For the chief executive officer of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt, these are not good times. GE’s first-quarter earnings fell nearly 6% in 2008 when compared to the first quarter of 2007. As well, he should be worried about the global disruptions of the Olympic torch relay by protestors who are voicing their discontent with China’s record on human rights and its crackdown in Tibet. For Immelt, the continuing global protests are worrisome, as GE’s NBC Universal division is putting up a great deal of money to support this summer’s Beijing Olympics. GE is using the Olympics to help sell its products in the globe’s most populous country. And GE isn’t the only corporation that views the Olympics as more than just an athletic event. The Olympics reach people who buy items — which means Olympic partners pay a lot to buy the five interlocking rings logo to stamp on their products.

Perhaps the president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, had Immelt in mind last week when he said last Thursday at a two-day IOC executive board meeting in Beijing that the protests posed a “crisis” for the Olympics.

The modern day Olympics are more corporate bazaar than competition. For example, the Beijing Games are just another stop on the tennis circuit taking place between August 10–17, about five weeks after Wimbledon and a couple of weeks before the U.S. Open in Flushing. The NBA will have All-Star teams facing one another just six weeks after what is supposed to be basketball’s crown jewel, the NBA Finals. The Olympics do have some less “elite” athletes participating in the secondary events, and while training and competing to get to the top level is important to all of those who will participate in the 28 different sports, the modern games have evolved into a huge global marketing venture. Companies have invested in the Olympics to reach a worldwide audience to sell their wares. Athletes are aware that winning big in the Olympics could translate into multimillion-dollar global marketing partnerships. It is all about money.

If the Olympic Games were about athletics, then Rogge and company would have kept baseball as an Olympic sport. Baseball will vanish after 2008 along with softball because Major League Baseball will not disrupt its season in either July or August for a two-week sports event, thus keeping elite players out of the Olympics, and that did not sit well with Rogge or IOC members. There will never be a repeat of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team Gold Medal performance because now, in the major team sports that also participate in the Olympics — basketball and hockey — the participants are professionals, not college or high school students.

The Olympics have been a worldwide platform for politics. Rogge alluded to that by saying, “It [the torch relay protests] is a crisis, there is no doubt about that. But the IOC has weathered many bigger storms. The history of the Olympic Games is fraught by a lot of challenges. This is a challenge, but you cannot compare to what we had in the past.”

Rogge talked about the 1972 Games, where the terrorist Black September group murdered 11 Israeli athletes and coaches and one German police officer inside the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany; as well as the boycotts of the 1976, 1980, and 1984 Games. In 1976, 26 African countries did not participate in the Montreal Games because the IOC would not ban New Zealand from the competition. New Zealand’s rugby team toured South Africa, whose government had an apartheid policy in place and played against teams there. In 1980, President Carter ordered the United States Olympic Committee to boycott the 1980 Moscow Summer Games, because the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Sixty-two countries did not send athletes to the 1980 Games. The Soviets, in retaliation of the American 1980 boycott, did not attend the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Soviet Union satellites, East Germany, Cuba, and 14 other countries stopped their athletes from attending the Los Angeles event. (Oddly enough, Los Angeles was a watershed moment for the modern Olympics and turned the Olympics into a corporate convention, as sponsorships were sold for the first time. The Los Angeles Games had licensed 43 companies to sell “official” Olympic products.)

However, Rogge did not bring up the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which was used by Adolf Hitler for propaganda purposes; or the 1968 Mexico City “Black Power” salute on the podium by sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith. Carlos and Smith raised their black-gloved fists at the medal award ceremony and wore black socks and no shoes on the podium to represent black poverty in America. It was the first time that Olympic athletes made a political statement. That did not sit very well with the then-president of the IOC, Avery Brundage, who ordered Smith and Carlos suspended from the American team and banned them from the Olympic Village.

Brundage also rejected calls for a boycott of the 1936 Berlin Games because of Jewish persecution at the hands of the Nazis, and was still insisting in the 1970s that “the 1936 Berlin Games were the finest in modern history.” In 1972, he suspended the Munich Games for a day following the murders of the Israeli athletes, and then at a memorial service said, “the Games must go on.”

In keeping with the spirit of Brundage, the British Olympic Association is requiring that British Olympic team members sign an agreement, stating that they “are not to comment on any politically sensitive issues.”

If there is an Olympic “crisis,” it may be because Olympic partners are feeling the heat of the torch relay protests, and the partners may be worried about losing customers. Rogge knows that last week’s protests were not good for business and may cause some companies to pause and think about their commitments to Beijing — although many of the IOC corporate partners have a lot of time and money invested in China. GE is running commercials on American television revolving around inexpensive X-ray machines it developed for China. Coke put out a statement saying that the company “expresses deep concern for the situation on the ground in Tibet,” and “that the Olympics are a force for good.”

The Olympics are more about selling goods to a worldwide audience than athletic performances. Michael Phelps won six gold medals in swimming at the 2004 Athens Olympics. The story line, though, wasn’t about Phelps’s accomplishments, but how many endorsements he could rack up. That is what the Olympics have become. Money, endorsements, and a consumer backlash may be the real Olympic crisis for Rogge, Immelt, and all the others involved with the Beijing Olympics.

evanjweiner@yahoo.com