What will people be wearing for Halloween? To be honest, sports is not the greatest well from which ideas spew. But here are a few ideas, which are clearly influenced by pop culture in America.
Be a Gymnast: Little girls all over America will dress up as The Final Five, no doubt. Just don’t try to buy an original Final Five leotard. The leotards, with their glittering Swarvorski crystals, cost anywhere from USD700 to 1,200 to make each one. My guess it’s easy to find replicas for cheaper. One of the more popular people to honor with a Halloween costume was Fierce Five gold-medal champion, McKayla Maroney, whose look of disappointment on the medal stand turned into a internet meme. Three years ago, a woman with Bell’s Palsy dressed up like Maroney because “It was the first time in months I got to look like I was intentionally making a face and it has helped me deal with the slow recovery a little better.”
Be Original: Paralympian Josh Sundquist, who lost his left leg due to cancer, has competed in the Paralympics as an alpine skiier, and is a popular motivational speaker. He is also known for his one-of-a-kind costumes for Halloween. See him put together his outfit as “Lumiere” a character (essentially a talking candle stick) from the film, Beauty and the Beast.
Be a Kid and Have No Choice: Shaun White is a two-time Winter Olympics gold medalist in the halfpipe, but when he was a kid, his parents put him in prison for Halloween – old-school lock up style that is. Here he is, with his two older siblings, in a TBT Halloween picture from three years ago.
For those of us in Japan, now thinking of how we are going to get ready for Tokyo 2020, the handover ceremony from Rio to Tokyo still resonates.
For eight minutes at the end of the Rio Olympics, Japan was given the spotlight. And the light shone brightly on Japan’s technology, fashion, arts, children and of course, Tokyo. They even made the solemn national anthem somewhat modern and uplifting with the stunning focus on the hi-no-maru, the red circle on white that symbolically represents the country.
Tokyo2020 recently shared a video of this ceremony’s production, which is fascinating. These are the kinds of intense, complex projects that I would absolutely love to be a part of.
Global marketing and advertising powerhouse, Dentsu, was hired to create the closing handover ceremonies for Tokyo2020 for both the Rio Olympics and Rio Paralympics. Dentsu was paid JPY1.2 billion (USD12 million) to produce these segments, and of the big decisions they made was to include globally reknown cartoon characters: Doraemon and Super Mario.
Clearly, the transformation of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe into Super Mario and back again was the highlight of the handover ceremony. And interestingly, Nintendo is reported to have paid nothing to have one of its characters be front and center.
Four more years to go. So much to do, so little time.
The 1960s was a period of intense competition between Puma and adidas, fueled by the sibling rivalry of the two brothers who ran the respective companies, Rudolph Dassler and Adolph (Adi) Dassler. The more images of champion athletes wearing their shoes appeared in the media, the more revenue poured in. And the easiest way to get superstar athletes to wear their shoes were cash payments of thousands of dollars.
At the 1960 Rome Olympics, Armin Hary of Germany set the Olympic record in the 100 meters in Pumas, after having worn adidas in previous heats. On the podium, Hary switched back to Adidas.
Bob Beamon shocked himself and the world when he lept 8.90 meters (29 ft 2.5 in) at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games. That was 55 cm (nearly 22 inches) better than the previous world record.
My assumption today is that high performance athletes are particularly fussy about their foot gear. According to the book Golden Kicks: The Shoes that Changed Sport, by Jason Coles, Beamon had always trained and competed in adidas shoes. But Mexico City during the Olympics was a fierce battle ground between Puma and Adidas.
Track groupie, Art Simburg, buddies to the Speed City sprinters of San Jose State College, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, was also a sweet-talking marketer for Puma. Simburg was able to “convince” many athletes to switch to Pumas in Mexico City, including Beamon.
So when Beamon made the long jump finals, prior to that massive jump, he did so in Pumas.
But in a switch that was becoming less and less uncommon, Beamon slipped on a pair of adidas shoes, and launched himself into the history books with a record leap that stood for 23 years. And the shoes that shine in all of those pictures of Beamon’s gigantic jump – the one with the three red stripes of adidas.
