Tag: Olympics

Can you trademark “winter”?

I had to look at the date of this article in IHT, but it unfortunately didn’t say April 1st. Turns out that the Canadian governement is proposing to change the law to grant the organizing committee of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games the rights to common words like “winter”, “gold”, “silver”, “medals”, “sponsor”, “games”, “21st” and “2010”. The article says that journalists are exempted from the law, but will bloggers get the green light too? Probably not, if the IOC has the same anti-blog attitude as in the past.

[Via Dennis.]

Olympic PR disaster as bombs hit Athens

The Olympics is already a PR disaster, the Guardian wrote this week (via PR Fuel). Athens is still being a construction site and the negative headlines in media have been frequent. Today there is a long article about the chaos in Athens in Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. The Greek themselves do not seem worried that they will not be finished on opening day, saying that “we are last minute people”.

Adding insult to injury, Olympic legend Mark Spitz, claimed the other day that the security in Greece may be inadequate to cope with the threat of terrorist attacks. And he didn’t have to wait long for those words to come true. Today, with only 100 days to go, Athens was hit by three bombs this morning. If the Greek cannot convince the Americans they have the situation under control, in spite of having four times the security costs of the Sydney games, they have threatend to pull out of the games, which would be a real PR defeat for Greece and the Olympics.