Abstract
Who owns the Olympics?
During London’s campaign to host the 2012 Olympic Games many local businesses in East London leant their support, prominently ‘backing the bid’ in their shop windows. Following London’s victory, scaffolding firms, minicab companies, kebab shops and convenience stores in the host boroughs of the Games changed their names: the Olympic Kebab, Olympic Cash & Carry, Olympic Skips and other variations proliferated.
However, the newly created London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (Locog) was much less keen for small businesses to associate themselves with the Games than its predecessor had been during the fevered bidding process. The ‘Olympic’ businesses gradually began to receive letters from Locog threatening legal action, leading most to temper their enthusiasm and revert to their previous names.
It is not only the use of the word Olympic that prompted threats of legal action. According to Locog’s brand protection guidance, combining the words Games, 2012, Two Thousand and Twelve and Twenty Twelve with gold, silver, bronze, medals, sponsor or summer could also constitute an infringement. The guidance also noted ominously that ‘an association can also be created without having used one of the Listed Expressions’. Just how far Locog felt that it could control the use of language in the run-up to the Games was demonstrated last year when it threatened a commercial venture called the Great Exhibition 2012 with legal action.
Olympic Kebab shop and owner, London, circa 2009–10, from Olympics by Martyn Routledge at Open Agency. To buy a copy for £8.99, visit openthebook.com (£1 will go to Prostate Cancer Charity)
At the time, a Locog spokesman told the BBC that the basis for the Great Exhibition 2012 challenge was the ‘London Olympic and Paralympic Games Act 2006 [which] prevents people from creating an unauthorised association between a person, organisation, business, goods and services and the London 2012 Games’. Mathew Healey, trademark attorney at law firm Bates Wells & Braithwaite, describes the Act as: ‘An extremely tough law. In effect it prevents any “unauthorised person”, anyone except official sponsors such as Coca Cola or McDonald’s, from doing anything that “is likely to create in the public mind an association” between the 2012 Olympics and that person, and/or their goods, services or activities.’ Healey adds: ‘The rights accorded to Locog are extremely broad. Many in the legal and marketing sectors believe they go beyond what is necessary to protect their legitimate interests.’
The Olympics has far greater protection in law than any other brand, and governments are quick to legislate to protect it as part of the deal to host the Games. The draconian nature of this very broadly drafted protection leads many to choose to play it safe and effectively self-police, even in the not-for-profit, cultural and educational sectors. When the 2012 Games bid was successful, much was made of the role of the Cultural Olympiad and how the UK cultural sector had its part to play. However, it was soon made known to arts organisations through various briefings and meetings that certain words would be out of bounds when it came to artistic programming and that an association would only be possible through sanctioned use of the 2012 ‘inspire mark’, a logo awarded to a number of non-commercial organisations allowing association with the Games. Only ‘incidental use in literary or artistic works’ is given as a defence against infringement of the 2006 Act.
By creating only one type of activity that can legally be called ‘Olympic’, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has monopolised a word that was in general use for centuries before Pierre de Coubertin established the modern Olympic Games in 1896. As a result, events that were named after the Olympics before Coubertin’s time are now seen as ‘pseudo’ Olympics, or as forerunners to Coubertin’s version. All would be subject to legal challenge if they were conceived today.
There were Robert Dover’s Games, which started in Chipping Campden in the early 17th century and were called Olimpicks by 1636, a name that has stuck. Robert Dover’s Cotswold Olimpicks are still held every summer. The poets who gave this anti-puritanical romp the Olimpick name were showing off their knowledge of classical literature: bear in mind that it was William Shakespeare who first used ‘Olympian’ in print in modern English, in Henry VI, Part 3.
