USOC and impact on USFSA

[Spider68]

Just curious what the more "experienced" out there think will be the impact of the current shambles of the USOC, the threat that the US government will step in and take charge, potential pull-out of key sponsors will have on figure skating and the USFSA. I am under the impression that the USFSA is pretty solid and the impact should be minimal.

[Emilieanne]

8-) If any of the sponsors are smart, from this point forward all of them will include ethics clauses in their contracts with anything they sponsor the way John Hancock Financial Services did with the USOC. I applaud John Hancock Financial Services for having the courage to exercise their right to withdraw their sponsorship because the USOC was "misbehaving." They stood up for ethics, which enhanced their image...and they saved the company a bundle of money. There is not a reason in the world why any of the sponsors of the USFSA, the ISU or the IOC cannot do what John Hancock Financial Services did! Not only that, the USOC got hauled in front of Congress and told to get their mess straightened out or Congress would straighten it out for them!

That brings me to some interesting facts. It is my understanding that the TV broadcasting contracts are coming due with the ISU in the near future (within a year, I believe). Those TV contracts are worth millions of dollars and are well over half the income for the ISU! Could you imagine if the TV broadcasters (ABC, ESPN, Lifetime, CTV, Eurosport) had ethics clauses in their contracts with the ISU...and as a result literally told the ISU "behave or no money?" Boy would that cause a humongous ruckus! Not only that, ABC, ESPN and Lifetime are owned by Disney. Think about it.

:idea: There IS something that we can do about this (I will provide information later in another post so as to not make this one any longer than it will be anyway). We can all get writing...we can write the sponsors and suggest that when their contracts come up for renewal to put in ethics clauses the way John Hancock did with the USOC. We can write Congress and applaud what they are doing to get the USOC straightened out; Congress is also interested in the IOC as well. We can write the IOC to put ethical standards for officials into the Olympic Charter the same way that they enacted the WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) standards. If any of you own stock in the sponsoring companies, you can write to put a proposal on the ballot for the company's annual meeting. The measure may not pass, but it sure will get attention from the thousands of other stockholders of that company.

Before any of the naysayers out there ridicule this idea, I challenge you to come up with an effective solution to this problem.

We can solve this one. Let's do it! 8-)