The fiercest battles at the Olympics are fought not on the track or in the pool but in the world of big budgets, marketing and - of course - corruption, writes Michael O'Keeffe

The Olympics are now synonymous with multi-million euro broadcasting rights, official sponsors, huge advertising revenue and massive funds generated from every possible marketing tool.

Olympic revenue is phenomenal and the sheer scale of the games is breathtaking. The first modern games in Athens, in 1896, attracted merely 241 athletes competing in 43 events across nine sports. This year's games will involve 10,500 athletes from more than 200 countries competing at 35 venues in 28 sports. Although ticket sales are reported to be extremely slow at present, around 5.3 million spectators are expected to attend the games, which begin next Friday. An estimated four billion television viewers will also tune in.

Make no mistake, this is the biggest show on earth.

Total revenue from the Athens Quadriennium (the games and their four year lead-in) will reach a staggering $4.3 billion (€3.6 billion), up from $3.7 billion in Sydney and $2.6 billion in Atlanta four years previous. For those in business, the real battles of the games are fought not on the track or in the pool but in a world of big budgets, marketing, product placement and - of course - corruption.

Corruption has severely tainted the Olympics in recent decades. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) dictates Olympic revenue and has done so since the start of the modern games as the supreme authority of the Olympic movement.

It is the merger of sport and money that has fostered nepotism, vote-selling and bribery as cities fight to host the games. Some analysts have explained away the IOC's corruption as an inevitable by-product of the vast sums of money that surround the games.

Critics lament the loss of innocence and the distortion of the founding ideals of the games but understanding the IOC's evolution from its inception in 1894 is critical to understanding the big business of the games. The collision of tradition and modernity has not been without its trauma.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin established the modern Olympic movement in Paris in 1894 and original members were not paid but volunteered their services to the IOC. The IOC was structured and functioned like a private and exclusive gentlemen's club and it continued in this vein for the best part of 75 years.

Operating under Swiss law, the now extended 124-member organisation has more in common with a secret society or Masonic lodge than a modern global business corporation, let alone a democratic body elected by and representing the interests of athletes and sports fans.

IOC members are chosen by the president and the 11-member executive board by secret ballot, rather than by national athletic or sporting bodies. Members can only be removed by the IOC itself. Such a case of self-regulation has not escaped its critics. Rupert Murdoch, in a letter to his own Australian newspaper in 1999, attacked the IOC and claimed that, "the only way forward is to embrace reform and that means changing management culture to meet the requirements of a modern corporation that the IOC must become".

There remains a sense of "untouchability" around the IOC and its delegates, epitomised by its honorary president, Mr Juan Antonio Samaranch. The scion of a wealthy Barcelona textile family, and head of the IOC for more than 20 years, his career as a sports administrator is inextricably linked to the evolution of the IOC.

Mr Samaranch was an enthusiastic member of the Spanish fascist movement in his teens and in 1966 was appointed the country's sports minister by General Franco. He remained a loyal Francoist until the dictator's death in 1975. Two years later he was made ambassador to Russia, a position he allegedly used to establish contacts with Soviet sporting bureaucrats, thus securing the votes he needed to be elected IOC president in 1980.

High profile scandals in later years have led to the departures of some of the more notorious delegates and have led to some reform, but past practice is not been easily shaken.

The IOC managed the games in a haphazard fashion until the late 1960s, when the spiralling costs associated with staging the games began to produce serious financial problems for the IOC and the host cities.

Few, if any cities, made a profit from hosting the games before the 1980s. The disastrous Rome Games of 1960 were a wake-up call to the IOC and, when the Montreal games lost $1 billion in 1976, it became apparent that the IOC had to change: the games were dragged into a new world of commercialism and profit.

New international players in the form of multinational corporations began to enter the scene at this time, anxious to use the event to promote their products or sell advertising space.

The Olympics were a sitting target for big corporations with huge marketing budgets, and a captive world audience of the scale the Olympics provides does not come around too often. This coincided with Mr Samaranch's election to the IOC presidency.

With the backing of major US and European corporations such as Adidas, Coca-Cola and, most importantly, the giant media and television companies, Mr Samaranch began to transform the Olympics into the mega-bucks spectacle you will tune into throughout this month.

The IOC had previously attempted to maintain the Olympics amateur status and prevent commercial sponsorship taking over. Mr Avery Brundage, one of Mr Samaranch's predecessors, regularly wrote letters instructing competitors and teams not to wear company logos on uniforms. A "Commission for the Protection of the Olympic Emblems" was used to stop exploitation of the games.

Under Mr Samaranch, all this changed. Eventually, Mr Samaranch secured enough support within the IOC to take office as president in 1980. He quickly expanded the organisation's membership base, carefully appointing IOC delegates who would support opening up the games to professional athletes and private sponsorship.

