Winning Olympic Family told to leave two members at home
To all blog and/or website owners: Please help this family get the Beijing Olympics Tour prize they were promised. This issue has now been resolved, see Good News for Olympic Family Tour Beijing
When I wrote last week that something about the “Olympic Families Tour Beijing” campaign smelt foul, I had no idea just how foul!
I learned this afternoon that the winning “foreign” families have now been told that only three members of their registered families get to go on the promised tour. For Vicente Antonio Marino, father of the top “foreign” family, this means the family will have to leave two of the five family members behind in Argentina.
In an email I received this afternoon from Vicente Antonio Marino, he explained that despite being allowed to enter and win the competition with his family of five, The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) is now telling him that only three of the five family members can participate in the China tour they have won.
The announced competition rules clearly stated that: “The participants must be families with at least three members” (source: The Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games) – i.e. three or more family members.
Furthermore at least two (unclear about the “go Hong Kong” family) of the total five winning “foreign” families have more than three family members and were not only allowed to participate but also announced as winners less than two weeks ago.
So if now only three members per family are allowed on the tour, this will be a highly controversial change of rules after the competition has finished.
Such a grotesque change of rules that I have written BOCOG’s media and communication department asking for confirmation that this is all just a misunderstanding:
Sent to BOCOG’s media and communication department on 16 July 2007:
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am the owner of the travel site The Travel Cooler (www.thecooler.info/travel) and have previously covered your Olympic Families Tour Beijing competition on my site.
I am very disappointed to have learned from one of your winning families that the number of family members allowed to participate in the tour has been reduced to 3. According to the winning family, they have received communication from the BOCOG event department stating the following:
“Taking the security issues and the limit of total participants into consideration, the member of each family should be equal or less than 3 people”.
This is, as you will be aware, in contradiction with the announced competition rules, which clearly stated that families wishing to participate should be of “at least 3 members”. The winning families with more than 3 family members were allowed to participate and declared as winners without any mention of such a change in rules.
It seems the only reasonable explanation must be that the communication is a mistake and that all members of the winning families will be allowed on the promised tour.
Please could you confirm that there has not been a change in rules to limit the number to 3 family members and that indeed all registered members of the winning families will of course be allowed on the tour?
Many thanks and in anticipation,
Anni Poulsen
www.thecooler.info/travel
Please help
If you own a website, a blog or in any way can help Vicente Antonio Marino’s family go on the tour they were promised, please do so by publishing the story on your site or by writing BOCOG asking them to reconsider (contact details can be found here: http://en.beijing2008.cn/bocog/contactus/index.shtml).
If you publish the story please leave a link to your article in the comment box below. This issue has now been resolved, see Good News for Olympic Family Tour Beijing.
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6 Responses to “Winning Olympic Family told to leave two members at home”
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Few weeks ago, this man also contacted me to publish an e-mail on the Google Group of Hospitality Club. Since the request was to help him get more clicks in a site, I decided not to publish it (It’s a competition based on the numbers of clicks you can get, not based on merit or whatever.)
They never replied the e-mail I had sent to them.
Now I see they have contacted You; eve if I have a travel blog, I’m from Argentina, I won’t give them more advertisement, there are more important things to do than to ask for 5 airplane tickets insted of 3, for a click (only click) contest online.
Your choice Aqui C. Just to set the record straight, according to the organizers the competition was not just based on the public votes, but also judged by a panel.
Anyway for me it’s a matter of principles and far beyond how this family got people to vote for them. Attracting votes any way you could was part of the competition and all the participants knew that when they entered.
The point is that The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) are cheating. The Beijing Games have received loads of PR from this competition and now they have turned around and refused to honour their promises. Now I would be naive to think that everything about the Olympics is above board, but for an organizing committee to cheat so openly is one step too far as far as I’m concerned.
I agree with You, that what the BOCOG is doing is not correct. But in the e-mail the family sent to me, they were saying “we are from a ‘poor’ country, we wont get as much clicks as someone from the US because our internet access is slower, etc.” So for me the message they were broadcasting was completely wrong, I think the aim wasn’t just beating another family criying for what we don’t have. The thing that bothered me was that they were complaining, not just trying to get more clicks, and that’s, unfotunatelly, so common here in Argentina.
That’s why I think it’s important to say the Comittee is doing “strange” things, but I don’t like the idea of supporting the argentinian family.
Fair enough. I can’t really comment on who did what to win, so I’ll stay out of that discussion.
My beef remains with BOCOG, who, if it’s any consolation, seem quite happy with their decision judging from their lack of response.
As of 16:00 GMT today, this issue has now been resolved. See Good News for Olympic Family Tour Beijing.
OK, well finally they got what they wanted, and the committee behaved as everyone exptected.