BUZZ NEWS

A blow for adidas: Li Ning lights the Olympic torch

Posted on August 14, 2008
Mathieu Picault

Lighting the Olympic torch at the Olympic Games is not only a huge honor – the person who gets to do it will also inevitably become the object of massive media coverage. Over 4 billion people were expected to watch the opening ceremony of this year’s Olympic Games in Beijing.

No wonder the Olympic committee did not disclose the identity of this person and kept the suspense up until the last moment. Not even adidas, the official sponsor of the Games, knew who had actually been chosen. You can guess that adidas’s president Herbert Hainer probably got the shock of his life when the long-awaited moment in the opening ceremony had finally come: the torch was lit by no other than Li Ning, China’s most famous gymnast and the winner of 6 Olympic medals – as well as the creator and president of the most popular Chinese shoe company, Li Ning Company Limited!

Adidas invested 80 million Euros to become the main sponsor of this global event, expected to generate massive revenues in China, a country of 1.3 billion potential customers. But for Li Ning there could be no better advertisement than to be seen on screen at the most important moment of the ceremony – without paying a single Yuan… if you watched the ceremony then it is safe to say that you probably witnessed the biggest coup of ambush marketing in the history of television.

Surely there were good reasons to opt for Li Ning – he has won 3 Olympic gold medals. Highlighting his achievement would only be logical and in tune with Chinese national pride. However, if you think about it, the choice of an adidas competitor might be seen as a violation of the brand’s exclusive sponsorship contract. Even if he was wearing adidas clothing at that moment.

To conclude, let’s not forget that although Li Ning is a private company based in Hong Kong, many of its shareholders are connected to the Chinese state. Who said that the secret was only kept to surprise the audience?