Public health advocates push Olympics to drop Coca-Cola sponsorship

When Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo slid two bottles of Coca-Cola off camera and raised a bottle of water to toast his hundreds of millions of social media followers during a news conference in 2021, he prompted a $4 billion drop in the soda giant’s market value.

“Such is the power of sport,” write public health advocates Trish Cotter and Sandra Mullin in an editorial published this week in the BMJ Global Health. They urge the International Olympic Committee to cut its financial ties to Coca-Cola and stop using its power to push sugary beverages that are linked to rising global rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure.

“In the interest of health for all, promoting unhealthy sugary drinks clearly has no place in sport,” write Cotter and Mullin, who work for Vital Strategies, a nonprofit global health organization. “Despite the evidence of health harm and the contradiction to the IOC’s mission to champion athletes’ health, Coca-Cola remains a top-tier sponsor of the Olympic Games.”

In 2023, Coca-Cola had more active sponsorship agreements than any other brand, including a multi-billion-dollar deal with the IOC, the editorial says.

The deal gives the soda maker “access to unparalleled marketing opportunities,” its red logo emblazoned on the walls of stadiums and broadcast across the globe. It allows Coca-Cola to “take advantage of children by beaming messages into their digital worlds that exploit their emotional vulnerabilities,” the editorial says.

Indeed, this year’s summer Olympics have reached unprecedented audiences on broadcast and online, NBC reports. Online viewing exceeded 17 billion minutes of streaming video, more than all previous Olympics combined.

The commentary echoes a “Kick Big Soda Out of Sport” campaign launched the week before the 2024 Olympics opened in Paris and supported by 80 public health and sustainability groups around the world, from Mexico’s National Institute of Health to Australia’s Public Health Association.

A video ad for the campaign opens with a young man downing a Coke and spitting it out. “Hey Big Soda,” it begins, “your sports-washing doesn’t wash with us.”

Like the BMJ editorial, the ad links soda to the twin epidemics of obesity and diabetes, and it criticizes soda companies for depleting water resources and littering oceans with plastic bottles. It fingers the industry for fighting laws aimed at protecting health and claims that soda makers use sports “to deliberately target children.”

The ad concludes: “The game’s up.”

Yet the finish line is nowhere in sight.

In response to the BMJ commentary, the IOC replied with a statement to NPR. “The IOC is proud of its nearly century long partnership with The Coca-Cola Company,” it said. The company makes other drinks with less sugar than Coke, the statement said, including sugar-free options. It goes on to cite Coca-Cola’s Responsible Marketing Policy,which says the company does not directly market its products to children under 13.

The IOC’s response to the editorial came as no surprise to Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University.

“Too much money is at stake for the IOC to refuse it,” she said in an email.

She called the Responsible Marketing Policy "a joke.”

“The policy itself is based on an absurd notion, that children under age 13 do not watch any Coke-advertised television programs, sports events or music events in which 70% or more of viewers are over age 13,” she said.

“Of course they do,” she added, “which is why the Olympics sponsorship is so important and so effective.”

The IOC’s continued partnership with Coca-Cola risks making the Olympics “complicit in intensifying a global epidemic of poor nutrition, environmental degradation, and climate change,” the BMJ editorial says.

In a recent speech, IOC President Thomas Bach promised to protect children from the marketing of unhealthy products, the writers note. They call on the IOC to acknowledge that its continued association with Coca-Cola contradicts Bach’s promise and “the foundational values espoused by this iconic sporting event.”

Ronnie Cohen is a San Francisco Bay Area journalist focused on health and social justice issues.