A defense of Stephanie Hightower's selection by the USATF board

The 26 year $20mm per year contract with Nike...

Guess what is costs to be a "named sponsor" of the Olympics? $150mm for the Olympic year. In 2012 Adidas coughed that up while Nike did not -- they knew they could circumvent the cost buy negotiating with the highest profile country federations who dont know how to value the marketing property. I would suggest that owning the US Olympic Track&Field team (the marquee team in the marquee sport in the country with the most viewers) is worth as much as being a name sponsor of the Olympics...so for even 4 years Nike is paying only $80mm for something that was previously valued at $150mm (it might be more like $180mm in 2016). And Max threw in all the other Track&Field national team jerseys for the other three years for free!

Oh yeah, and then lets understand the 26 year term of the contract. The price doesnt go up through time. It stays constant. So unless there is no inflation or the Olympics doesnt continue to be one of the most watched athletic events on the world, then Max has mortgaged 5 generations of Track & Field athletes earnings for national team events to post a self proclaimed "good" revenue number in 2015. Give Nike half price today and a quarter of the price in the future.

Nike did the same thing with the world cup, circumventing paying FIFA to be a name sponsor and instead sniping unsophisticated country federations to get the exposure they wanted and filling in with commercials of their sponsors players in their country Nike jerseys. Didnt Max notice this tactic? Where was Underarmour's bid? Why couldnt you disaggregate the jersey sponsorship...sell the Olympic jersey to one sponsor and a World Champ jersey to another? Where else has anyone ever in sports inked a 26 year deal at constant terms with no escalators?

Yes there is more money this year than last. Max has brought in additional sponsors, and he should get credit for that. But this Nike deal is just economically not in the USATF's favor by a huge margin, and the only way to get out of it now is to go to the USOC and IOC (who you can imagine dont really like Nike not paying them directly), decertify the USATF, and void the contract at some point. Is that strong stable leadership? I dont blame Nike one bit --its not their job to be philanthropic, its there job to make as high a profit as possible marketing and selling their shoes and apparel. It is Max's job solely to extract as much revenue to put your logo on our athletes jersey, then hopefully feel compelled to return as much of that revenue as possible to the people generating the revenue -- the ATHLETES.

“Bob is the most upstanding person ever, and what kills me is that he’s not an ass-kisser like Stephanie is and he doesn’t play these political games, I mean obviously he knows politics"

whos's "Bob?"

nevermind.... what a shitty written article

AL Jessie Sr. wrote:

Anyone who doesn't want her is racist. In fact if you even think about it you are racist. You racists have been running things too long. So what if things go broke when she is in charge. You have a problem with that, you are racists.

All of you are racists

This ^^ lol :)

Scroll down to the December 10th submissions for Coach Johnson's take on the Anaheim festivities.