On October 30th, I presented “Is Sponsorship a Sin?” at the annual Night of Lies in Canmore. It’s a fun evening of heckling, mockery & ridicule. Given the nature of the event (& the typical amount of beer consumed), I thought examining professional climbing would be a good fit. I’ve included a video of my talk below.

I sent this video to a few friends that weren’t there, and my friend Dave Karl, a sales rep in the northeast US, raised a good point:

Good slide show but I disagree with the three-test rule. I have IFMGA & AMGA Mountain Guides that I sponsor that are totally worthy. Their personal (non-guided) climbing accomplishments may not be noteworthy among their elite peers, but they don’t bullshit either, and they do help sell product. These guides help the entire sport and climbing community by educating the public and introducing new participants to climbing. A good mountain guide can be a great sponsorship investment.

This is a good point, and one I wish I had made during my talk. I agree with Dave that there are folks out there worthy of support that may not be on the cutting edge of climbing. They are typically local, grassroots climbers or industry-folk like guides that are in front of the target market on a daily basis. I have no objections to these athletes being supported, either by sales reps or by brands, on an informal basis.

My beef is with climbers that are put on an official, publicized pedestal by the sponsoring brand (and with climbers that are striving to be put on that pedestal) — via blogs, websites, magazines, slideshows, etc — but who really haven’t done anything of note to warrant their elevated status.

This latter group seems to be growing in numbers, and that trend needs to be reversed.

Enjoy the show…

Sponsorship Slideshow from Scott Semple on Vimeo.

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“Self-promotion is bad.”

No, bullshit is bad. Self-promotion happens everywhere and it’s smart. We just don’t like it mixed with our idealistic pursuits, of which climbing is one.

“Sponsorship is selling out.”

Only if the person has previously committed to not being sponsored. Otherwise, it’s just psychological projection on the part of the critic.

“Sponsored climbers are pressured by brands to perform.”

I don’t believe it happens. If there’s any pressure, it’s self-inflicted by the athlete. I was sponsored for five years, and the only pressure I felt was what I put on myself.

“Sponsored climbers get paid.”

I wish. Sharma and Hirayama maybe. Some retainers are paid, but they are very rarely enough to live on. (Unless you live in your car, don’t put gas in it and eat dog food.)

“If I’m rad enough, they’ll just call me up and give me free gear.”

Sorry, this ain’t the NBA, sugar. If you want it, you have to go after it.

“Sponsorship has no influence on me.”

Only in a blind taste test.

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1. Is Sponsorship a Sin?

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether his is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

- Francois A. R. Chateaubriand

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NO. But bullshit is.

After nearly 15 years of climbing, I rarely read climbing magazines. I have no subscriptions. If I do pick up a magazine, I usually only look at the pictures. The words usually make me nauseous.

My experienced climber friends are the same way. Some of them haven’t looked at a climbing magazine in years.

The more you climb, the less you’re interested in reading the same recycled stories with the same characters smiling from new faces. And the less you can tolerate the self-promotion that comes from white lies and self-serving exaggerations in hopes of becoming (or staying) sponsored. And those indulgences are rampant and widespread.

If sponsorship isn’t backed up by a legitimate accomplishment that is significant to the sport, then being rewarded for something insignificant is sad and undeserved. And it’s immoral, because it creates a facade, and facades are lies.

This happens more often than you might think. Many of the athletes you often see in climbing magazines are phenomenal at self-promotion, but range from average to crap at actually climbing. Ice, mixed and alpine climbing have the worst offenders. (Rock climbing is usually too consistent, popular and objective for lies to last long.) Truth is, many climbers are sponsored for what they say, or how well they’re known, rather than for what they’ve done.

The problem stems from the fact that the “athlete” is the performer, but also the judge and the journalist. A lack of objectivity and a lack of integrity combine to create opportunistic self-promotion masquerading as journalism. The result is that average achievements beget above-average attention. (All those “Hot Flashes” you read, written in the third person, are often written by the climbers themselves.) Few other disciplines would tolerate such a lack of objectivity, but no direct access to the “feats” of accomplishment makes us dependant on it.

Sponsorship is only defensible when the degree of self-promotion is equal to or less than the significance of the achievement. When Good Climber does something Rad and says, “This is Rad”, that’s fine. Kudos. Too often though, Wanna Be Famous does something mediocre and says, “This is Rad! Really! I swear!”

The sad fact about our sport is that genuine devotees are the exception, not the rule. True athletes, masters and visionaries do exist, but only some of them are sponsored. Most are not.

Disclosure: Yes, I was a sponsored climber. I resigned from all of my sponsorships in December 2007. I am happy I did.

UPDATE, October 22nd: After some dialog with editors of some of the climbing magazines, I see now that the first few paragraphs of this post may seem critical of the magazines. That is not what I intended. My beef is not with the magazines, but with opportunistic climbers of questionable integrity and the brands that support them. It’s not the magazines’ responsibility to police our sport. It’s my hope that the climbers themselves will do that, and then the brands will follow suit.

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“Who are you upsetting? Because if you’re not upsetting anyone, you’re not changing the status quo.”

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