The American Alpine Institute had an interesting post on their blog several months ago about the topic of sponsorship in the climbing community that they summed up this way:
The outdoor industry is full of sponsored individuals. And it is full of a lot of ego, arrogance and self-promotion. Sponsorship is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it’s great. It provides us with an insight into who is at the top of the game. But on the other hand, if we can’t trust the magazines and the gear manufacturers to screen their athletes, then the value of every sponsored athlete — whether they deserve it or not — is diminished.
The impetus for the AAI blog post was this excellent post by alpinist Scott Semple. In the post, Semple asserts that sponsorship is not a bad thing (he was once a sponsored athlete), but “bullshit” is:
If sponsorship isn’t backed up by a legitimate accomplishment that is significant to the sport, then being rewarded for something insignificant is sad and undeserved. And it’s immoral, because it creates a facade, and facades are lies.
This happens more often than you might think. Many of the athletes you often see in climbing magazines are phenomenal at self-promotion, but range from average to crap at actually climbing. Ice, mixed and alpine climbing have the worst offenders. (Rock climbing is usually too consistent, popular and objective for lies to last long.) Truth is, many climbers are sponsored for what they say, or how well they’re known, rather than for what they’ve done.
The problem stems from the fact that the “athlete” is the performer, but also the judge and the journalist. A lack of objectivity and a lack of integrity combine to create opportunistic self-promotion masquerading as journalism. The result is that average achievements beget above-average attention. (All those “Hot Flashes” you read, written in the third person, are often written by the climbers themselves.) Few other disciplines would tolerate such a lack of objectivity, but no direct access to the “feats” of accomplishment makes us dependant on it.
As a followup to the blog post, Semple gave a slideshow on the topic that is well worth watching (even if it is a bit long and hard to hear at times):
Is Sponsorship a Sin? from Scott Semple on Vimeo
The concept of outdoor companies sponsoring athletes by giving gear and/or money in exchange for some sort of promotion on the part of the athlete is really nothing new. However, as the internet age develops there are more and more opportunities for consumers to be inundated with sponsored material (whether they realize it or not). While I don’t necessarily agree with everything Semple asserts on his blog and his slide show, I think he raises several points that are worth keeping mind.