After Richard Chandler, an Englishman, discovered the site of ancient Olympia in 1766, a new wave of Olympic events emerged. In Hendon in 1786, for example, there was an event that was advertised as ‘a burlesque imitation of the Olympic Games’, with similar events in Hampstead before the century’s end. More people used the name over the course of the 19th century, as a general fashion for classicism met news of the excavation of Olympia. These included sporting events, like Baron de Berenger’s Olympic Festival at Chelsea’s Cremorne Gardens in 1832, as well as circus acts and theatres, like the Olympic Pavilion, which opened in London’s Drury Lane in 1806 for equestrian spectaculars, and was later renamed the Olympic Theatre under Eliza Vestris’s direction. A rare poster from Oswestry in 1834, written in a phonetic rendering of a Shropshire accent, promised ‘Gim Nas Stick Xercisez, Ho-Lympic Gaymes, Hand Ethennyun Sportes’.
The president of McDonald’s and International Olympic Committee president Dr Jacques Rogge (second from right) sign a contract securing McDonald’s sponsorship of the Olympic Games through to 2020
Credit: Kerstin Joensson/AP Images for McDonald’s
Then there were Pablo Fanque’s Olympian Games, a touring equestrian circus act of the 1850s. The name became more sporting thanks to the successful Wenlock Olympian Games, which started in 1850 and are thriving today, as well as the Liverpool Olympic Festivals of the 1860s and the National Olympian Games, held in London in 1866 and Birmingham in 1867. Coubertin was born in 1863, and he clearly borrowed ideas and terminology from these events.
Most intriguing were the Morpeth Olympic Games, a racing and wrestling event for miners and quarrymen that started in the Northumberland town in the 1870s. It survived, cash prizes and betting culture intact, until 1958. Then, of course, there was Blackburn Olympic FC, the first working-class team to win the FA Cup with their 1883 triumph over Old Etonians. The name continued to have an appeal outside sport, as witness the renaming of the National Agricultural Hall in Kensington as Olympia in 1886, and the naming of Titanic’s sister ship RMS Olympic in 1910.
Locog’s guidance on ‘protected’ words, from ‘Brand protection’, London 2012’s UK statutory marketing rights, April 2010
Helms Bakeries, 16 March 2005. The bakeries catered to the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics
Credit: Jim Sedgwick/blogging.la
So Coubertin was not the first to call his event Olympic. He was working in a long tradition, one informed by an interest in classical history, and by a desire to add lustre to modern events by naming them after the famous games of ancient Greece. And while Coubertin attempted to close off alternative, non-sporting meanings early on in the IOC’s history, in 1910 he acknowledged the fact that the name could not be monopolised: ‘The term is in the public domain. If you are not afraid of looking ridiculous, and if your efforts are considerable enough to be compared to what goes into organising a standard Olympiad, go ahead and use it. No one has the right to prevent you from doing so.’
The fact that the Morpeth Olympic Games survived under that name until 1958, untroubled by cease-and-desist letters from the IOC’s lawyers, shows the longevity of tolerated alternatives. Ironically, during the first half of the 20th century Olympic organisers and officials seemed quaintly naive about language and branding. According to Professor Alan Tomlinson of Brighton University, in a paper about the commercialisation of the Olympics, ‘entrepreneurial operators from outside the IOC were the ones to see the potential of the commercialisation process’. Helms Bakeries of Los Angeles, founded in 1931, was contracted to supply the Olympic Village at the Olympics in LA in 1932. Founder Paul H Helms duly registered the marks of the Olympics in all the US states, including the five rings and the word ‘Olympic’, something neither the IOC nor any other connected organisation had ever thought to do. Helms Olympic Bread continued as a brand, until its founder generously gave up the rights in the 1950s, allowing the IOC to lay the foundations for its own eventual stranglehold on Olympic language.
It was in the 1980s, as income from traditional sources began to fall and the Olympics became more expensive to stage, that the IOC began to sell the brand to commercial sponsors. When the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics were audited and found to have made a surplus of $222m, a new era of commercialisation and control was born. As far as using the word Olympic is concerned, Coubertin’s assurance has been conveniently brushed aside, offering little protection to the owner of the former Olympic Kebab shop in Hackney Wick contemplating whether his business would have really undermined McDonald’s role as ‘official restaurant of the Olympic movement’.