International pharmaceutical giant Glaxo Smithkline Beecham last night launched a major advertising campaign in the UK highlighting its role as providing the official anti-doping testing laboratory for the London Olympic Games.
This is the first time that such a service has been contracted to a private sector company.  It is being run in partnership with King’s College University and will employ 1,000 people to test as many as 400 samples a day throughout the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Anti-drug testing has traditionally been carried out by the International Olympic Committee in conjunction with the World Anti-Doping Agency and the respective national authority of each country that hosts the Games.
Every medallist, and as many as 50% of the athletes competing at the Games, will be tested for up to 240 banned substances.
GSK, which has a strong association with Irish sport through its Lucozade Sport brand ran the first advertisement last night and will roll the campaign out to poster sites across the country in the coming weeks.
The ad features a tagline of ‘The crowd is my only drug’ and shows five British athletes, including Marlon Devenish and Phillips Idowu preparing to compete.  The visual ad is a stylised representation of how the body is affected by adrenaline.  You can view the advertisement on the Sport for Business You Tube Channel.
Among the poster sites will be a building wrap on the company’s West London headquarters adjacent to the M4 motorway which will serve as a main artery for transporting athletes and fans from Heathrow Airport to the Olympic Games venues in East London.
The campaign is a brave move by the company and a massive vote of faith that the games, and its featured athletes in particular, will run ‘clean’.  No Irish athlete has ever tested positive at an Olympic Games but two horses have been disqualified.  Damage to the reputation of swimmer Michelle Smith occurred after her Olympic medal winning performances at the Atlanta Games of 1996.
The main Olympic sponsors have had a mixed run in to the games with McDonalds and Coca Cola, as well as Cadbury being accused of being inappropriate sponsors for the Games.  GSK will face its own issues later this week when a TV investigation of ‘performance drinks’ is expected to present an unfavourable case for their effectiveness.
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