China's Rio Olympic Delegation Is Set. Who Wins Off the Field?

To say it again: the business world is far more brutal than sport.

With less than 20 days to go before the Rio Olympics open, China's Olympic delegation was formally established on Monday. At 711 people, it is the second-largest the country has ever sent, behind only the Beijing Olympics eight years ago.

The 416 athletes in it compete across 26 sports. Some, like Lin Dan and Sun Yang, made their names long ago; others, like 17-year-old gymnast Wang Yan, are just starting out. After the Games, a few may become famous overnight, the darlings of the Chinese public and of brands. A few more may hold the country's attention for a day or two after winning gold. Most will stay unknown.

For China's sports administration, the Olympics are a chance to bring glory to the nation. For each athlete, a competing career is short. Past 30, every one of them faces falling results and rising injury risk. Any professional athlete has to plan for life after retirement, and Olympians are no exception.

Athletes whose market value multiplies overnight because of the Olympics are not rare. Liu Xiang only became hot property after he won the 110-meter hurdles at the 2004 Athens Olympics. In 2004 alone, the brands he signed with included Dongfeng Kia, Baisha Culture Communication, Chongqing Loncin Motorcycle, Konka phones, Shanshan apparel and Qianlima Auto, and he became an ambassador for China Post EMS. His income rose from 1.6 million yuan in 2003 to 23 million yuan in 2004.

But athletes as successful as Liu Xiang are still the exception. How many of this year's 416 will succeed, and how many will come anywhere near Liu, is hard to say. The one certain thing is that the business world is more brutal than sport.

Whether an athlete shines still depends on whether the sport is popular

Most athletes who go to the Olympics get no commercial opportunities at all — not only because not all of them win gold, but because most of the sports they compete in have no commercial prospects to begin with.

You can see it in how many sponsors each national team attracts. At the London Olympics four years ago, China's men's basketball team had 19 sponsors. Minor sports — archery, trampoline, rhythmic gymnastics, wrestling, weightlifting, modern pentathlon, triathlon, rowing, women's water polo, synchronized swimming — had four each. Most of those sponsors made equipment for the sport in question. In other words, sponsoring those teams was not the companies' first choice; there was nothing else for them to choose.

This is easy to understand. Sponsorship follows the 80/20 rule: a small number of top performers take the great majority of the attention, and become the athletes most brands chase. Which is why, in the past, we saw brand after brand pile onto the same athlete.

Before the Athens Olympics, Liu Xiang had two endorsement deals, with Nike and Coca-Cola. After the gold medal, the contracts on his back jumped at once to more than a dozen. Sun Yang likewise had endorsed a single sports brand, 361°, before he won in London in 2012; after the win, Yili and Beijing Hyundai came knocking. At the time the American magazine Swimming World predicted that Sun Yang's endorsement income in 2013 would very likely pass $20 million.

The cold sports, by contrast, draw few eyes to begin with, and when their athletes do win gold the sponsors who turn up look shabby. The sponsor of Olympic fencing champion Zhong Man was Nantong Tieren, which makes exercise equipment. Another Olympic fencing champion, Sun Yujie, endorsed Mengshi, a car-carpet brand.

And whether an athlete shines does not depend on the sport alone

The most valuable athlete to come out of each Olympics has been a different person. Athens 2004 was Liu Xiang. Beijing 2008 became Lin Dan. By 2012 the biggest name was Sun Yang. At this year's Rio Olympics, the athlete drawing the most attention so far is Ning Zetao.

Four Games, and the most valuable athletes came from three different sports. That is not only a question of how well they compete. It also has to do with the society around them at the time.

The 2004 Athens Olympics fell at a delicate moment. China's economy was still growing fast, and slower growth was unimaginable for the country. Commercial forces had not yet soaked through every part of it, and people still watched sport with some sense of a national cause at stake.

Track and field, Liu Xiang's sport, had long been one of China's weakest. When the "Flying Man of China" came out of nowhere, the national pride that European and American sprinters and hurdlers had kept bottled up for years burst out all at once, and it put Liu Xiang on an altar. After he pulled out of two races — in Beijing and in London — words like "coward" and "deserter" were pinned to him instead.

By Lin Dan's turn, things had changed. What pushed Lin Dan into the market was less his technique and his results on court than the image of the man himself.

