Visa’s Olympic sponsorship starts
While LOCOG is still thinking about what it might do for the 2012 London games, Visa are already ramping up their Worldwide Partner status with their schools programme called the Visa Olympics of the Imagination (VOI). VOI is an international arts programme that started in 1994. The theme for the 2008 Beijing games is global unity with a tagline, One World One Dream.
Visa has been an Olympic sponsor for 20 years - their first involvement was at the 1998 summer games held in Seoul (South Korea) and Calgary Winter Olympics held the same year. One of the odd things about the Olympics is that since 1992, the summer and winter games have been held in different years, although we can’t seem to find out why. Visa are already committed as a major sponsor of the 2012 games, although the scale of the financial commitment is now so great that few companies can afford to participate. Kodak, an Olympic sponsor for over a century, announced that they would no longer be a sponsor after 2008.