At the end of a wonderfully long interview in early 2015, the 1964 gold medalist of the 5,000 meter track competition mentioned it would be nice if Olympians who participated in the 1964 Tokyo Games could return to the Tokyo for the 2020 Games. He wasn’t suggesting that the government or anyone pay for their expenses. He was just wondering, wouldn’t it be nice if they could get assistance in finding accommodations or meals, for example.
That would be nice.
But it would be nicer, frankly, incredibly inspiring actually, to find a way to bring ALL 1964 Tokyo Olympians back in 2020. I have interviewed over 70 Olympians from the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics. I would estimate well over 90% of them, without prompting, described their time in Japan and at the Olympics as a wonderful and special experience. Many have said they would love to come back to Japan for a visit, particularly in 2020.
Imagine the stories that these Olympians would tell about 1964, about their memories of Japanese graciousness, resiliency, efficiency, and pride. There is little doubt that bringing the 1964 Olympians would result in a mutual lovefest. There could be opportunities for fundraisers dedicated to the 1964 Olympians, educational opportunities for Olympians to share their memories at schools or museums. And it would be another opportunity for embassies and chambers of commerce to embrace their heroes from 1964, reliving their stories, and reinforcing cultural impressions.
How many Olympians would that be? Allow me to make assumptions (and use admittedly somewhat cold and clinical language about life expectancy).
According to this article in The Daily Mail, British athletes were offered free admission to certain events at the 2012 London Olympics. It was estimated that around 125 Olympians were eligible (ie: still alive). Since there were 404 Brits representing their nation at the 1948 Games, one could say that 31% of that group of Olympians were alive in 2012.
But the gap between the 1964 Olympics and the 2020 Olympics is smaller – 56 years to be exact. In other words, assuming an average Olympian age of 25, most 1964 Olympians would be in their mid-70s to mid-80s. Because of that, we could assume that more than 31% of all 1964 Tokyo Olympians could be healthy and ambulatory and interested in coming to Japan in 2020. For the sake of generating an estimate, let’s say 40%. That would mean, of the 5,151 worldwide Olympians who participated in the 1964 Games, a little over 2,000 Olympians could be here in Japan in 2020!
But alas, this is still only a dream. If London organizing committee’s offer were expanded to all 4,100 Olympians from 1948, it’s possible they would have had to extend their offer to over 1,200 Olympians. I am not aware of such a program to bring all the 1948 Olympians back to the 2012 Games, but I imagine the organizing committee considered it, and I’m sure they knew the challenges. How do you contact all those Olympians? How would you finance it? At a time of peak capacity for the city, how do you accommodate so many people who deserve respectful attention and may have special needs due to their age?
Mitsui Fudosan won the rights to be the Japan Olympic Committee’s exclusive real estate Tokyo 2020 Gold Partner. That shuts out companies like Mitsubishi Jisho (Mitsubishi Estate, in English) from marketing themselves using the Tokyo 2020 logos, or even the word, Olympics, and of course, the five-ring Olympic logo.
But there are ways companies get around the strict licensing rights dictated by the IOC. They market themselves by association.
From August 4 to 22, Mitsubishi Jisho sponsored Sports Fes Marunouchi, essentially in the middle of the Ginza, Tokyo’s established business, entertainment, shopping district, very near the famed red-bricked Tokyo Station. The Sports Fes featured over two weeks of athletic displays, Olympian appearances, and interactive sporting activities, all on the most expensive streets in Japan.
On the Sunday afternoon I went, I saw people watching the Rio Olympics on the big screen, as well as adults and kids testing to see how high they can jump, how low they can extend their arms, how fast they can throw a basketball. And I got to see London Olympian and fencing silver medalist, Kenta Chida, in a display of fencing so close, I could have jumped into the match from my front-row seat.