From the start, Lin Dan was linked with a hot temper and a habit of smashing his racket; in 2008 he clashed openly with South Korean coach Li Mao during a match. By 2012 his public image had turned inward and steadier, and many came to see him as a man carrying badminton itself on his shoulders, not just the Chinese team.

Southern People Weekly wrote in a 2012 piece: "In his youth it showed as impulsiveness and swagger; the authenticity he has now holds both a loyalty to his own self and a willingness to shoulder responsibility." It was this rounded personal image that made Lin Dan an idol, and held the public's attention for years.

As for Sun Yang and Ning Zetao, there is no real difference between them and idols like Luhan and Kris Wu, who are red hot right now. What the public asks of Sun Yang and Ning Zetao gets simpler all the time: satisfy the fantasy and that is enough. Nobody cares about the honor they have won for China, and nobody cares what sort of people they are off camera. What travels furthest online is their faces and their bodies — and it happens that both of them swim.

In the end the mood of the whole society has changed. What people want is no longer a collective pride built on the machinery of the state, but the satisfaction of private desire. With that change, the kind of athlete people like has changed too.

If an athlete really wants to get famous, the Olympics may not be the best place

Plenty of athletes do become famous overnight after the Olympics. But the highest-earning athletes in the world do not come from the Olympics.

Of the 100 best-paid athletes counted by Forbes, 62 compete in non-Olympic sports: baseball, American football, golf, Formula 1 and so on. Among the rest, very few owe their fame to the Olympics. The 18 NBA players on the list barely deign to look at the Games — LeBron James, Stephen Curry and James Harden have each announced, one after another, that they were pulling out.

The Olympics are such a hit that it is easy to miss one fact: what is popular is the Olympics itself, not the sports inside it.

The commercialization of the Olympics started with the 1984 Los Angeles Games. Before that the Olympics were a money-loser. Montreal lost more than $1 billion in 1976; Moscow spent $9 billion in 1980 and made nothing back.

To get out of the hole, Peter Ueberroth, then head of the Los Angeles organizing committee, brought in television and sponsors. Ueberroth set an asking price of $250 million and invited the networks to bid for exclusive broadcast rights. ABC took the US rights for $225 million; the Australian and European rights went for $287 million.

Ueberroth also invented the sponsorship model, picking one global Olympic partner from each industry, with a floor of $4 million per deal. In the end 32 sponsors were chosen, among them Coca-Cola, United Airlines and the American magazine Sports Illustrated.

What was commercialized in all this was "the Olympics," the meeting held once every four years. Say the word and people think of the Olympic spirit — faster, higher, stronger — or the tradition born in ancient Greece, or even the grand slogans about the Games bringing peace. The sports inside it — weightlifting, table tennis, diving — borrow the Olympic name for a brief spell of attention and gain nothing solid at all.

Fully commercialized leagues like the Premier League and the NBA do far more work than the Olympics does. Because a league is built on one sport, promoting the league means first making that sport popular. In doing so, the leagues pull in more people to watch, and even to play.

Only when people start caring about the sport itself do the athletes who play it become better known and better recognized. On top of that, the leagues play many games a year, far more often than a Games held once every four years, which gives athletes much more exposure. That is what brands care about.

The General Administration of Sport is Chinese athletes' biggest obstacle

Chinese athletes face one more obstacle: the General Administration of Sport.

Look at China's three biggest athletes of the past decade — Liu Xiang, Li Na and Yao Ming — and you find that Liu Xiang's commercial value was lower than Li Na's or Yao Ming's, that his commercial life was shorter, and that brands treated him more harshly. That is not only because his results swung more.

In 2000, while Yao Ming was still playing in the CBA, the famous Team Yao had already been set up to plan his commercial affairs. Everything Yao Ming did afterwards, from going to the NBA to signing with brands, Team Yao handled.

Because of that early planning, Yao Ming showed huge commercial value early. Visa, Reebok, Pepsi, McDonald's and Apple had all signed him within his first few years in the NBA, when he was still an ordinary rookie.

In 2009, Li Na left the Tennis Administrative Center and hired a professional agency, IMG, to run her commercial affairs. After she finished runner-up at the Australian Open and won the French Open in 2011, her agent, Max Eisenbud, landed her international brands including Rolex, Häagen-Dazs and Mercedes-Benz, worth $48 million in total.

