Coca-Cola is a significant sponsor of the Olympics.
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Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Photos
When Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo slid two bottles of Coca-Cola off digicam and raised a bottle of water to toast his tons of of hundreds of thousands of social media followers throughout a information convention in 2021, he prompted a $4 billion drop within the soda large’s market worth.
“Such is the facility of sport,” write public well being advocates Trish Cotter and Sandra Mullin in an editorial printed this week within the BMJ International Well being. They urge the Worldwide Olympic Committee to chop its monetary ties to Coca-Cola and cease utilizing its energy to push sugary drinks which can be linked to rising world charges of weight problems, diabetes, coronary heart illness and hypertension.
“Within the curiosity of well being for all, selling unhealthy sugary drinks clearly has no place in sport,” write Cotter and Mullin, who work for Very important Methods, a nonprofit world well being group. “Regardless of the proof of well being hurt and the contradiction to the IOC’s mission to champion athletes’ well being, Coca-Cola stays a top-tier sponsor of the Olympic Video games.”
In 2023, Coca-Cola had extra energetic sponsorship agreements than every other model, together with a multi-billion-dollar cope with the IOC, the editorial says.
The deal offers the soda maker “entry to unparalleled advertising alternatives,” its pink emblem emblazoned on the partitions of stadiums and broadcast throughout the globe. It permits Coca-Cola to “benefit from youngsters by beaming messages into their digital worlds that exploit their emotional vulnerabilities,” the editorial says.
Certainly, this 12 months’s summer time Olympics have reached unprecedented audiences on broadcast and on-line, NBC experiences. On-line viewing exceeded 17 billion minutes of streaming video, greater than all earlier Olympics mixed.
The commentary echoes a “Kick Massive Soda Out of Sport” marketing campaign launched the week earlier than the 2024 Olympics opened in Paris and supported by 80 public well being and sustainability teams around the globe, from Mexico’s Nationwide Institute of Well being to Australia’s Public Well being Affiliation.
A video advert for the marketing campaign opens with a younger man downing a Coke and spitting it out. “Hey Massive Soda,” it begins, “your sports-washing doesn’t wash with us.”
Just like the BMJ editorial, the advert hyperlinks soda to the dual epidemics of weight problems and diabetes, and it criticizes soda firms for depleting water assets and littering oceans with plastic bottles. It fingers the trade for combating legal guidelines geared toward defending well being and claims that soda makers use sports activities “to intentionally goal youngsters.”
The advert concludes: “The sport’s up.”
But the end line is nowhere in sight.
In response to the BMJ commentary, the IOC replied with an announcement to NPR. “The IOC is pleased with its practically century lengthy partnership with The Coca-Cola Firm,” it mentioned. The corporate makes different drinks with much less sugar than Coke, the assertion mentioned, together with sugar-free choices. It goes on to quote Coca-Cola’s Accountable Advertising Coverage,which says the corporate doesn’t instantly market its merchandise to youngsters below 13.
The IOC’s response to the editorial got here as no shock to Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of vitamin, meals research and public well being at New York College.
“An excessive amount of cash is at stake for the IOC to refuse it,” she mentioned in an e-mail.
She known as the Accountable Advertising Coverage “a joke.”
“The coverage itself is predicated on an absurd notion, that youngsters below age 13 don’t watch any Coke-advertised tv packages, sports activities occasions or music occasions during which 70% or extra of viewers are over age 13,” she mentioned.
“After all they do,” she added, “which is why the Olympics sponsorship is so necessary and so efficient.”
The IOC’s continued partnership with Coca-Cola dangers making the Olympics “complicit in intensifying a worldwide epidemic of poor vitamin, environmental degradation, and local weather change,” the BMJ editorial says.
In a current speech, IOC President Thomas Bach promised to guard youngsters from the advertising of unhealthy merchandise, the writers be aware. They name on the IOC to acknowledge that its continued affiliation with Coca-Cola contradicts Bach’s promise and “the foundational values espoused by this iconic sporting occasion.”
Ronnie Cohen is a San Francisco Bay Space journalist targeted on well being and social justice points.
