While the 10 top sponsors of the Olympics invested heavily in Sochi’s success — and in their multi-year partnership with the International Olympic Committee — they have remained largely silent on LGBT and other human rights concerns in Russia.
BuzzFeed/John Gara
WASHINGTON — With the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Sochi just days away, the top Olympic sponsors have largely stayed on the sidelines of the disputes over Russia's anti-LGBT laws and other human rights issues.
The sponsors have nearly universally backed the International Olympic Committee, whose president, Thomas Bach, this week accused politicians not attending the games of using the Sochi games to make a political statement "on the backs of the athletes."
The IOC's sponsorship program — called The Olympic Partners, or TOP — likely is part of the reason the sponsors all have backed the IOC, as the program "operates on a four-year term – the Olympic quadrennium," which means the sponsors also will be working with the IOC for the larger, upcoming Rio Summer Olympics in 2016.
The Sochi and Rio games are big business for the 10 TOP sponsors — in terms of brand recognition, marketing rights, and sales connected with the Olympics — and some sponsors, including Coca-Cola and Omega, already are contracted with the IOC through the 2020 games.
As Visa announced plainly on its site, "Sponsoring the Olympic Games makes good business sense for Visa and our clients."
The other seven TOP sponsors are: Atos, Dow, GE, McDonald's, Panasonic, Procter & Gamble, and Samsung.
When BuzzFeed sought information from the TOP sponsors in August 2013 about their view of Russia's then-new anti-LGBT propaganda law, several provided BuzzFeed with identical language backing the IOC's position that it has received assurances from the Russian government that the games will not be affected by the law. Notably, a GE spokeswoman was an exception, going further than the others and telling BuzzFeed, "We expect the IOC to uphold human rights in every aspect of the Games."
Two weeks after BuzzFeed published its story, the Human Rights Campaign sent a letter to the TOP sponsors, asking them to speak out against Russia's new law and asking them to ask the IOC to take action as well. Nothing happened.
After that first story, the TOP sponsors, generally, have either not responded to BuzzFeed's requests or not responded with any substantively different statements.
This past Friday, HRC was joined by Human Rights Watch, All Out, and 37 other groups in a letter sent to all the TOP sponsors seeking action. They asked the companies' CEOs to "use your voice to insist on changes that will make a difference in the future." The letter asks the companies to "condemn Russia's anti-LGBT law," use their advertising during the Olympics "to promote equality during the weeks leading up to and during the Games themselves," "ask the IOC to create a body to monitor serious Olympics-related human rights abuses in host countries as they occur," and asks the IOC to ensure that future host countries "honor their commitments to upholding the Olympic Charter, including Principle 6 which forbids discrimination of any kind."
The 40 groups — which included U.S., Russian, and global groups — concluded, "Discrimination has no place in the Olympics, and LGBT people must not be targeted with violence or deprived of their ability to advocate for their own equality. We cannot be silent on how Russia's anti-LGBT law violates this very standard to which we aspire. As all eyes turn toward Sochi, we ask you to stand with us."
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