Olympic Club - Wassat ?
4 June 1998OK, here's the deal.
There's this thing called the Olympic Club, see, and at the moment they're trying to round up as many people as they can to be members.
They're in the middle of a major advertising and marketing campaign across Australia, which in the past couple of weeks has included leaflets being put into five million letterboxes across the mation. (If you haven't got one yet, you're probably living in Gympie.)
Yesterday, they had a lunch at the Bellevue Hotel in Paddington, where they essayed to fill some journalists with as much good red meat and better red wine as we could handle, in the hope we would write nice things about them today.
So, a moment, if you please, while I pay for my lunch ...
(It's GREAT! They're CHAMPIONS! You SHOULD JOIN! HONEST!)
That out of the way, let's have a look at it.
The aim of the Olympic Club, the way they tell it, is to provide a kind of vehicle for the populace at large to have involvement in the Olympics in the time leading up to the Games.
In return for parting with a certain amount of cash - $300 for families, $500 to be something called a patron - you get such things as a welcome kit, with posters, certificates, pins, video and CDs, as well as regular mailings thereafter of magazines and collector cards.
Perhaps more pertinently, you also get a chance to win the first lot of the 70,000 tickets to Olympic events, and the first of these draws will be on June 23, for all those members who have joined before June 10.
The draws from then on will be weekly, with 200 tickets being allocated each draw right up until the start of the Games.
And if you think THAT's good, don't forget the blurb which says "YOUR NAME WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY", as "your name will be inscribed on a permanent and publicly displayed roll of honour." Whoo-eee!
The aim is to have about 200,000 people on board by the time the Olympics start, and they're currently sitting on around 20,000, meaning, of course, those people who join now have a fairly good chance to win tickets.
Is it all driven by altruism and the desire to give as many Australians as possible a feel-good involvement with the Olympics?
Of course not. This is modern sport, read business, and nothing works like that anymore.
Of the profits, if there are any, 60 per cent will go to the Australian Olympic Committee, 20 per cent to SOCOG, and 20 per cent to Synthesis, the corporate crowd organising it all.
The reckoning is that even though things are slow at the moment, it will probably all take off as we get closer to the event and word spreads of those who have won tickets.
There has been no such scheme in previous Olympics, and if it works it will undoubtedly become the prototype for future Games.
If it fails, of course there will be the usual fruitless search for the inventor of such a nonsense.
Is it a good idea to join?
Dunno.
I'll tell you, if I end up by joining up my own family.
Waiter! More wine! Spare no expense!
