Opinion – Sandro Macedo: For sponsors, marijuana cannot, but can it be anti-vaccine?

Sports sponsors are like a force of nature. Or greater, because they are unnatural, although they move with the tide.

They are capable of things that sometimes even the government of a country cannot. And they are strict, because losing customers is much worse than losing an athlete. Image is everything.

Lance Armstrong felt the wrath of sponsors as soon as he confessed to using doping for much of his cycling career. Nike, associated with the athlete, abandoned him on the spot… just like the others. boom.

Tiger Woods, golf star, was involved in a sex scandal and admitted that he cheated on his wife with several women. Tag Hauer, Gatorade and Gillette didn’t like it. boom.

At the time Manchester United star striker Wayne Rooney cheated on his pregnant wife. Coke said it can’t. boom.

Michael Phelps won 28 Olympic medals in swimming and decided to smoke marijuana to relax. For Kellog’s, it didn’t come cheap. boom.

Michael Vick, famous retired quarterback, was involved in dog fights. In addition to all animal welfare societies, Nike, Reebok and Coca-Cola didn’t like it. Triple boom.

In almost every case, the sports stars did blunders that only harmed them. They scratched the image, and paid the price. Financial too.

But what about Novak Djocovid? I mean, Djokovic? While he doesn’t get immunized and diminishes the importance of the vaccine for his millions of followers, he does not only harm him but many more people. And where were the tennis player’s sponsors with their fat checks now?

Shouldn’t serving as a poster boy for the vaccine be worse than using marijuana or cheating on your better half (with all due respect to your better half)?

Long before the vaccine, Djokovic hosted a friendly tournament in his country. He and the woman were defiled. Maybe a lot of fans too. But no sponsor gave a damn.

In Australia, Djokovic didn’t have a vaccine or semancol tea. If I had — the tea — I would have had the dignity to at least say something like, “OK, I understand the rules, I don’t agree with them and I withdraw from the tournament.” But no, like a good denier, he tried to impose his will on an entire country. And for other deniers, he took on the air of a martyr.

Djokovic has already earned about US$ 150 million in his career (R$ 813 million at the current price) using the racket. But it earns a lot more with sponsors. In 2021 alone, according to Forbes, it was about $30 million, courtesy of Lacoste (the main), Peugeot, Hublot, Asics, Raiffeisen Bank (an Austrian bank), among others.

After a lot of pressure on social media, Lacoste decided to call the tennis player “to talk” this week. Guess: If there’s someone in the room with a syringe with the Lacoste logo threatening to take away the sponsorship, Djoko gets the shot. By the way, isn’t Lacoste that brand that has the figure of the crocodile, the alligator’s cousin, as a symbol? Is the tennis player afraid of turning into the reptile?

Tweet by André Rizek, journalist for SporTV, which is worth reproducing: “I see that Alexandre Pato praised Djokovic for ‘not submitting to the experimental sting’. Well… I would say that experimental, really, is taking a penalty with a cavadinha against Dida. A serious health agency would never authorize such a penalty.

And just remembering that it was the sponsors, after social pressure, who threatened Santos when the club tried last year to rehire Robinho, a striker convicted of rape.