IMG stayed with Li Na after she retired. Eisenbud planned a tennis academy for her, to come with a dining and leisure club, a wellness center and a fitness center. IMG also helped her launch licensed merchandise designed around her image.

Every endorsement contract of Liu Xiang's, by contrast, had to be decided by the General Administration of Sport. Ahead of major competitions the Administration tended to rule with one blunt stroke — halting all commercial activity and endorsements — with no regard for what brands wanted or needed.

Under those conditions, Liu Xiang's commercial development looks random and disorderly, with no continuity, and the brands themselves were a mixed lot: the 2004 deal with Baisha Culture Communication struck outsiders as rather baffling. When Liu Xiang withdrew at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, his commercial value collapsed. His income fell from 130 million yuan in 2008 to 29 million yuan in 2011.

Not long ago Ning Zetao was pulled into a dispute of the same kind. Ning had signed with Yili as an endorser, but the Swimming Center had signed a blanket deal with Mengniu, so Mengniu and the Center both took it for granted that Ning was endorsing Mengniu. The affair grew, and ended up producing rumors that Ning might lose his place at the Rio Olympics.

The rumor turned out to be false, but Ning Zetao's place on the final Olympic roster may be no more than a compromise the Swimming Administrative Center made for the sake of the Games. Once the Olympics are over, the conflict between Ning and the Center is bound to break out again.

We think Lin Dan may be this Olympics' biggest winner

So who in this year's delegation could be the biggest winner of these Games?

First, narrow the field to the sports where China might take gold, since over the two weeks of an Olympics only a gold medal draws enough public attention. That leaves 14: diving, table tennis, badminton, gymnastics, weightlifting, shooting, swimming, track and field, fencing, taekwondo, wrestling, cycling, boxing and judo.

Next, rule out the minor sports — fencing, wrestling, weightlifting, boxing, judo, shooting. Athletes in them may win, but the base of the sport is too thin, and whatever excitement they create will be replaced by the next wave of excitement soon enough.

That leaves six: diving, table tennis, badminton, gymnastics, swimming and track and field. Each has produced a first-rate sporting idol. Diving had Tian Liang, table tennis had Deng Yaping, badminton has Lin Dan, gymnastics had Li Ning, swimming has Sun Yang and Ning Zetao, track and field had Liu Xiang.

It is easy to feel the period in that list of names. Deng Yaping and Li Ning were both products of the 1980s, both emblems of "bringing glory to the nation," both vessels for national pride. As that pride faded out of daily life, table tennis and gymnastics lost their old shine. Ma Long and Zhang Jike still post excellent results, and gymnastics still has Olympic champions like Cheng Fei and Chen Yibing, but none of them command the standing Deng Yaping and Li Ning once did.

The same is true of track and field. Since Liu Xiang retired there has been no track athlete Chinese people feel they know. And as running has caught on as a form of exercise, what people know of track and field has turned into the kilometers logged by an app on their phone. Track as competition has receded further still.

Diving once gave the Chinese entertainment industry a star in Tian Liang. After winning gold at the 2004 Athens Olympics, Tian Liang began taking part in all sorts of commercial activity and secretly signed with Emperor Entertainment Group. All of it angered the Swimming Administrative Center, which finally expelled him from the national team. He chose to retire in 2007.

The Swimming Administrative Center's habits have not changed, as the recent Ning Zetao affair shows. Lanxiong Sports quoted one person with knowledge of the matter: "There's a lesson in agent circles that will hold for ten thousand years: don't touch swimming!" So although Sun Yang and Ning Zetao may be the two most popular athletes in the whole delegation right now, their commercial road ahead may not run smooth.

That leaves only Lin Dan. These Games are very likely the last for a man who is now 33. Luckily, Lin Dan not only competes well; the Table Tennis and Badminton Administrative Center has been tolerant with him. In 2015, with Li Ning holding the deal to sponsor the Chinese national badminton team, Lin Dan alone chose Yonex, and became the first badminton player to step outside the national team's sponsorship system.

Lin Dan has also begun learning how to run himself as a business. Shooting photo spreads for magazines, endorsing Montblanc, founding his own underwear brand — all of it shows he means to march into the commercial world. Whether he can do it well is not yet known; business and sport are two entirely different fields. And for Lin Dan right now, the thing that really matters is still winning Olympic gold, the most important foundation for any business he builds afterwards.

(Intern reporter Cao Yajun contributed to this article.)