Olympic Fever - No Blackout

The Olympics Opening Ceremonies are today and I'm pumped! I'm wearing my London Calling shirt for the occasion, as are most of the Oiselle Team ladies thanks to fun Twitter suggestions yesterday. Go Team USA! Kev and I will be watching the delayed tape-delayed version tonight at 7:30 pm Pacific.

Is London Calling You?

Although there is a ton of Olympic excitement, there is also a not-so-good (read: terrible) Olympic Blackout plaguing the games. If you haven't heard about this yet, there is detailed information posted to the Oiselle blog outlining the situation.

The short story is that Olympic athletes aren't allowed to promote the brands that sponsor them from July 18 through the end of the games unless they have one of the big Olympic sponsors. The companies can't talk about their athletes, and the athletes can't talk about - or even wear - their company's gear.

These athletes, especially ones in the low-paying sports like Track & Field, work their butts off to train and to get sponsored only to have to 'hide' these sponsors at the biggest moment of their career. This hardly seems fair. As mentioned in the Oiselle post, it's hard for companies to want to spend money on sponsored athletes when they lose media coverage at a time like the Olympics. We want these athletes to continue having sponsorship opportunities!

You are probably thinking ok, that's crappy, but what can we do about it? The Oiselle team ladies had a fantastic idea - the athlete's fans do the promoting for them! When the athlete is racing, we tweet/Facebook/Google+ about how awesome they and their sponsor are. If you use Twitter, add #noblackout or #bsblackout to the post.

Of course, the hard part of this is figuring out who is sponsored by what, but that's been done for us in the blog post I mentioned earlier. The post even lists when the events take place and when they air on TV.

Check out the list, find your fave athletes (or all of them) and go to it. Let's fight the Olympic Blackout with social media!