Olympic Medals and New Beginnings

Once upon a time, winning an Olympic medal was a purely sporting achievement that gave medallists and the nations they represented a great sense of pride. Those things are still hugely relevant, but winning an Olympic medal in the 21st century can also be the key to much more. Winning an Olympic medal has helped the likes of Chris Hoy, Rebecca Adlington and Bradley Wiggins to become household names, and that in turn has enabled them all to land high-profile sponsorship deals and endorsement contracts. Because athletes can focus more effectively on their training when they don’t have to worry too much about cash flow, those business partnerships allow the medallists to train even harder and perform even better in future events, making it possible for many of the athletes concerned to turn what usually starts out as a labour of love into a long term career in its own right.

Right now, there are plenty of fairly unknown athletes who are going through the final stages of preparation for the coming Olympic Games knowing that winning a medal – and ideally a gold medal at that – would not only earn them wider recognition but could also give them a valuable career boost. Whilst some purists might complain that the Olympics have become too commercial in recent decades, there is no doubt that the commercial factor is good news for athletes and for their medal-winning potential in the future.

But it doesn’t stop there. Watching athletes win medals inspires many people – children and teenagers in particular – to take their own sporting interests more seriously. The majority will be content to get involved rather than merely watch proceedings as spectators, and that will obviously bring them a variety of physical, psychological and even social benefits, but a few will go on to become world-beating competitors themselves.

Of course, there is plenty to be said for the notion that merely participating in the Games should be a source of pride, because that is certainly a tremendous achievement. However, I don’t think that any of us should ignore the fact that, in the modern world, winning Olympic medals has a definite long-term effect, not just on the athletes who win them, but also on the millions of people who watch those athletes succeed.

In short, Olympic medals are much more than symbols of personal achievement. They can now be keys to new beginnings, thriving careers and the renewal of national and international sporting interest. Good luck to everyone who will be competing to win one or more of them later this month!

Olympics Facebook Pages Launched

The Olympic Games has launched its own set of Facebook pages, and regular users of the social networking site will be pleased to see that no advertising appears on any of them. That wasn’t entirely Facebook’s decision, you understand – the rules concerning who can and who can’t advertise in association with the Olympics are very tightly regulated – but it is good to see Facebook giving the whole of each page to the subject featured rather than force them to share space with banner advertisements.

The Facebook pages include profile pages for around 200 athletes, including Theo Walcott, Sir Steve Redgrave, Jessica Ennis, Tom Daley and Chris Hoy. There are also pages for 58 Olympic teams and over two dozen Olympic sports. All you have to do to keep abreast of the latest news is ‘Like’ the pages you are most interested in. Updates will then appear in your Facebook news feed in the run-up to the Games and presumably throughout the Games themselves.

Although Facebook is not an official sponsor of the Olympic Games, and will not be permitted to place banner advertisements on Olympic pages, it will of course benefit from hosting those pages. That’s because you will need to have an account with Facebook to view the pages and receive updates from them. Many readers of this blog will already have a Facebook account, but many others will sign up for one from scratch purely for access to the Olympic Games pages. My bet is that Facebook expects a high percentage of those new sign-ups to remain with the social network when the Games are over, and I don’t think such an expectation would be unfounded.

It is highly doubtful that the athletes will be posting all of their own status updates personally (they do, after all, have medals to try and win) but it is certainly good to see the Olympic organisers making full use of social media in this way. People will be using smartphones and mobile internet devices just as much as traditional methods to keep up with the Olympic action this year, so having dedicated information sources specifically geared to those kinds of consumer device will be very useful.