There’s no question the Vancouver Winter Paralympics are a more intimate affair than the big Olympic show that just folded its tent and left town.
There are five events instead of 15, and 1,350 disabled athletes compared with about 2,600 Olympic competitors.
But the Paralympics are in growth mode and after five decades have evolved from an off-year adjunct to the Olympics into a fully-fledged partner staged in the same host city.
Nowhere is the evolution more evident than with sponsorship, a key factor in expanding the Paralympics’ presence.
Korean electronics giant Samsung signed on last week as a worldwide partner for the Paralympics–a position it also holds with the Olympics–as well as an official sponsor of the Vancouver Paralympics.
“The Paralympic Games is part of the Olympic movement,” said Samsung vice-president Gyehyun Kwon, the company’s head of worldwide sports marketing. “It’s inseparable.”
Samsung joins Visa, tech company Atos Origin and Otto Bock, a German health-care company as an International Paralympic Committee global sponsor.
Sir Philip Craven, International Paralympic Committee president, said the addition of Samsung has helped open doors to approach other potential sponsors.
Carla Qualtrough, the head of the Canadian Paralympic Committee agrees. As awareness of Paralympic sport grows, sponsors will see the value of affiliating with the Games at different levels, she said.
“I think the leaders, the forerunners, will be the ones who shine, who get the best deals, for lack of a less crass way of saying it, because the value of the movement will increase,” said Qualtrough, who swam for Canada at the 1988 Paralympics in Seoul.
The dollars, of course, are a fraction of the hundreds of millions in play for Olympic sponsorships.
For example, the Canadian Paralympic Committee’s budget for a Games year is about $3.5 million, roughly half of which has come from sponsorships.
Host-city organizers do their own fundraising. Vancouver’s organizing committee has not broken out how much it raised specifically from Paralympic sponsorships.
“You can get a lot more bang for your buck when you sponsor the Paralympic side,” said Qualtrough. “There’s not as many rules, there’s not as many conditions [as with Olympic sponsorship].”
A dearth of competition for sponsor slots allows companies to be more creative in their Paralympic programs, she said.
“You have access to people who as a matter of course think outside the box,” said Qualtrough. “We do sport differently, we solve problems differently. We’re quite creative thinkers out of necessity.”
Shrewdly, the Canadian Paralympic Committee opted not to sell its team-sponsorship rights to Vancouver Games organizers with rights to Paralympic symbols. That leaves room for deals with firms that don’t have the budget for a full Games sponsorship.
“So we can go off and sell our teams and have been quite successful,” she said.
Craven also noted the Games will get 150 hours of live and delayed TV coverage, more than Beijing.
In Canada, host broadcaster CTV is committed to 50 hours of coverage through its various channels.
