For Korea Inc, scandals make Games awkward
WHEREVER they are held, the Olympics are a chance for bigname local sponsors to show home-country pride, associate their brands with athletic values and splash their logos before millions of eyeballs.
This month in South Korea is set to be different.
The country is hosting its first Winter Games amid a national reckoning about big business, politics and the tentacles of influence that link them. Calls for a cleanup intensified this week after the heir apparent at Samsung, a top-tier Olympic sponsor, was freed from prison by a court ruling that reduced and suspended his sentence for bribery.
The Pyeongchang Games themselves stand as a symbol of the cosy ties between South Korea’s government and Samsung, its most powerful conglomerate.
The company’s chairman, Lee Kun-hee, is a longtime member of the International Olympic Committee and lobbied for years behind the scenes to bring the Winter Games to South Korea. The government saw Lee as so pivotal to its Olympic dreams that after he was convicted of tax evasion in 2008, the country’s president then pardoned him expressly so he could resume lobbying for Pyeongchang.
Companies and commerce have long been part of the Olympics, of course. Critics of the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta derided them as the “Coca-Cola Olympics” for the marketing blowout undertaken by that local benefactor.
But in South Korea, the recent atmosphere of scandal has made it an especially awkward time for the country’s leading corporate names to be plastering Olympic venues with logos and showering athletes with freebies. The corruption allegations that ensnared Lee’s son and heir – and that last year felled Park Geun-hye, then South Korea’s president – involved bribery via sports sponsorships.
The Pyeongchang Organizing Committee finished raising the $875 million in sponsorship money it needed only after President Moon Jae-in called on government companies, including the state electric utility, to pitch in.
“The political issues have not directly affected the planning or preparations of the Games, but they were certainly a distraction for local engagement,” a spokeswoman for the Pyeongchang committee said by email.