Hello monty and All,
Not sure if it is an innovation in sports or a tradition in sports (boxing comes to mind) but help to get Triathlon off the ground in the early days came from some unlikely sources.
JDavid served time (as an early Bernie Madoff), Charles Keating served time, and Bud Light served beer.
=======================================================================
August 15, 1987
The Bud Light US Triathlon Series - a 13-city national tour of triathletes from around the country – comes to Boston tomorrow for the fifth year.
Boston is the 10th stop on the tour that began May 3 in Miami and ends September 27 at Hilton Head Island, S.C. The event is scheduled to begin at 7 a.m. with a 1.5-kilometer swim at Lake Cochituate State Park, followed by a 40K bike ride from the lake to the Esplanade and concluding with a 10K run along the Charles River…
Move over, Budweiser. There’s a new King of Beers in town.
Bud Light, once derided by critics as a watered-down “diet” version of Budweiser, recently overtook Bud as the top-selling beer in the United States.
Since Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc. introduced Bud Light in 1982, the brand consistently has been one of the company’s top-performing beers, while sales of Budweiser, its flagship, have steadily declined.** 1980s-early 1990s** • Bud Light aerobatic plane • Bud Light Daredevils acrobatic basketball show • Official beer of Professional Bowlers Association Tour and Ladies Professional Bowlers Tour
• Title sponsor of Bud Light Triathlon Seri
October 10, 1983
Triathlon’s Secret Sugar Daddy
The name is JDavid. It first appeared in connection with the triathlon on the front of Kathleen McCartney’s racing singlet at the 1982 Ironman in Hawaii. Since then, what’s officially known as Team JDavid/Hoover Racing has come to include five of the top six male triathletes and two of the five best women. Two-time Nice champion Mark Allen is on Team JDavid. So are Scott Molina, Scott and Jeff Tinley and three-time Olympic cyclist and 1980 Ironman champion John Howard. Among the biggest names, only Dave Scott is missing. McCartney and the woman who beat her in that '82 Ironman, Julie Leach, are the JDavid women.
But what is JDavid? It’s a 6-year-old, privately held La Jolla, Calif. specialty investment securities company named after co-founder Jerry David Dominelli, a fiercely private 41-year-old former Bache broker whose forte is foreign exchange trading. The Hoover belongs to JDavid’s other co-founder, former Del Mar, Calif. Mayor Nancy Hoover, who has lived with Dominelli the last four years and is considered a financial wizard in her own right. But despite JDavid’s deliberately low profile, it has become perhaps the most influential force in triathlons today. Its sponsorship of leading athletes has allowed them to train under ideal circumstances and has solidified a potentially unstable sport.
Philanthropy is nothing new to JDavid—almost from its inception it has consistently and silently supported sports and arts in San Diego. It took on triathlons when JDavid executive Ted Pulaski got the bug: He took up the sport himself (he has lost 33 pounds in two years), convinced Dominelli to sponsor McCartney and eventually passed the bug along to Hoover’s 20-year-old son, George, who finished fifth at Nice.
JDavid’s support is more than a family affair. Team JDavid has 20 members. Half are investors who are among the top five triathletes in their various age groups, and the other half are the Aliens, Molinas, McCartneys, Howards and Tinleys, who are treated as if they were Olympians in training. In addition to free clothes and equipment and all-expenses-paid trips to Nice and Hawaii for competitions, they receive a stipend of about $1,200 a month as well as help in buying $1,500 racing bikes. They also get group training trips to places like Colorado. Much of Team JDavid will arrive in Hawaii 10 days before the Ironman, with an entourage including a team bike mechanic and a cook.
The next move apparently will be into television. “JDavid has a great deal of influence,” says Barry Frank, senior corporate vice-president for Mark McCormack’s International Management Group, the organization that produced the last two made-for-TV triathlons in Nice. “Networks believe you’ve got to have a Tinley, Allen or Molina to have an attractive event.”
JDavid forced the cancellation of a CBS-IMG triathlon, which had been scheduled for this summer in Spain, when its team balked at running a marathon and the Nice run was shortened from 26.2 miles to the 18 miles preferred by triathletes when JDavid contributed $25,000 to the $75,000 prize money.
