The Olympics breathe life into niche sports. How do they win sponsors in other years?

When was the last time you watched a good old-fashioned game of badminton, a canoe slalom race, or an archery tournament? If you ever did, chances are it was around three years ago at the last Summer Olympics, when sports that most people would usually never imagine finding on ESPN suddenly got thrust into the international spotlight.

For some niche sports, the Olympics and Paralympics provide a welcome boost in sponsorship interest that doesn’t tend to come during non-Olympic years.

“Interest in general in the sport, it’s almost like it stays pretty flat, and then you have the Olympic Games, and it jumps in magnitudes,” Martin Branick, CEO of USA Team Handball, told Marketing Brew. “The closer we’re getting to 2028, the more we see a pickup in interest from corporate partners.”

While the Olympics and Paralympics certainly bring welcome attention to niche sports, their national governing bodies (NGBs)—as well as individual athletes—are still working year-round to make sure they can attract fans and sponsors without relying solely on the prestige of the games.

Training season

For USA Fencing, which has secured Paris qualifications across multiple men’s and women’s disciplines, the attention that comes from an Olympic and Paralympic year “certainly…has been helpful” for getting sponsors, CEO Phil Andrews said. In May of last year, the NGB announced its first non-endemic sponsor, Naked Wines, and it has seen a “pretty significant increase” in brand partners outside of the fencing space over the past couple of years, he said. Sponsors for the league include Avis, Mount Sinai, and Hilton, which came on as the organization’s official hotel partner last month and marked the NGB’s sixth new sponsorship deal this year.

In 2020, USA Team Handball, one of the county’s smallest NGBs, locked down a sponsorship with Verizon, its biggest corporate partnership in recent history, shortly after it was announced that Los Angeles would host the 2028 Olympics and Paralympics, according to Branick. USA Team Handball did not qualify a men’s or women’s team for Paris, but with LA hosting the next summer games, they qualify automatically as hosts.

That news, as well as the fact that the US qualified for the 2021, 2023, and 2025 Handball World Championships, made the NGB “a lot more interesting to these corporate partners,” he said.

USA Artistic Swimming landed a two-year deal with hair-care brand Tresemmé in early 2023 that was meant to “support the team’s training, competition schedule, and its pursuit of qualification for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris,” according to the NGB. It also led to the brand featuring a handful of American artistic swimmers in its 2023 Super Bowl ad.

Even sports that are a bit more well-known, like swimming and boxing, use the Olympics as something of a selling point for sponsors.

“The five rings is the most recognized brand in the world,” Mike McAtee, executive director and CEO of USA Boxing, said. “That understanding, that once every four years the world will have its eyes on you, that’s why Nike is our sponsor…It opens up so many doors.”

Sweetener

But dropping the word “Olympics” in partnership talks every few years isn’t enough to sustain the sponsorship business on its own. For one, the NGBs aren’t selling the games themselves—that’s up to the national and international committees, and to NBCUniversal, which has the rights to air the games in the US through 2032 and sells ads for its digital and linear coverage. Beyond that, there’s no guarantee that national teams will always qualify.

Athletes and NGBs also have to navigate Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter, which dictates what kinds of marketing can happen during the “Games Period.” In light of that, USA Team Handball emphasizes to brands the value of being seen as helping athletes throughout their training journeys, not just during the games, Branick said.

USA Fencing, meanwhile, uses its trove of membership data—which includes everything from household income, marital status, education level, political affiliation, and shopping preferences—as a selling point for sponsors, according to Andrews.

“That is the pitch, because we can’t deliver eyeballs,” he said. “We don’t have the large viewership numbers that some of the major leagues might, so what we’re really selling is direct access to the demographic that you need to target.”

For USA Boxing, the diversity of its membership base can be a draw for sponsors, as is the potential for brands to generate goodwill, McAtee said.

“Boxing gyms are in the toughest neighborhoods; boxing gyms teach self-confidence; boxing gyms teach respect,” he said. “A lot of our sponsors understand it’s not only [about] making money…but also the corporate social responsibility.”

Anita Alvarez, an American artistic swimmer who’s gearing up to compete in her third Olympics and who’s recently started reaching out to brands for deals of her own, said her pitch primarily centers around her engaged social media following, which spikes around any competition season—not just during the Olympics.

“A lot of brands will reach out to us Olympic athletes [only] during the Olympic year, and sometimes they only want a one-year partnership, or just for these few months leading up to the Olympics,” Alvarez said. “They forget that we’re still doing our jobs and competing at the highest level every other year as well, and that their brand, or their logo, or their product, can still have a huge reach of audience in those in-between years.”