FSOM: How sponsorships in sport have evolved since Jesse Owens’ groundbreaking deal 90 years ago

Before he stuck two huge black fingers up to Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Jesse Owens was approached by a man with a box.

The box toter was also called Adolf, his box contained shoes and he was representing der Gebruder Dassler Schuhfabrik.

The silver-tongued rep of the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory, who had more neck than a herd or giraffes, convinced Owens that the shoes he had made had specially adapted soles, which had spikes on them and they would improve Owens’ performance on both track and the long jump pit.

The man did not require any payment from Owens for the shoes, in fact the American quadruple gold medallist was told he could keep the shoes – for free!

Thus began one of the first athletics sponsorship deals, and one which probably benefitted Adolf ‘Adi’ Dassler and his brother Rudolf more than Owens.

Back then, a few free pairs of shoes were the only payments Owens received for winning four gold medals and in the process, humiliating the Austrian Corporal in front of the whole world.

It didn’t do a lot for the Dassler boys who suffered the biggest brotherly tiff since Cain and Abel, the only difference being a shortage of ass jawbones in the Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach which prevented murder being committed and one of them being exiled to the Land of Nod.

Adi formed his adidas company, while Rudolf, in a huge great snit, literally moved to the opposite bank of the river Aurach to form Puma. Amid dark and bitter wartime accusations flung at each other, the pair never spoke to each other again. If Adi had the early kudos with Owens initially and providing the boots to the 1954 West German World Cup winning team as adidas grew, Rudolf and Puma would have their revenge later.

Athletics was strictly an amateur sport, and would remain so for some time.

In common with most other sports, it was founded to provide recreation for blazered middle and upper class chaps who had the time to indulge in such pastimes, the working class being too busy digging at the coal face or toiling in the field.

In the 1860s, from the soot and smoke of the northern industrial towns such as Manchester and Sheffield, arose professional foot racing, especially what was known as pedestrianism, and to the shock and disgust of the blazered chaps. competitors got paid for it. the purse money coming from betting on the races.

The chaps acted quickly and in 1880 the Amateur Athletics Association (AAA) was formed with the express intention to keep working-class professionals out.

The Amateur athletics ethos was exemplified by the story of Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, two Cambridge University chaps, whose gold medal winning exploits in the 1924 Olympics was told in the film Chariots of Fire.

Any professional athletes were treated like the little boy outside the sweet shop with his nose up against the window as the upper classes maintained the Corinthian spirit and kept the sweaty toilers and worker bees out of their playtime.

Gentleman amateurs probably had their last hurrah in 1954 when Roger Bannister broke the mythical four-minute mile barrier.

Bannister – who in later life became a renowned neuro surgeon – was a trainee doctor at St Mary’s hospital in London at the time, having previously been at Oxford.

His pacemakers on that day at Iffley Road track in Oxford were Christopher Chataway who studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford – the perfect grounding to become a Conservative MP – and Chris Brasher, from St John’s college Cambridge, who later co-founded the London Marathon.

Athletics remained a strictly amateur sport, which meant that unless they came from the sort of gilded, privileged background the AAA preferred, British athletes had to earn a crust and shoehorn their training in around work. This put them at a disadvantage against the Eastern European athletes who trained full-time under the guise of being an officer in Russia’s NKVD or East Germany’s Stazi.

At last, the stuffed shirts of the AAA gave way and in 1982, the rules were relaxed to allow athletes to set up trust funds and collect appearance fees, prize money and corporate sponsorship., to earn money from the sport and to train as full-timers.

In 1985 the IAAF introduced trust funds which allowed athletes to collect appearance fees, prize money and corporate sponsorship and officially professional athletes were allowed to compete at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.

Of course Ben Johnson was stripped of his 100m title after testing positive in what has been dubbed the dirtiest race in history, with seven of the eight finalists thought to be hopped up to the eyeballs, causing people to wonder how they ever managed to run in a straight line and giving the amateur brigade a huge opportunity to say ‘We told you so!’

