The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) is betting on the country’s pride in Team Canada athletes to drive the success of its recent Olympic sponsorship deal, says Brock University expert Michael Naraine.

The Crown-owned gambling entity recently became the Official Ontario Lottery Partner of Team Canada for the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The partnership with the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Committees (COC, CPC) is the first of its kind for the OLG. The Summer Olympics in Paris are also the first Games to take place since the regulation of single-game sports betting in Ontario.

“We’re seeing a lot more strategies around sports betting, and one of them is sponsorship,” says Naraine, Associate Professor of Sport Management at Brock. “There is almost a century-and-a-half now of equity in the Olympic rings — it is elusive and exclusive — and aligning yourselves with Canada’s team, whether it’s Olympic or Paralympic, has a lot of power to it.”

The OLG’s Olympic campaign features Team Canada athletes Andre De Grasse, Penny Oleksiak, Maggie Mac Neil and Jillian Weir, among others who have received funding from Ontario’s Quest for Gold program. The campaign’s messaging focuses on the OLG’s proceeds — including those from its new $2 Instant Quest for Gold lottery game — going directly back into initiatives that help fund athletes in their journey to reach the podium.

The partnership may raise a few eyebrows, however, says Naraine. Aligning oneself with what he calls the “sin” categories — like gambling, tobacco or cannabis, for instance — could be perceived as a risky move for an organization that places ethics and integrity as keystones of its brand identity.

“It’s an interesting dynamic because this is not something that we’ve seen before in the Olympic movement here in Canada,” he says. “Sports integrity is a very hot topic issue as sports gambling is becoming more prominent here in North America, as well, so that is a bit of the worry.”

What the OLG is banking on, however, is finding what’s known as congruence: an alignment between the values of the sport property and the sponsoring brand, Naraine says.

Fundamentally, if they share the same values, the sponsorship should work, he adds.

“If you look at the press release that the COC put out, they literally used the word gambling zero times,” Naraine says. “What the OLG does talk about, though, is the shared values of supporting Canadian athletes, and so that’s the congruent foundation. That’s the glue that holds it together.”

Naraine says these types of partnerships may become more common as the sports industry prepares for a potential shift in funding priorities that could take place if there is a change in government.

“There is this expectation that the amount of funding that will be going towards sport organizations is going to dramatically decrease,” he says.

With that in mind, he says some organizations are preparing to move to a scaled-down model used by Team USA, where all the money raised by its Olympic and Paralympic teams is sponsorship-driven.

“The sports system is in a very, very peculiar place right now and the next election is going to have knock-on effects for the way Canadian sport looks, operates and feels,” Naraine says. “Even though some of these companies’ products or services might be contradictory to the message that you’re sending, it really comes back to the financial implications of sport: money is tight everywhere.”