• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, May 11, 2007

In Europe, sports marketers have a way to get TV exposure for a tenth of the cost of buying traditional TV time.

What is this great deal? It’s product placement in professional road cycling.

For around $7 million to $10 million, sports marketers can get attached to a mid-level pro team, which puts their corporate names on biking jerseys, bringing exposure in front of rabid TV viewers who watch scores of hours of live and taped European races from February through October.

In recent months, it might cost sponsors even less than that -- but not for the best of reasons. 

Drug and blood doping issues have returned with a vengeance to the sport, starting back before last year’s Tour de France, when about a dozen or so of the best cyclists were implicated in a Spanish investigation for alleged blood doping called Operation Puerto. As a result, these athletes were banned from the world’s biggest cycling event.

Then to make matters worst, the eventual winner of last year’s Tour de France race, American Floyd Landis, tested positive for testosterone, a result he is appealing because of what he says are sloppy and bad practices at a French lab who did the testing.

Partly as a result of these controversies, some cycling sponsors have abandoned the sport. Landis’ team, named after the Swiss-based Phonak, a hearing aid company, disbanded last year as a consequence of his positive test.

This year two U.S. races -- the Tour de Georgia and the new U.S. Open cycling race in Virginia -- struggled up to the last minute to find sponsors. Other longtime European races have struggled as well to find marketers or have been outright cancelled, such as the Championship of Zurich.

Sponsors are finding that it’s hard to be associated with a sport that seems to have drug issues continually popping up in the news.

One wonders why this doesn’t affect American sports, such as with the NFL, Major League Baseball, and the NBA. Do American athletes hide their drug activities better?  Maybe it’s because most of these athletes aren’t doing performance-enhancing drugs -- just using them recreationally. Or, perhaps, there are not as many doing drugs? Former baseball player Jose Canseco says otherwise.

The poster boy for much alleged drug activity is baseball player Barry Bonds, who allegedly has used steroids. One wonders how marketers will treat him and his San Francisco Giants, as he nears the record on one of the most hallowed of all baseball stats, career home runs.
Perhaps sports sponsors can be aloof in this country. Company names don’t appear boldly on athletes’ uniforms. Instead, they can do some hiding, of a sort, in those commercial breaks, and elsewhere.

Of course, marketers might say U.S. sports don’t have any large-scale ongoing investigations that involve many athletes -- and few, if any, have been charged or admitted drug use.

Should all this change, however, U.S. marketers will run for cover just like those European companies. Either that -- or those TV sports sellers and leagues will be forced to give them a better deal.