Last but not least: Telekom hangs up the receiver

 
After ARD and ZDF, this year's "Spritztour de France" was apparently also too much for the sponsor of the German cycling team, Deutsche Telekom: on Tuesday afternoon, it ended its sponsorship of the T-Mobile men's and women's teams with immediate effect. "We have decided to take this step," said Telekom board member Hamid Akhavan, "in order to distance ourselves and the T-Mobile brand from the latest doping findings in sport and especially in cycling. Given our long-standing support for professional cycling and the recent progress made by Bob Stapleton's management, this has not been easy for us." According to the company, however, it intends to continue its efforts in the anti-doping fight (Stapleton speaks, somewhat exaggeratedly, of the team's "leading role in the anti-doping fight"), which is a disaster for German cycling, but perhaps a sensible solution for Telekom. The unsportsmanlike behavior of several athletes in the German cycling team became a burden for the Telekom name, even more so after the public broadcasters ARD and ZDF, as moral authorities, stopped live coverage of the Tour de France after the Sinkewitz case. One is inclined to believe that Telekom's departure was inevitable. If you take the moralizing press as your guide, you are probably right. But if you look at surveys, things look a little different. According to a survey conducted by the consulting firm Sport+Markt
61 percent of those surveyed (out of a total of 1,000) said that their current financial backers would stick by the team even in times of crisis. Only one in five said they would not. And that was after the Spritztour de France. No sponsorship agreement mentions loyalty to the Nibelung, but after Telekom had benefited from the popularity of cycling for years, this departure leaves a somewhat stale aftertaste. In view of the above survey results, a further commitment by Telekom could have been worthwhile.