In 1981, the Olympic's amateur-only status was watered down when international sports federations were given the right to determine which athletes could compete. This set in motion irresistible pressures with endorsement dollars and commercial deals.

In 1983, the IOC voted to open up the games to company sponsorship. The current IOC Marketing Commission was initially established as the New Sources of Financing Commission, before adopting its current guise in 1997. Its mission was to "help perpetuate the work of the Olympic movement by providing resources, programmes and financial support". That it did, and almost immediately.

The Los Angeles "Coca-Cola" Games of 1984 were the turning point in the history of the Olympic movement. Not only did the games, now open to commercialism, break even, they made an operating profit of $215 million.

The profits came mostly from selling exclusive rights to various corporate sponsorship categories and that year saw the first official Olympic drink, the official clothing manufacturer, official snack food and much more. The Olympic movement had learned quickly.

It may have been crass commercialisation and the once strictly amateur games may have lost some of their identity, but it was perceived to make financial sense and the big corporations took notice. But none of this would have been possible without television.

Television has been the vehicle for the growth of the Olympic movement, much in the same way that the introduction of Sky money into British football ushered in an era of huge expenditure and revenue for the British clubs in the mid 1990s.

Hitler's 1936 games were the first to be televised in the area around Berlin. The London Games of 1948 were the first to introduce the concept of a broadcast fee. From $50,000 for Mexico in 1968 to $636 million for Barcelona in 1992 to the $1,476.9 million for Athens, the broadcast fees are now astronomical.

The IOC has earned more than $10 billion in TV broadcastrevenue in the past 20 years and television now makes up half of the Olympic marketing revenue.

Increased revenue over the past two decades has provided an unprecedented financial base for the games to grow and, this year, more than 200 countries will take pictures from the games, with NBC splashing out $793 million for the right to transmit.

Through television and commercialisation, the IOC transformed the Olympic movement from a small non-profit organisation to a multimillion-dollar enterprise. The model developed through the 1980s was stunning in its effectiveness.

Beneath the television rights lie several layers of sponsorship rights, the most lucrative being the so-called TOP (The Olympic Partner) programme, managed and negotiated by the IOC.

Created in 1985 after the successful LA Games, TOP targets large multinational corporations such as Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Visa, Xerox and Panasonic, and offers exclusive worldwide marketing rights.

TOP allows the use of Olympic imagery on products, hospitality opportunities at the games, preferential access to Olympic broadcast advertising and on-site franchising and sales.

Before Seoul, TOP was worth $95 million, for Athens this has grown to $603 million.

Further revenue comes from the Olympic Supplier Programme. It carries more restricted marketing rights but allows for the provision of basic supports and services to the IOC and to national committees. The Supplier Programme does not include direct support for the staging of the games, rather it is intended to assist the IOC in its governance of the Olympic movement and in the support of athletes.

Examples of this include Daimler Chrysler, which provides transport to the IOC, or Mizuno, which provides clothing for the Olympic staff.

The local Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (OCOG) also manages its own marketing programmes targeted for the host country. This year, the domestic sponsorship programme will contribute €273 million to the Athens budget.

The IOC also allows for the production of officially licensed products and merchandise such as souvenirs, baseball caps, T-shirts and video games. The authorised sale of licensed merchandise will generate an estimated €530 million this year.

The remainder of the Olympic revenue is made up of ticket sales and they make up more than 10 per cent of the Organising Committee's revenue. Projected sales for this year's 5.3 million tickets are €183 million with prices ranging from €10 to €300 for events and up to €950 for ceremonies.

With dollar signs filling the horizon, the competition to host the games has become fiercer than ever before. Not alone have the games been proven to provide prestige to a nation but potentially millions of dollars in profit in the short and longer term.

Delegates determining which cities and corporations would be granted access to the massive profits and opportunities provided by the games, found a new world appearing at their feet. The IOC is now the power broker, the kingmaker.

But as the competition between cities and corporations intensified, and as the profits climbed, so to did the opportunities for bribery and corruption of individual IOC delegates and the organisation as a whole. IOC lobbyists and middlemen were paid handsomely to deliver votes - and that they did.

Allegations of corruption went from a whisper to a roar, with delegates bribed with anything from paintings to furs, to women or jobs for relatives.

Scandal at the Winter Olympics has ensured that Salt Lake City is now a byword for sleaze and corruption, but the selection of summer games in Sydney, Atlanta, Barcelona and Seoul are not without their dark secrets and allegations of mass bribery.

For all the talk of corruption, the IOC is thriving and Athens will be the richest games ever. Whether the money involved has moved the competition in such a way as to sunder it entirely from its past is a moot point.

The end of innocence has long since passed. At its essence, the games are about sport - but in all that surrounds them, money is what matters.