In 1997 National Lottery funding provided British competitors with Athlete Performance Awards which allowed track and field athletes to train full-time.

But in the same way raspberry jam attracts wasps to the picnic table (or if you are more agriculturally-minded, cow manure attracts flies) the sniff of money attracts a certain type.

Enter Andy Norman, a hugely controversial figure in the world of athletics.

A former Met police officer, Norman wormed his way into the athletics scene and became the British Athletics Federation’s promotions officer. Allied to his role as an agent for many of the top athletes of the day – Steve Ovett, Sebastian Coe, Sally Gunnell and Linford Christie to name a few – it gave him a grip on British Athletics tighter than two coats of paint.

A promoter’s meeting could live or die depending on Norman. Southampton-based club Team Solent staged invitational meetings, the Solent Games which thanks to a combination of Norman’s influence and the popularity and reputation of legendary coach Mike Smith, attracted some of the biggest names in the sport.

As the erstwhile athletics correspondent of the local chip wrapping, FSOM saw the likes of Daley Thompson, Aussie 400m gold medallist Debbie Flintoff, Christie, Roger Black and Kriss Akabusi perform on Southampton Sports Centre’s track in front of huge crowds, even if it did mean the stars of track and field changing in specially erected marquees.

Athletes adored Norman, and to be fair, he enabled those he represented to earn a decent wedge, as well as ushering in the end of shamateurism, where athletes were paid hooky sums of money under the table, with the joke doing the rounds they were unable to post decent times at certain meetings as it was difficult to run with the toes of their shoes stuffed with folding money.

Norman, who married British javelin thrower Fatima Whitbread, was a bully who virtually blackmailed promoters and he became all powerful. His methods took a dark turn when he confronted Cliff Temple, the hugely respected Sunday Times athletics correspondent who was compiling an expose of Norman who threatened to spread false accusations that Temple had sexually harassed a young female athlete he had coached, with the result that Temple took his own life on a Kent train track.

The BAF sacked Norman from his role as promotions director and he died in 2007.

The issue of sponsorship and money for athletes raised its ugly pimply head recently when Britain’s Josh Kerr won the 1500m at the inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championships in Budapest.

The Ultimate Championships is an ersatz event organised by the IAAF, staged in the years between Olympic Games and almost specifically run to provide the top athletes with a chance to earn money and Kerr trousered £112,000 ($150,000) for winning the four-lap race.

But it was what Kerr did afterwards that caused a ruckus. As he posed for pics, he wrapped a Union flag round his shoulders but deliberately covered GB team sponsor Nike’s ‘Swoosh’ logo on his vest by draping his Brooks running shoes over it.

Kerr was quite unapologetic about his actions. Although expecting a rocket from British athletics, his argument was that he received no money from the Nike’s sponsorship of the GB team, but Brooks sponsorship put jam on his toast.

Kerr is not the first sportsman to put his own personal deals before that of his team.

Johan Cruyff notoriously ploughed his own furrow by going out to play for Holland with two striped on his sleeve whereas his team mates played with three.

Adidas sponsored the Dutch team kit, but Cruyff’s deal with Puma was far more lucrative to him, so he unpicked one sleeve stripe so he had no trace of adidas on his shirt.

Thus, Rudolf Dassler who died in 1974, got his revenge from beyond the grave

Puma put the football boots on the feet of both Pele and Diego Maradona and in almost a deliberate attempt to pooh-pooh adidas’ links with Owens, signed up Usain Bolt.

Full marks to Puma for spotting Bolt’s potential and signing him up to a deal with he was just 15, but in 2010 the Jamaican inked the biggest athletics deal in history, transitioning it into a lifetime deal in 2013 worth £7.47m a year ($10m), even after he finished competing. Bolt is now estimated to be worth £67.2m ($90m).

The irony of Adi Dassler’s role in providing the shoes that enabled Owens to humiliate Hitler was that both he and Rudolf joined the Nazi party in the pre-war years.

Who would have guessed that the box Adi Dassler took to Jesse Owens in 1936 was owned by Pandora?