When Naomi Osaka walked on to court at the US Open in August, the world’s highest-paid female athlete was covered in names: Nike, Yonex, All Nippon Airways, and Nissin, the company that invented the instant noodle and which has supported her from the start of her stratospheric rise to the top of tennis.
So when Mayumi Taguchi, a fan watching an ocean away in Yokohama, saw the words “Breonna Taylor” emblazoned on Ms Osaka’s face mask, she assumed it was just another sponsor — perhaps an exotic foreign fashion label she’d never heard of. When she googled the words, the reality startled her. The name on Ms Osaka’s mask belonged to a black woman killed in her home by police in Louisville, Kentucky: one of the injustices that fuelled the Black Lives Matter movement.
In that instant, and with that deliberately unmissable statement, Ms Osaka propelled herself into a position that none before her have occupied — a superstar athlete capable, at the age of 23, of making a protest reverberate equally powerfully in both east and west. She set out to “spread awareness”, as she put it, of violence against black people on the biggest stage possible, but ended up, say sponsors, sports industry supremos and advertising agencies, doing a great deal more.
It was a pivotal moment, not only for tennis and for Ms Osaka’s international fan base, but for boardrooms and for a multibillion-dollar sports marketing industry which is facing unprecedented pressure to decide how far it should let politics entangle with commercial messaging.
“The balance of influence [for an athlete] has shifted quite dramatically, in every sport and every territory”, says Phil de Picciotto, founder and president of Octagon, a global talent agency.
“The value of an athlete brand is higher than ever. Now athletes are being very careful, as careful as companies are, in choosing [endorsement] partners.”
Athlete activism may not be a new phenomenon in the US, but in recent months there has been a fundamental change in the way that sponsors, leagues and many fans view political statements from stars.
Only four years ago, Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback who took the San Francisco 49ers to the 2013 Super Bowl, was effectively drummed out of the National Football League for leading a series of protests against police violence, which involved kneeling during the playing of the national anthem before every match.
Ms Osaka is such an important figure in this shifting culture because her fame reaches far beyond the US. In Japan, say two Tokyo-based sports agents, the media, sponsors, sports franchises and the country’s foremost advertising group, Dentsu, have tended to like their athletes bland and obedient. But Ms Osaka — the playfully blunt daughter of a Haitian father and a Japanese mother — is doubling down on her potential as an agent of change.
Even before her support for a cause that was, at the time, drawing millions on to American streets, Ms Osaka’s requirement to choose to retain Japanese citizenship when she turned 22 embodied the ambiguity with which Japan views her mixed heritage: a joy when she is winning, but a fundamental challenge to some people’s notions of “Japaneseness”.
“I love Osaka-chan and I loved her even more after she did this. It was brave and it was part of her character,” says Ms Taguchi, who started researching more on Taylor and the BLM protests. “I think that there were some stories about the Japanese sponsors being unhappy but everything is too conservative in Japan. We need more people like Osaka-chan to shake things up.”
Celebrity activism
Athlete activism has existed in the US for decades, ignited by the influence of Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight boxer, and sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos in the 1960s. All were punished for their activism and shunned by their sports. But a confluence of factors since then have amplified the power of athletes turning them from entertainment figures to some of the most prominent drivers of social conversation.
Those factors — including the shift from network television to cable and streaming, the increased distribution of sports broadcasts, a global growth of the middle class, and the opening of borders since the cold war — have “layered on top of one another” to create the current era of the powerful celebrity athlete, according to Mr de Picciotto.
In 2020, the police killings of Floyd, Taylor and other African-Americans led to massive social unrest around the US and throughout the world, giving new urgency to Black Lives Matter, a movement that promotes racial equality and denounces forces of systemic racism, including police brutality.
In the days following the Floyd killing, videos by NFL players demanding change and racial justice prompted an extraordinary apology by League commissioner Roger Goodell for not accommodating earlier protests by the likes of Mr Kaepernick.
