Nike hypocrisy

Andreas Vou writes in Spiked,

...Recent comments made by another sports star, Turkish NBA player Enes Kanter, have exposed Nike’s lack of principle.

In the summer of 2016, around the same time as Kaepernick began his protests, an attempted coup against the Turkish government sparked a crackdown on dissenting voices by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Kanter is a longtime critic of the regime and a supporter of US-based Fetullah Gulen, who Erdogan blamed for the coup. And so he became a target.

The New York Knicks player had his Turkish passport revoked, and Erdogan issued a warrant for his arrest. Kanter’s father even had to disown him in a bid to safeguard their family.

Despite playing for a popular NBA team, the 26-year-old cannot find a sponsor. This is because, he says, sportswear companies are wary of damaging their commercial prospects in Turkey. And in an interview with Vice Sports last month, he singled out (you guessed it) Nike as one of those companies:

‘I talked to Nike and they said “we want to give Enes a contract, but if we give him one [the Turkish government] will shut down every store in Turkey, so we cannot”… I’m an NBA player with no shoe deal. No endorsement deal. And I play in New York!’

It seems that Kanter sacrificed everything for something he believed in, and yet Nike was nowhere to be found.

The decision to sign Kaepernick obviously had nothing to do with his sporting profile. He has not played in the NFL since 2016, as he has been unable to find a new team. And yet he was given a contract with Nike that was said to be on par with top-end NFL players.

Kanter, on the other hand, is in the prime of his sporting career, making millions pursuing his passion. What’s more, his decision to put everything on the line to continue speaking out against the Turkish regime, which has detained over 170,000 of his fellow citizens in recent years, showed precisely the kind of bravery Nike is claiming to champion.

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