Olympians Banned From Blogging

nodwick writes "CNN reports that in a bid to protect its lucrative media contracts, the IOC is barring competitors, coaches, and support personnel from writing firsthand accounts of their Olympic experience, on the web or in print, for the duration of the Games. Nor are they allowed to ever post photographs or movies that they've taken, including media of themselves, even after the Games are finished. They've threatened to disqualify anyone that violates their restrictions and sue them for monetary damages. Looks like an effort to clamp down on grassroots, word-of-mouth publicity for the Olympics -- good thing they're not having any problems selling tickets anyways, eh?"

Comments

And don't even THINK of linking to their Site

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't even want people directing traffic to their site. Check out their policy here Ooops...So much for that rule :)

Speaking of idiots

[sempf]

RTFA.

"An exception is if an athlete has a personal Web site that they did not set up specifically for the Games."

Re:What Idiots

[ConceptJunkie]

Because the Olympic Committee are a bunch of money-grubbing slime bags who waant to maintain a monopoly on distributing media of this so-called non-professional competition.

The Olympics have become too bogged down in corruption and conspiracy between committee members on the take, crooked judges and athelete on drugs. You know, I just can't care any more.

Re:What Idiots

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Guess the Games have become about money too now.

Nah. The Olympics have become about control . The people running them have this terribly simplistic and fairly out of date belief that the more control they exercise over information about the Olympics, the more money they will make.

I think most everyone here knows what that approach leads to -- nepotism, corruption, stagnation and ultimately a slow rot into dismal irrelevance. The slack ticket sales are just one aspect of that retreat from glory.

Short-term they may make more money, but in the process they are killing the goose that laid the golden egg. No amount of corporatized hype can sell people (or disuade them) on a product like word of mouth. The net is the ultimate mouth. If they don't want to strangle themselves to death, they need to wake up and realize that they need to cultivate the net's communications about the good stuff at the Olympics. Instead, all we get is stories about what a bunch of incompetent, corrupt political bastards are running the organization.

Hey NBC -- I had little interest in the Olympics this time around, your only hope that I would have watched them would be an enticing, personal story that convinced me to follow-up. No, corporate-sanctified and sanitized fluffy news-bite is going to cut it, and now that your business partner has killed any other method for the news to get out, I'll probably never get that chance to hear that compelling story that would make me care. You should ask for a refund from the IOC.