• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, August 17, 2007

General Motors Corp. has yanked the $100 million-plus it spends every two years to sponsor the U.S. Olympic Committee and NBC's coverage of the games. One wonders if the savings will be rerouted to union pension obligations, or perhaps into something truly radical, like designing and building cars that Americans want to buy more than the imports. Most will wonder if this means the Olympics is losing some of its appeal as a big-event marketing vehicle. I see it as a safety issue.

One of the most fun aspects of being a major sponsor of the Olympics is that you get to write off inviting all your business partners and cronies to hang out in an exotic city, sit in reserved seats for all the best events, and chow down in a nearby tent while smirking at the Average Guy who had to take a shuttle bus from a parking lot 27 kilometers away, stand in a security line that moves slower that the NYC subway in a rainstorm, and pay a year's salary for two 89th-row tickets to a basketball game between Botswana and Liberia.

But if you take your clients to China, there is a fair chance that at least half of them won't survive the trip. The local caterer you hired probably will use tainted pork in the dim sum, so at least five guests will drop over dead at one of the Big Round Tables and 12 more will be hospitalized in critical condition, forced to watch the blood-doped 100-meter finals on state-sponsored-healthcare pay-per-view.

By now the Bird's Nest is lathered in numerous layers of lead-based paint--so that all of your guests who sit directly on the seats will, in six or eight months, begin to drool and get failing grades in spelling and finger-painting. Your corporate lawyers will argue that their conditions were congenital, but will settle out of court when the blood tests are admitted as evidence. The settlement will wipe out all incentive bonuses, the entire fleet of private jets, and departmental Christmas parties for the next three decades.

Guests wise enough to use seat cushions (so they can plant their sweaty butts on your corporate logo) will ingest PCPs from the drinking straws they use to avoid having to put their lips on Chinese-made plastic beer cups. Those who don't die in the next nine months will qualify for Super Fund clean-up. Their spouses and siblings will worry that their proximity in the same house will hurt their own market values and will force your client to live in the pool house (or outhouse, depending on their DMA).

Inspired by the athleticism of the games, a number of guests will participate in an early morning fun run that starts and ends at the entrance of the host hotel. They will later develop TB, pleurisy, emphysema and/or a terminal case of asthma. In fact, anyone who stays the entire three weeks and doesn't breathe only from 150-lb. scuba tanks strapped to their back will suffer similar fates.

The children of your clients will begin to die from hard-to-diagnose maladies at a rate in direct proportion to how soon they started to chew on the Olympic souvenirs their parents brought home. In some cases, counterfeit prescription medicines from China (or any number of off-the-shelf consumer products like, say, toothpaste) will accelerate their conditions.

It will be of no consolation that a handful of Chinese industrialists either jump or are hurled by the state over the 607-foot pinnacle of the Three Gorges Dam. But, who knows--maybe you'll bump into Michael Johnson in the hotel lobby.

The story you have just read is an attempt to blend fact and fiction in a manner that provokes thought, and on a good day, merriment. It would be ill-advised to take any of it literally. Take it, rather, with the same humor with which it is intended. Cut and paste or link to it at your own peril.