The NFL, the NBA and other leagues began incorporating social justice slogans on fields of play and on uniforms this summer, at the request of players. A tipping point came in August with a mass walkout by players in professional basketball, baseball, football, and tennis — including Ms Osaka — in protest of the police shooting of another black man, Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The scale of the BLM movement this year has “forced these challenging conversations to happen, especially in the corporate landscape”, says Blake Griffin, an NBA star who is endorsed by Nike’s Jordan brand, among other companies. This summer Michael Jordan, who was famously apolitical when he was one of the world’s most recognisable sports star in the 1990s, pledged $100m over the next decade together with the Jordan brand “to organisations dedicated to ensuring racial equality, social justice and greater access to education”.
The leagues, companies, sponsors and agents have recognised the need to incorporate the athletes’ messages in their advertising.
Christa Carone, chief executive of the North America division at sports agency CSM, works with athletes, brands and leagues including the Women’s Tennis Association. After the August walkouts, Ms Carone says, “there wasn’t a single brand that said they wanted to step away” from sponsoring sports.
“This is a commercial environment, right, everything is a business, and no one was stepping away” she says.
Though athlete activism has existed for decades, until recently sports stars had to think critically about when and where they could engage on issues beyond the playing field.
“You still have people like [Fox News host] Laura Ingraham who tell LeBron to ‘shut up and dribble’”, says Mr Griffin. A decade into his playing career, Mr Griffin is now more comfortable advocating for social issues and rebutting critics who, he says, fundamentally misunderstand facets of the movement for racial justice.
“It’s almost like, if you say ‘Black Lives Matter Also’ at the end, people would be less freaked out in general,” he adds.
Ted Chervin, chairman of agency ICM Stellar Sports, says he found a way to “marry the moment to the client” this summer when Malcolm Jenkins signed a contributor contract with CNN to comment on national affairs, the first time an active NFL player has had such an agreement with a news broadcaster.
“When we originally signed him, he wanted an opportunity to extend his brand beyond sports,” Mr Chervin says. After the death of George Floyd and the subsequent upheaval within American football, “[we] thought, what about reaching out to CNN?”
Mr Chervin says the perception that athletes, particularly in the US, could speak out on social issues without eliminating professional opportunities for themselves has evolved over the past five years.
Today, brands that use athletes or celebrities for product marketing are rethinking their approach to civic issues, from systemic racism to voter enfranchisement. US sportswear maker Under Armour launched its first initiative to help members of the public register to vote this year, according to chief executive Patrik Frisk.
“If you asked me earlier this year if we would do such a thing, I would have said, ‘are you crazy? Why would I do that?’ But things have changed,” says Mr Chervin. The rise in athlete activism has, in fact, made it easier for the company — which relies on affiliations with stars and teams to sell products — to identify good partnerships for endorsements.
“Today, it’s easier to understand what a person or institution stands for and that they would be aligned with our stand against discrimination in any form,” he adds.
Unease in Asia
When Ms Osaka first appeared in a BLM mask, the response in Japan was not so straightforward.
Senior executives from two of her Japanese sponsor companies, according to people familiar with the situation, held emergency internal meetings to discuss what the impact for their brands.
Even now, with the benefit of almost two months to craft the perfect response, the ultra-cautious public reactions of her Japanese sponsors — companies that have all revelled in the ‘Naomi effect’ on product sales — suggest an unease with the change in stance.
While the cosmetics giant Shiseido says “we support the active and beautiful way of life of all sports enthusiasts in many different ways”, Citizen Watch says the company “respects her courageous actions”. Yonex, which makes Ms Osaka’s rackets, believes her actions “reflect our fundamental values”, while Nissin says she embodies its “hungry to win” slogan. All say they received a broad range of responses on her mask-based campaign.
However, sponsors in Japan are also aware of the series of events over the summer in the US that tipped the scales of power in favour of athletes.
It was this reality that caused Ms Osaka’s actions to resonate so powerfully in Tokyo. “They [Japanese companies and advertising agencies] look at the US and they see this shift in control and they wonder how long they can hold on to theirs,” says the chief executive of one Tokyo-based advertising agency.