Except on the large-screen TV where NHK was broadcasting the 2016 Rio Olympics, you didn’t see the word Olympics, or the Tokyo 2020 logo, or the five-ring Olympic logo anywhere. Mitsubishi Jisho is not an official sponsor, and is forbidden from doing so. But it’s clear to everyone why Mitsubishi Jisho is sponsoring the Sports Fes Marounouchi. By holding this event during the Rio Olympics, and inviting former Japanese Olympians to talk about their experiences and display their skills, this Japanese real estate firm is basking in the golden glow of the Olympics, so hard to contain behind the curtains of IOC contracts and rules.
Men’s individual foil silver medalist at the 2012 London Olympics, Kenta Chida.
Does this rankle the official real estate sponsor of Tokyo 2020, Mitsui Fudosan? Most likely, yes. But these are the Olympics, a premier symbol of competition. And the competition doesn’t end with the athletes. Companies in Japan will be battling for our mindshare in the coming years. And if necessity is the mother of invention, then I look forward to the creative ways non-sponsors guerilla market themselves, as we embark on the road to Tokyo 2020
Watch the video below for an up-close display of foil fighting. En garde!
It was August 6 and I had just watched the opening ceremonies of the Rio Olympics, which was being broadcast live in Japan that lazy Saturday morning. Quite coincidentally, my wife and I reserved a Brazilian barbecue place in Roppongi for dinner that evening.
Roppongi is a hive of activity, a center of commerce, entertainment and shopping that bustles 7 days a week. In our stroll through Roppongi that day, I came upon two examples of how official Olympic sponsors have begun marketing the Olympics, not only as a lead in to the Rio Olympics, but also as a proud reminder that Tokyo will be the host of the XXXIII Olympiad in 2020.
Coca Cola is one of 12 worldwide Olympic sponsors, part of the so-called TOP program – TOP standing for “The Olympic Partner”. Like other TOP sponsors, Coca Cola has exclusive rights in the food and beverages industry to use the word Olympics and the five-ring symbol of the Games in its global marketing and advertisements, among other exclusive rights.
And in the popular Roppongi Hills square was a Coca Cola booth, with kids and adults lining up to get in. Inside the booth was a large screen displaying a swimming competition computer game. A pair of contestants would line up in front of the screen, get a motion-sensing band attached to their wrist, and then furiously roll their arms as their watched their avatar on the screen race to the finish. At the end, they were awarded a medal with a bottle of Coca Cola attached.
After dinner, we walked to my old work haunt – Midtown Tower. This popular office complex was built by Mitsui Fudosan, a major real estate developer in Japan. Mitsui Fudosan is not a TOP partner, but is instead a Tokyo 2020 Gold Partner. In the Olympic hierarchy of sponsors, the IOC allows the local national Olympic committee to select local sponsors that have exclusive rights in Japan to market and advertise using the word “Olympics” and related logos.
Mitsui Fudosan used the open area in front of Midtown Tower artfully. Dotted throughout the square were sculptures of figures in athletic pose, gleaming white and geometrically fashioned. A female basketball player and a wheelchair tennis player greet us at the entrance. A sprinter climbs the glass cover of the escalator leading down to the underground shopping areas. Synchronized swimmers rise from a shallow pool of water, a paralympic runner strides, and a pair of judoka negotiate a fall.
Mitsui Fudosan wants you to “Be the Change”. In a missive at the display area, the JOC Olympic sponsor states that like athletes, whose daily efforts and countless beads of sweat and tears, have shaped them into Olympians with unique and wonderful stories, Tokyo is also being shaped on a daily basis, building by building, each with their own stories. The last line of the missive states, “Next, it’s Tokyo’s turn. The Olympics will be on our stage. What fantastic stories will be told?”
Why do we love the Olympics? Why will the Rio Olympics succeed despite the political, environmental, security and health issues hanging over the Games like a black cloud on the verge of bursting?
Because we love what The Olympics make us feel, what the five colored rings represent: hope, dreams and inspiration, friendship and fair play, and the joy we have in making an effort.
