Olympic Games Ethics

1000 Words4 Pages
The Olympic Games Sponsorships During a time with worldwide health problems and an American population where more than 1/3 are categorized as obese and an estimated annual medical cost of $147 billions caused by obesity and 6/10 in UK are overweight or obese, is it not unethical that the Olympic Games main sponsors are McDonalds and Coca Cola? The question is especially relevant since IOC recently extended their contract with McDonald’s and Coca Cola until 2020 despite health campaigners who are urging the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to ban junk food and fizzy drink brands from future sporting sponsorship deals and other efforts to stop the sponsoring. The Olympic Games are the leading international sporting event with more than 200 nations partaking and in the winter and summer games which each happens every 4-year with sport idols like Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Roger Federer and many more. With the latest 4-year revenue of up to £5.12billion and a £528 million surplus shouldn’t it be possible to find sponsors who doesn’t advertise unhealthy food and beverages? Even some of the athletes grasp the opportunity to work with McDonald’s. After winning 2 gold medals at the Olympic Games in Beijing Rebecca Adlington was interviewed by The Independent and said: “I’m going to go to McDonald’s, after all this hard work, and watching what I eat, I just fancy a burger and some chips.” Research shows that children see fast food as less unhealthy if associated with sports and doctors agree that the sponsorship is wrong and could worsen the obesity epidemic as people will begin to link the fast food with fit healthy athletes. When the public is asked if you think the sponsors should be healthier on an online survey only one-in-five agreed though that it was appropriate for these brands to be allowed to be 2012 Olympic sponsors and sixty per cent agreed that the
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