The question, say marketing experts in Japan, is whether the new “Naomi effect” will be her ability to show that there are alternatives to the way things have always been done in Japan and to promote the awareness that not all deviation from the script is necessarily bad.
The Japanese advertising industry, says Hideki Ogino, chief executive of online advertising group FICC, has generally allowed companies to outsource most of the thinking about brand building and messaging. Because it suits the big agencies financially to use celebrities, they have pushed that on companies and then allowed the companies and the general public to build an expectation that those celebrities will speak only when required and be squeaky clean, he says.
“In the US, you hire for skills; in Japan you hire for image,” he says, adding that Ms Osaka’s great challenge to Japan’s status quo lies in the idea that image is ultimately something that the stars control, rather than the companies hiring their services.
Saeko Ishita, an expert on Japanese advertising at Osaka City University, says the habit-bound, celebrity-dependent advertising industry is simultaneously rigid in its conventions but also potentially vulnerable to change.
About 80 per cent of television advertising in Japan, she says, deploys a celebrity of some type — the highest ratio in the world followed by South Korea and China. As Japanese advertising budgets have shrunk and strategies changed, the focus on big foreign stars has diminished. That has placed even more emphasis on domestic celebrities — the singers and actors beholden to Japan’s powerful talent agencies provide the main feedstock, but sports stars are an increasing staple.
The practice has been kept alive by a compact in which the advertisers and sponsors demand rigorously innocuous behaviour from their pet celebrity, and have generally received that. Ms Osaka, whose sponsors have not abandoned her whatever their private views on her protests, has shown that it is possible to take a stand and survive.
“Speaking honestly, I would have to say that there has been more support and goodwill for her activism in the US market,” says Stuart Duguid, senior vice-president at IMG Tennis and agent for Ms Osaka. While the individuals who work at her Japanese brand partners are often supportive of her activism, “the Japanese companies, speaking corporately, are reluctant to support any message. They are steadfastly neutral.”
The corporate traditions ranged against any change may prove formidably hard to shift, Mr Duguid adds. “[But], if anyone can change that tradition, it would be Naomi Osaka.”
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Democrats who control both chambers of the Virginia legislature are hoping to make good on promises made on the campaign trail, including becoming the first Southern state to expand constitutional protections for abortion access.
The House Privileges and Elections Committee advanced three proposed constitutional amendments Wednesday, including a measure to protect reproductive rights. Its members also discussed measures to repeal a now-defunct state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and ways to revise Virginia’s process to restore voting rights for people who served time for felony crimes.
“This meeting was an important next step considering the moment in history we find ourselves in,” Democratic Del. Cia Price, the committee chair, said during a news conference. “We have urgent threats to our freedoms that could impact constituents in all of the districts we serve.”
The at-times raucous meeting will pave the way for the House and Senate to take up the resolutions early next year after lawmakers tabled the measures last January. Democrats previously said the move was standard practice, given that amendments are typically introduced in odd-numbered years. But Republican Minority Leader Todd Gilbert said Wednesday the committee should not have delved into the amendments before next year’s legislative session. He said the resolutions, particularly the abortion amendment, need further vetting.
“No one who is still serving remembers it being done in this way ever,” Gilbert said after the meeting. “Certainly not for something this important. This is as big and weighty an issue as it gets.”
The Democrats’ legislative lineup comes after Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, to the dismay of voting-rights advocates, rolled back a process to restore people’s civil rights after they completed sentences for felonies. Virginia is the only state that permanently bans anyone convicted of a felony from voting unless a governor restores their rights.
“This amendment creates a process that is bounded by transparent rules and criteria that will apply to everybody — it’s not left to the discretion of a single individual,” Del. Elizabeth Bennett-Parker, the patron of the voting rights resolution, which passed along party lines, said at the news conference.
Though Democrats have sparred with the governor over their legislative agenda, constitutional amendments put forth by lawmakers do not require his signature, allowing the Democrat-led House and Senate to bypass Youngkin’s blessing.