After the 1996 Olympics Games in Atlanta, considered one of those most commercially blatant Olympics in the modern age, and the bid-rigging scandals of the Salt Lake City Games, the International Olympic Committee believed they had to reassert and protect the brand by reminding the world what the true value of the Olympics were. Thus was born the Celebrate Humanity campaign.
Enrolling TBWA, Chiat Day and their legendary worldwide creative director, Lee Clow, the man who developed the commercial that launched the Macintosh (“Think Different”), the IOC launched a series of public service announcements on television that dominated the airwaves leading up to the 2000 Sydney Games.
With the unmistakable voice of Robin Williams bringing both joy, tenderness and strength to the images, the Celebrate Humanity ads were everywhere – on your TV, radio, on your in-flight screen, in your magazines. Incredibly, broadcasters were even asking the IOC how much they had to pay to air the spots, according to Michael Payne, who tells this story of the Olympic brand in his book, Olympic Turnaround.
The campaign included seven short films that represent the Olympic values, symbolizing them, for example, in the 400-meter sprinter, Derek Redmond of Great Britain who pulled a hamstring during the competition at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, but gamely limped onto the finish line, or the Nigerian women’s 4×100-meter relay team who celebrate their bronze medal effort after first thinking they had finished fourth.
Watch them and be inspired.
Courage
Strength is measured in pounds. Speed is measured in seconds. Courage… You can’t measure courage.
Bronze
Just a reminder: At the Olympic Games, you don’t have to come in first to win.
Smile
When you smile, I smile, that’s the deal. I’ll not walk past you, and not look you in the eyes, and not acknowledge you. Instead we’ll pass each other and say hello. Not with our words–they’re not the same–but with our faces. I meet you and see there is good in your eyes. There’s passion in your heart and there’s a friendly hello in your smile, and for the first time we can relate and appreciate each other. That’s all it takes. That’s where it starts. Because I know that you will smile and I will smile. And all the rest is easy.
Adversary
You are my adversary, but you are not my enemy. For your resistance gives me strength, your will gives me courage, your spirit ennobles me. And though I aim to defeat you, should I succeed, I will not humiliate you. Instead, I will honor you. For without you, I am a lesser man.
As Olympians finalize their preparations for the 2016 Rio Olympics, parents of Olympians too are gearing up for the emotional roller coaster. At times, mothers can have an outsized impact on the development of their children – think Duke Ellington, Richard Nixon or Norman Bates.
In homage to one of their biggest customer segments, global fast-moving consumer goods company, P&G, has continued its “Thank You Mom” campaign, launching one of its most talked-about commercials two months ago. Hollywood director, Jeff Nichols, was hired to create its flagship commercial as a run-up to the Games. And while he took an uncharacteristically dark turn in theme, the commercial proved to be a viral hit.
The 2-minute commercial, Strong, tells the stories of athletes whose mothers protected them, sheltered them, comforted them during difficult or even dangerous times: a tornado, a car crash, air turbulence, bullying.
Yes, there are violins that help pull at your heartstrings.
The Belgian has the lead, 30 meters on the Ethiopian struggling to stay in the race. With only a lap to go, we are clearly on the brink of….wait…my goodness! Two people have wandered onto the track, a girl and a boy…what are they doing on the track? They’re just walking, staring at their phones…and here come the leaders waving their arms, shouting. LePlante and Kidane veer to the right and pass them…they’re just standing there! Now the rest of the pack is shouting at them as they past the boy and the girl n their right and left…. OK, finally an official has come to escort them off the track. We saw this happen two days ago, when a teenage boy from Canada walked onto the mat during the semi-finals of the bantamweight wrestling competition. Could this be, yet again, another Pokémon Go attack?
On July 13, the Mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Paes, wrote on his Facebook page on July 13 that he welcomes Nintendo to roll out the gaming phenomenon, Pokémon Go. “The whole world is coming here. Come too!”
With everything going wrong in Brazil, the mayor knows that Pokémon Go is right now the hottest item in pop culture, so just talking about it is easy publicity for the upcoming Rio Olympics. Launched to phenomenal fanfare in Japan, the game starring such characters as Pikachu, Squirtle and Fennekin, Pokémon Go is scheduled for launches in Asia. Unfortunately, with scant few weeks left, it does not appear that Pokémon Go will be making it to Brazil any time soon.