While JDavid’s clout is most evident at the top of the sport, its influence is also felt at the grass-roots level. JDavid investors put up $50,000 to launch Triathlon magazine, and JDavid funds have helped double circulation to 100,000 in only six months. This has brought new athletes into the sport, one reason races have increased from 200 to 1,000 in the last 12 months. So who cares if JDavid doesn’t like to talk? Actions—and money—speak louder than words.
AP
Published: June 25, 1985
A Federal judge today sentenced the financier J. David Dominelli to 20 years in prison for masterminding a multimillion-dollar investment swindle.
The sentencing came 17 months after the forced bankruptcy of La Jolla-based J. David & Company and its affiliates, the money trading and investment network that Mr. Dominelli founded in 1979.
‘‘It boggles the mind, the nature and extent of the fraud that was perpetrated,’’ District Judge William Enright said in sentencing Mr. Dominelli.
He also ordered Mr. Dominelli to pay restitution to the estimated 1,000 investors who lost about $80 million. Mr. Dominelli, who was convicted of four felony counts of fraud and tax evasion, also must pay more than $2 million in back taxes.
IIRC Charles Keating supported triathlon with a Bud Light race at his huge housing development in Arizona.
Charles Humphrey Keating Jr. (born December 4, 1923) is an American athlete, lawyer, real estate developer, banker, and financier, most known for his role in the savings and loan scandalof the late 1980s.
Keating was a champion swimmer for the University of Cincinnati in the 1940s. From the late 1950s through the 1970s, he was a noted anti-pornography crusader, founding decency organizations and serving as a dissenting member on the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.
In the 1980s, Keating ran American Continental Corporation and the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, and took advantage of loosened restrictions on banking investments. His enterprises began to suffer financial problems and were investigated by federal regulators. His association with, and financial contributions to, five U.S. senators to argue for preferential treatment from the regulators led to them being dubbed the Keating Five. When Lincoln failed in 1989, it cost the federal government over $3 billion and about 23,000 customers were left with worthless bonds. In the early 1990s, Keating was convicted in both federal and state courts of many counts of fraud,racketeering, and conspiracy. He served four and a half years in prison before those convictions were overturned in 1996. In 1999, he pleaded guilty to a more limited set of wire fraud andbankruptcy fraud counts, and was sentenced to the time he had already served.
In the 1980s, Keating ran American Continental Corporation and the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, and took advantage of loosened restrictions on banking investments. His enterprises began to suffer financial problems and were investigated by federal regulators. His association with, and financial contributions to, five U.S. senators to argue for preferential treatment from the regulators led to them being dubbed the Keating Five. When Lincoln failed in 1989, it cost the federal government over $3 billion and about 23,000 customers were left with worthless bonds. In the early 1990s, Keating was convicted in both federal and state courts of many counts of fraud,racketeering, and conspiracy. He served four and a half years in prison before those convictions were overturned in 1996. In 1999, he pleaded guilty to a more limited set of wire fraud andbankruptcy fraud counts, and was sentenced to the time he had already served.
The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The five senators, Alan Cranston (Democrat of California),Dennis DeConcini (Democrat of Arizona), John Glenn (Democrat of Ohio), John McCain(Republican of Arizona), and Donald W. Riegle, Jr. (Democrat of Michigan), were accused of improperly intervening in 1987 on behalf of Charles H. Keating, Jr., chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which was the target of a regulatory investigation by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB).
The FHLBB subsequently backed off taking action against Lincoln.
Lincoln Savings and Loan collapsed in 1989, at a cost of over $3 billion to the federal government. Some 23,000 Lincoln bondholders were defrauded and many elderly investors lost their life savings.
The substantial political contributions that Keating had made to each of the senators, totaling $1.3 million, attracted considerable public and media attention.
After a lengthy investigation, the Senate Ethics Committeedetermined in 1991 that Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, and Donald Riegle had substantially and improperly interfered with the FHLBB in its investigation of Lincoln Savings, with Cranston receiving a formal reprimand.
Senators John Glenn and John McCain were cleared of having acted improperly but were criticized for having exercised “poor judgment”.
Cheers,
Neal