Instead, the General Assembly must pass proposed amendments twice in at least two years, with a legislative election sandwiched between each statehouse session. After that, the public can vote by referendum on the issues. The cumbersome process will likely hinge upon the success of all three amendments on Democrats’ ability to preserve their edge in the House and Senate, where they hold razor-thin majorities.
It’s not the first time lawmakers have attempted to champion the three amendments. Republicans in a House subcommittee killed a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights in 2022, a year after the measure passed in a Democrat-led House. The same subcommittee also struck down legislation supporting a constitutional amendment to repeal an amendment from 2006 banning marriage equality.
On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers voted 16-5 in favor of legislation protecting same-sex marriage, with four Republicans supporting the resolution.
“To say the least, voters enacted this (amendment) in 2006, and we have had 100,000 voters a year become of voting age since then,” said Del. Mark Sickles, who sponsored the amendment as one of the first openly gay men serving in the General Assembly. “Many people have changed their opinions of this as the years have passed.”
A constitutional amendment protecting abortion previously passed the Senate in 2023 but died in a Republican-led House. On Wednesday, the amendment passed on party lines.
If successful, the resolution proposed by House Majority Leader Charniele Herring would be part of a growing trend of reproductive rights-related ballot questions given to voters. Since 2022, 18 questions have gone before voters across the U.S., and they have sided with abortion rights advocates 14 times.
The voters have approved constitutional amendments ensuring the right to abortion until fetal viability in nine states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Ohio and Vermont. Voters also passed a right-to-abortion measure in Nevada in 2024, but it must be passed again in 2026 to be added to the state constitution.
As lawmakers debated the measure, roughly 18 members spoke. Mercedes Perkins, at 38 weeks pregnant, described the importance of women making decisions about their own bodies. Rhea Simon, another Virginia resident, anecdotally described how reproductive health care shaped her life.
Then all at once, more than 50 people lined up to speak against the abortion amendment.
“Let’s do the compassionate thing and care for mothers and all unborn children,” resident Sheila Furey said.
The audience gave a collective “Amen,” followed by a round of applause.
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Associated Press writer Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
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Olivia Diaz is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative.
NEW YORK (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump says he will nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, putting him in charge of a massive agency that oversees everything from drug, vaccine and food safety to medical research and the social safety net programs Medicare and Medicaid.
“For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social site announcing the appointment. Kennedy, he said, would “Make America Great and Healthy Again!”
Kennedy, a former Democrat who ran as an independent in this year’s presidential race, abandoned his bid after striking a deal to give Trump his endorsement with a promise to have a role in health policy in the administration.
He and Trump have since become good friends, with Kennedy frequently receiving loud applause at Trump’s rallies.
The expected appointment was first reported by Politico Thursday.
A longtime vaccine skeptic, Kennedy is an attorney who has built a loyal following over several decades of people who admire his lawsuits against major pesticide and pharmaceutical companies. He has pushed for tighter regulations around the ingredients in foods.
With the Trump campaign, he worked to shore up support among young mothers in particular, with his message of making food healthier in the U.S., promising to model regulations imposed in Europe. In a nod to Trump’s original campaign slogan, he named the effort “Make America Healthy Again.”
It remains unclear how that will square with Trump’s history of deregulation of big industries, including food. Trump pushed for fewer inspections of the meat industry, for example.
Kennedy’s stance on vaccines has also made him a controversial figure among Democrats and some Republicans, raising question about his ability to get confirmed, even in a GOP-controlled Senate. Kennedy has espoused misinformation around the safety of vaccines, including pushing a totally discredited theory that childhood vaccines cause autism.
He also has said he would recommend removing fluoride from drinking water. The addition of the material has been cited as leading to improved dental health.