I guess they’ll just have to settle for the Olympics.
Swiss manufacturer Belrlinger’s urine sample bottle explained by the NY Times.
I have enough trouble taking the cap off those child-proof bottles for pain medicine. I’m sure it’s not easy to open up one of Berlinger’s urine sample bottles.
The design of this bottle is based on 20-years of experience of designing and manufacturing security bottles according to Berlinger & Co AG, and that the Swiss company “welcomes all endeavours to further investigate these allegations.”
The allegations are that the lab in Russia in charge of testing urine samples of high-performance athletes had figured out a way to open up sealed urine sample bottles in order to switch out tainted urine with clean urine. The New York Times has covered the state-sponsored doping scandal in Russia extensively, and a recent article provided details of how athletes beat the urine tests.
Today, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) released its report on the allegations of Russia’s doping and cover-up of doping, not just of track and field athletes, but all high performance athletes. As a result, the recommendation for a Rio Olympics ban on Olympians from Russia have expanded to all athletes.
As many now know, the head of the drug-testing lab for athletes in Russia was a man named Dr Grigory Rodchenkov, and he described in detail how tainted urine samples were passed through a small round hole in the wall of the testing facility, to be returned with clean urine samples. Before the bottles were returned, however, someone had to figure out how to re-open the supposedly tamper-proof bottles without any obvious evidence of tampering.
The now famous Russian hole in the wall.
The bottle, which is part of Berlinger’s “BEREG-KIT”, was designed to be opened only one way once sealed – by breaking the cap into two parts with the use of a special tool in the kit. Somehow, Russians involved in the conspiracy to cover up drug usage figured out how to open the bottles up without breaking the cap. Here’s how the Times explained the process:
In Room 124, Dr. Rodchenkov received the sealed bottles through the hold and handed them to a man who he believed was a Russian intelligence officer. The man took the bottles to a building nearby. Within a few hours, the bottles were returned with the caps loose and unbroken. Dr. Rodchenkov’s team emptied and cleaned the bottles with filter paper and filled them with untainted urine collected from the athletes months before the Olympics.
This made me wonder – what are the ways in which urine tests can be compromised. I thought I would uncover stories only about athletes, but in the United States in particular, needing to cheat on drug tests is far more common than I had thought. I’ve lived in the US for only three adult years, so I was surprised at the level of drug testing that takes place in schools, hospitals and places of employment, very often as a part of the pre-employment screening process.
With a relatively high number of recreational drug users in America comes a need to cover up drug remnants in the system. According to this website, there are three basic ways to “fool” a urine drug test:
Diluting a urine sample with water,
Substituting your urine, or
Adulterating a sample.
Apparently, tampering in the first and third ways are easily detected by lab technicians, but “substitution”, assuming you are not being observed up close when peeing into a cup, is the best way to beat the test. Not only that, the tools to beat the urine tests are available online. I had no idea.
A quick search took me to this product called “U Pass Synthetic Urine” for only $11.74. U Pass comes with a bottle of “100% Toxin Free Synthetic Urine” and two heat pads that can be used to warm the sample just before the test. (After all, you can’t hand a sample of urine to a security person that doesn’t feel somewhat warm.)
According to the website, THC Clean, subtitled “The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for THC Detox & Passing Your Drug Test”, U Pass works and doesn’t work, and that “… you need good quality synthetic urine in order to not get caught.”
But perhaps the most important advice provided in the THC Clean site is that drug tests and drug-cheating techniques are changing all the time: “When reading synthetic urine reviews online and other people’s experience with synthetic urine, on forums and such, it’s important to look at the date. Drug testing evolves constantly, which means the same brands and methods may or may not still be effective. If older than a year, you may want to look for something more recent.”
Drug testing is a cat-and-mouse game, but one in which the mice are sponsored by well financed and highly motivated players, relative to the cats, who always seem to be two steps behind.
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