ABSTRACT
Corporate sponsorship of sporting events is not new. These alliances go back more than 100 years, with the first advertisements appearing in the official program of the 1896 Olympics. Yet, the real growth and pervasiveness of sports sponsorship, with its overabundance of commercial sponsors, peaked in 1984 at the summer Olympics in Los Angeles (Stotlar, 1993). Since then, there appears to be no turning back. It is estimated that companies such as AT&T, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch, Visa, and Reebok shelled out between $40 and 60million each in cash and services forworldwide rights to align their names with and achieve worldwide exposure at the 2002Winter Games in Salt LakeCity, Utah and the 2004 SummerGames inAthens, Greece (Sandomir, 2002).
