Speedo sweetens deal for Olympic swimmer

Speedo is banking on publicity from offering a $1 million award.
WASHINGTON POST
The three Olympic swimmers and their agents, the hairstylist, the makeup people and the public relations man from the swimsuit company are crammed into a room of a swanky hotel overlooking New York's Times Square.
Michael Phelps, who is aiming for seven gold medals at the Summer Games in Athens, is checking himself out in the bedroom mirror.
He and the other swimmers are about to help Speedo launch a new line of racing suits before a national TV audience. All have Speedo endorsement deals.
As they wait, one reviews Speedo's talking points. Phelps already knows the mantra by heart. "It's like, 'Repeat Speedo as many times as possible,'" he jokes.
An hour later, during his 55-second dialogue with "Today" show host Matt Lauer, when Phelps tells millions of viewers he is looking forward to the Olympics, he deftly adds, "This year is a very exciting year for me, and Speedo."
Twenty-five years after the Olympic movement allowed professional athletes to compete in the games, Phelps has become the epitome of the modern American corporate Olympian.
How it's done
Many Olympic athletes get corporate stipends or support from companies that believe such associations help sell their products. For most, says Bob Condron, director of media services for the U.S. Olympic Committee, the funding pays the bills and allows them to train. Phelps, he said, is at another "extreme of the spectrum."
Although he's only 18, is less than a year out of high school and still lives with his mother in a Baltimore County town house, he's already a millionaire.
He's been a professional swimmer since he was 16. He is the youngest male to turn pro in his sport. He has sponsors, agents, lawyers, accountants, deals, charities, obligations, his own Web site, and his own logo, a jazzy-looking MP over the name Michael Phelps. He also has looks, poise and smarts. This summer, thanks to a cascade of corporate marketing deals, he could become the richest professional swimmer.
Phelps is aiming to match, or beat, the record of American swimming legend Mark Spitz, who won seven gold medals at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Such a feat, never equaled, would be glorious enough.
But Speedo, with whom Phelps already has a multimillion-dollar, multiyear endorsement deal, has added the promise of another $1 million if he pulls it off.
It has been a brilliant marketing coup, generating extensive press coverage that has catapulted Phelps into the public spotlight as no other swimmer since Spitz.
In addition to the Speedo endorsement, which Phelps signed in September 2001, he landed lucrative deals with Visa, the credit card giant, in 2002; Argent, an Irvine, Calif.-based mortgage company in 2003; and this year with AT & amp;T Wireless and the energy food company PowerBar.
Cooperation
Phelps has been as conscientious with his commercial obligations as with his physical training. His advisers say he's been a quick study in the unfamiliar world of business.
"Being able to work with sponsors, Speedo, Argent and Visa ... if you're away from home and you're with them, they're a family away from home," Phelps says.
"We're pretty much all in this together, the sponsors and myself ... working to get at the top of the game and to stay at the top of the game."
To gain true commercial stardom, he must first live up to his potential in Athens, says his agent, Peter Carlisle. Then he must then surmount the Olympic athlete's traditional marketing dilemma: Can he reach the masses?
"The swimming world, forget what they think," Carlisle says. "Olympic world? Really forget that."
The general public is what matters, and these athletes usually have a narrow window of marketability that comes around only with each four-year Olympic cycle, says Carlisle, who heads the Olympic division for the sports marketing firm of Octagon, based in McLean, Va.
The challenge: "Can you keep the ... marketability alive beyond the window? Can you potentially enable that athlete to transcend the Olympic space altogether?"
Though he's never won an Olympic medal, Phelps has what the company calls its "richest swimwear sponsorship of all time," one his agent says is probably worth $2 million to $6 million through 2009.
His choice
By 2001, Phelps was so good he had a serious decision to make: He could earn big-time endorsement money, but then he'd have to forgo swimming in college, where professional athletes may not compete, and lose any athletic scholarship.
Most top high school swimmers choose college, says Stu Isaac, Speedo's senior vice president of team sales and marketing. It is a rare few whose prospects are good enough to make it worthwhile to turn pro beforehand.
But Speedo agreed to pay Phelps' future college tuition plus endorsement money. The initial contract went out to 2005. Last fall it was extended to 2009 -- sweetened with the $1 million seven-gold-medal Spitz challenge.
That idea, Isaac says, originated with Carlisle, Phelps' agent.
"It's created a huge buzz," says Evan Morgenstein, president of Premier Management Group, which represents a host of other topflight swimmers. "Speedo's the big winner; we'll see if Michael is."