Olympians tiptoe around sponsorship ban

Want to see the glasses and goggles that aerials skier Lydia Lassila and snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis wore at the Sochi Olympics? If you go to the website of the company that manufactures their eyewear, you might be in for a shock.

On the Australian section of Bolle.com, photos of Lassila, Jacobellis and other competitors at the Sochi Games have been digitally blurred to obscure their faces.

This isn't a throwback to the days when Soviet propaganda chiefs airbrushed people out of photos. It's an extreme application of regulations meant to make sure that companies such as Bolle, which do not sponsor the Olympics, don't get to advertise off the back of them.

So the Olympics are a Pepsi-free zone, because Coca-Cola is an Olympic sponsor. In Sochi's Olympic Park only Visa cards work for payments or in ATMs, again because Visa is a sponsor. At one Sochi venue an Olympic worker even slapped a white sticker over the Dell logo on a journalist's laptop, because the computer manufacturer isn't an Olympic sponsor.

The IOC's top global sponsors pay up to $100 million each for exclusive four-year deals.

For Olympians the dense and confusing thicket of rules severely restricting advertising is a serious issue. In theory, Olympians could be disqualified if they use the games to plug nonapproved brands. The International Olympic Committee even holds athletes responsible for how their sponsors behave outside the Olympic bubble.

So athletes cannot allow their images to be used for any commercial advertising, whether Olympic-related or not, for the duration of a specific blackout period.

Pandora, the jewelry company that sponsors U.S. figure skaters Ashley Wagner and Gracie Gold, isn't an Olympic sponsor. It has had to put on hold an advertising campaign it prepared with Gold and to stop running magazine ads that showed Wagner, their agents said.

For Sochi the rule applies from nine days before the opening ceremony until three days after the closing: Jan. 30 to Feb. 26.

Athletes aren't all happy about such policies. U.S. skier Ted Ligety labels the rule "barbaric." Before the blackout kicked in, he tweeted: "I want to give a shoutout to my sponsors that supported me for years yet arent allowed to get OLY love."

Figure skater Gold left one of her favorite jackets at home because it was made by Pandora. She said she did not want to risk falling afoul of the "very frightening" thicket of rules.

Norwegian online store Ludo, which sells everything from clothes to electronics, used a product featuring cross-country skier Marit Bjoergen on its website early in the games.

Norwegian IOC member Gerhard Heiberg told Norwegian media the ad could lead to "consequences," including Bjoergen's being stripped of the gold.

Ludo pulled the image immediately, and the issue died down.