publicity. For example, the meaningful engagement with local Indigenous communities undertaken by Hancock’s Roy Hill Community Foundation in West Australia to support their actual needs.
“Thirdly, because there are more impactful means to make a beneficial difference. For example, Hancock’s holistic support for real programs including Hanrine Futures – that are providing a true pathway for Indigenous students through education and into employment where they are guaranteed a job should they wish, at the end of their training.
“The reality is that sponsorship is integral to sports organisations – for full-time professionals right through to young children at the grassroots level – who rely on corporations investing the funds that enable all sports to not only survive, but thrive.
“Sadly, recent media does not help encourage sporting sponsorships. What can be lacking is a sufficient connection between sponsorship funds and the athletes themselves, with money unnecessarily wasted on administration and related costs.
“Which is why Hancock has, and will continue to insist, that the funds it provides to any sports it sponsors are spent on and for the athletes.”
