What not to wear

The agents of Great Britain's leading Olympic athletes have recently been meeting with officials from UK Sport to discuss the sponsorship arrangements that will be in place for Team GB at the 2012 London Games. It is anticipated these meetings will lead to athletes and UK Sport formulating an agreement that all will be expected to sign. Reaching an agreement and then enforcing it is likely to be a potential minefield, fraught with difficulty, and characterised by a myriad of image rights and personal endorsement considerations. There are too many issues for one blog posting to consider, but here are some questions that highlight the territory UK Sport and the athletes are operating in: once an athlete signs the agreement, just how likely is it that we will witness any British athletes in 2012 having an 'Usain Bolt moment', waving their heavily branded personally endorsed footwear in front of an official scoreboard before the world's media? During the victory parade that will inevitably take place for Team GB in Trafalgar Square some time towards the end of 2012, what will each of the athletes be wearing, and which company will it be produced by? On what products and in which media will we see British athlete images appearing? Will this be under the auspices/jurisdiction of Team GB? Under the terms of their own personal deals? And where will the boundary between personal and team-related deals actually lie?