HHS has more than 80,000 employees across the country. It houses the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Medicare and Medicaid programs and the National Institutes of Health.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, currently has a lawsuit pending against a number of news organizations, among them The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy took leave from the group when he announced his run for president but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — In a Cypriot National Guard camp, Ukrainians are being trained on how to identify, locate and dispose of landmines and other unexploded munitions that litter huge swaths of their country, killing and maiming hundreds of people, including children.
Analysts say Ukraine is among the countries that are the most affected by landmines and discarded explosives, as a result of Russia’s ongoing war.
According to U.N. figures, some 399 people have been killed and 915 wounded from landmines and other munitions since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, equal to the number of casualties reported from 2014-2021. More than 1 in 10 of those casualties have been children.
The economic impact is costing billions to the Ukrainian economy. Landmines and other munitions are preventing the sowing of 5 million hectares, or 10%, of the country’s agricultural land.
Cyprus stepped up to offer its facilities as part of the European Union’s Military Assistance Mission to Ukraine. So far, almost 100 Ukrainian armed forces personnel have taken part in three training cycles over the last two years, said Cyprus Foreign Ministry spokesperson Theodoros Gotsis.
“We are committed to continuing this support for as long as it takes,” Gotsis told the Associated Press, adding that the Cyprus government has covered the 250,000 euro ($262,600) training cost.
Cyprus opted to offer such training owing to its own landmine issues dating back five decades when the island nation was ethnically divided when Turkey invaded following a coup that sought union with Greece. The United Nations has removed some 27,000 landmines from a buffer zone that cuts across the island, but minefields remain on either side. The Cypriot government says it has disposed of all anti-personnel mines in line with its obligations under an international treaty that bans the use of such munitions.
In Cyprus, Ukrainians undergo rigorous theoretical and practical training over a five-week Basic Demining and Clearance course that includes instruction on distinguishing and safely handling landmines and other explosive munitions, such as rockets, 155 mm artillery shells, rocket-propelled grenades and mortar shells.
Theoretical training uses inert munitions identical to the actual explosives.
Most of the course is comprised of hands-on training focusing on the on-site destruction of unexploded munitions using explosives, the chief training officer told the Associated Press. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorized to disclose his identity for security reasons.
“They’re trained on ordnance disposal using real explosives,” the officer said. “That will be the trainees’ primary task when they return.”
Cypriot officials said the Ukrainian trainees did not want to be either interviewed or photographed.
Defusing discarded munitions or landmines in areas where explosive charges can’t be used — for instance, near a hospital — is not part of this course because that’s the task of highly trained teams of disposal experts whose training can last as long as eight months, the officer said.
Trainees, divided into groups of eight, are taught how to operate metal detectors and other tools for detecting munitions like prodders — long, thin rods which are used to gently probe beneath the ground’s surface in search of landmines and other explosive ordnance.
Another tool is a feeler, a rod that’s used to detect booby-trapped munitions. There are many ways to booby-trap such munitions, unlike landmines which require direct pressure to detonate.
“Booby-trapped munitions are a widespread phenomenon in Ukraine,” the chief training officer explained.
Training, primarily conducted by experts from other European Union countries, takes place both in forested and urban areas at different army camps and follows strict safety protocols.
The short, intense training period keeps the Ukrainians focused.
“You see the interest they show during instruction: they ask questions, they want to know what mistakes they’ve made and the correct way of doing it,” the officer said.
Humanitarian data and analysis group ACAPS said in a Jan. 2024 report that 174,000 sq. kilometers (67,182 sq. miles) or nearly 29% of Ukraine’s territory needs to be surveyed for landmines and other explosive ordnance.
More than 10 million people are said to live in areas where demining action is needed.
Since 2022, Russian forces have used at least 13 types of anti-personnel mines, which target people. Russia never signed the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning the use of anti-personnel mines, but the use of such mines is nonetheless considered a violation of its obligations under international law.
Russia also uses 13 types of anti-tank mines.
The International Campaign to Ban Landmines said in its 2023 Landmine Monitor report that Ukrainian government forces may have also used antipersonnel landmines in contravention of the Mine Ban Treaty in and around the city of Izium during 2022, when the city was under Russian control.
