How to Get Kicked out of the Olympics

July 26, 2012, 12:30pm

London’s on total lockdown for the Olympics, and I’m not just talking about security measures. The full guidelines from the International Olympics Committee (IOC) and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic anad Paralympic Games (LOCOG) are nothing short of draconian in scope, and cover everything from the food you’re allowed to eat to the hashtags you’re allowed to use on Twitter.

The main mission of the rules is to keep a lid on ambush marketing or, in the words of Olympic Marks and Imagery Usage Handbook, any “planned attempt by a third party to associate itself directly or indirectly with the Olympic Games to gain the recognition and benefits associated with being an Olympic Marketing Partner.” But it’s not just freeloading companies who stand to get in trouble by breaking the rules. Even a misplaced tweet or the wrong order at the snack counter can get you in trouble at the Olympics this year.

Videos by VICE

The most comprehensive set of regulations revolves around Olympic verbiage. As Motherboard’s own Brian Merchant pointed out last week, the anti-ambush marketing efforts put a ban on using words like “Olympic,” “gold,” “silver,” “bronze” and “summer” in advertising. They mean that broadly speaking. Not only will you get a slap on the wrist for putting these words on billboards or newspaper ads, but even the blackboards outside of bars are subject to the rules. That includes naming dishes after anything Olympics-related or associating beer brands with the events in any way. They’ve even prohibited all 800 of the snack bars at the 40 Olympic venues from serving french fries so as not to infringe upon McDonald’s status as official fast food restaurant of the Olympics. Of course, the 2012 Olympic sponsors did spend billions and billions of dollars to be affiliated with the Games, so it’s understandable that there would be some red tape, but this all seems rather extreme.

Meanwhile, the various Olympic committees are also still coming to terms with the role of social media in the Olympic games. Greek triple jumper Voula Papachristou got herself banned from the Games for a single racist tweet that reads, “With so many Africans in Greece… the West Nile mosquitoes will at least eat homemade food!!!” The Greek Olympic committee not to mention thousands of people on Twitter and Facebook did not find the joke funny and pulled her off the team within a matter of hours. (It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t the first time Papachristou’s posted questionable things online. In the past few months, she’s also posted a number of videos promoting the neo-Nazi Chryssi Avgi (Golden Dawn) party.)

The dangers of Twitter extend beyond making off color jokes. Pretty much anyone with an official affiliation with the Olympics — coaches, athletes, sponsors, officials — is prohibited from mentioning or appearing to support any brand, product or service that’s not officially affiliated with the Games. The rule extends to non-sponsors buying promoted tweets with Olympic language or hashtags like #London2012. Posting any audio or visual material captured the Games events to third party sites like Twitter and YouTube is also prohibited. And don’t even think about setting up a WiFi hotspot in the stands.

The only people that have it worse regulation-wise than the spectators, of course, are the athletes. There are extremely tight regulations on everything from what the athletes can say in public to what they wear. And obviously, they’re not supposed to do drugs either. Nevertheless, nine athletes have been busted for doping and expelled from the Games. Of course, that athletes are looking for a chemical edge comes as hardly a surprise.