Day -20: McLympics

A 4-piece McTidbits about the Games' erstwhile sponsor.

The Olympics has had many sponsors—this year’s roster includes both Airbnb and something called AB InBev—but at least IMO, one of its most iconic corporate partnerships has been with McDonald’s. The chain was an official Olympic sponsor from 1976 through 2018ish,in a relationship that’s yielded a lot of kitschy merch and questionable marketing campaigns, as well as feeding a lot of Big Macs to the world’s best athletes.

The Olympics has gotten some heat for associating with McDonald’s, both for valid reasons (think globalization, environmental destruction, and labor issues) and more stupid ones (the idea that Olympians are role models of health and healthy people only eat leaves you pulled out of the ground). Meanwhile, McDonald’s has also gotten its own pushback for associating with the Olympics, which keeps happening in countries with actively ongoing human rights abuses (oops!!!). These are good things to keep in mind while we enjoy discussing some of their sponsor antics over the years!

Olympic Village freebies

At some Olympics, the Olympic Village has had its own McDonald’s with free meals for the athletes. McDonald’s was particularly popular for athletes at the 2016 Summer Games in Rio, which did such big business that it had to institute a 20-items-per-order policy. Here are some things people said about the lines at that particular Mc, as reported by Washington Post:

• “People were literally playing beach volleyball around the line….If you go at peak times, it’s maybe one of the craziest experiences I’ve ever had.” (Jessica Javelet, USA, rugby)

• “The Chinese basketball team, they come all day, every day. The Chinese eat Big Macs at 9 a.m. It’s crazy.” (unnamed employee)

• “They should have two McDonald’s.” (Brandon Schuster, Samoa, swimming)

Lines at the McDonald's in the Rio 2016 Olympic Village.

It seems like one reason so many athletes took advantage of free McDonald’s in various Olympic Villages is its relative familiarity/consistency compared to the food offered in official cafeterias. Usain Bolt has said that because he didn’t vibe with the food in Beijing in 2008, he ate 100 Chicken McNuggets a day, for an estimated total of 1000 nuggs over the course of his time in China.

Maccies at London 2012

I feel like the McDonald’s situation at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London was particularly silly, for the following reasons:

• They built a temporary world’s-largest-McDonald’s next to the Olympic Stadium, boasting a capacity for 1500 customers. Predictably, some talking heads were like “blah blah unhealthy food blah blah blah” about it, but as one man-on-the-street told The Guardian, “It's a balance, but it's fine in moderation. We're a young family. We haven't got time to go and find carrot sticks everywhere.”

• They had British fashion designer Wayne Hemingway design special staff uniforms that were allegedly an homage to Mad Men. Regarding the green and yellow polo shirts, pencil skirts, and jockey caps, GQ’s Julie Miller wrote: “A quick glance of the promotional photo above reveals a uniform that Megan Draper would not touch, even if she were playing an overworked fast-food employee in an Off Off Broadway production or sadly starring in a McDonald’s commercial produced by Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.”

• Apparently McDonald’s sponsorship agreement included a clause prohibiting any food vendors in or around Olympic venues from selling french fries, except within the culturally-significant context of fish and chips. Apparently this led to hordes of Olympic workers and spectators constantly hounding non-McD food service workers to give them fries. “Please understand this is not the decision of the staff who are serving up your meals who, given the choice, would gladly give it to you, however they are not allowed to. Please do not give the staff grief, this will only lead to us removing fish and chips completely,” a sign in one catering area apparently warned. Given the outcry, food vendors were able to negotiate a exemption to the fry prohibition—Games organizers decided they could offer fish-less chips specifically when catering for folks working on the opening and closing ceremonies.

Macca’s Olympics-themed menus

For some reason Australia seems really into having special Olympics-themed menus. In 2008, they promised to take you “around the world in 70 days” with their Flavors of the Games menu, which cycled through five limited-edition continent-themed sandwiches: the McEurope, a chicken burger with Napoletana sauce and Parmesan; the McAmerica, a bagel-based breakfast sandwich with spicy ketchup; the McAfrica, a cheeseburger “dressed with an exotic African sauce of mayonnaise and spices”; the McAsia, a chicken wrap with cucumber, mayo, and Thai chili sauce; and the hometown McAustralia, which is just like a burger but with pineapple barbecue sauce on it.

And then they came back in 2012 with a whole different Olympics-themed menu, which was focused on host cities this time: offerings included the Barcelona Omelette, the Atlanta Pork McRib, the London Fish and Fries, and the Sydney Stack. I am particularly transfixed by the ad above for the latter, specifically the mystifying tagline “deserves a mouth opening ceremony.” When I Googled this text, most of the results were about the ancient Egyptian “opening of the mouth ceremony,” which seems to be a funerary ritual involving opening the mouth of a dead body.

The scratch-off disaster of 1984

While something about those Australian menu items has taken hold of my personal consciousness, objectively the most noteworthy Olympics-related promotion McDonald’s did was in 1984. Los Angeles was hosting the Games—the first time the U.S. had hosted the Summer Olympics since the previous L.A. go-round 52 years prior—and the Cold War was very much afoot, so patriotism was really patriotism-ing. McDonald’s capitalized on this with a campaign called “When the U.S. Wins, You Win,” in which customers at United States McDonaldses received scratch-offs with their purchases. Each card had a different Olympic event on it, and if the U.S. got a medal in that event, you’d be entitled to a McDonald’s freebie: bronze meant a coke, silver got you fries, and gold was worth a Big Mac.

When McDonald’s execs were developing this plan, they priced it out using the medal table from the Montreal Olympics in 1976. What they didn’t account for was the Soviet Union and 13 of its geopolitical allies boycotting the 1984 Games, which they were doing in retaliation for…the United States and a bunch of its allies boycotting the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.¹ Given the Eastern Bloc’s Olympic dominance throghout this era, their absence led to a way-less-competitive than usual Games in Los Angeles. And that meant the United States won way more medals than they normally would, which was probably good news for people obsessed with America but definitely bad news for McDonald’s. People were redeeming scratch-offs left and right! And that led to McDonald’s having to hand out even more scratch-offs!

McDonald’s won’t tell anyone exactly how much this ended up costing them, but some have speculated that their losses were probably in the millions of dollars. Nevertheless, they brought the promo back for the significantly-less-boycotted 1988 and 1996 Olympics. Touché I guess!!

1. Albania, Iran, Libya and Upper Volta (now called Burkina Faso) also boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics but like, separately from the Soviet boycott. In fact, Iran and Albania boycotted both the 1980 and 1984 Olympics!