For two and a half weeks, the eyes of the world are turned to Paris for the latest iteration of the Summer Olympic Games. As always, the international event has overflowed with countless feats of prowess and perseverance. But what happens on Aug. 11 when the Games end?
That is exactly the question that the International Olympic Committee (IOC), along with new partner Alibaba, are looking to answer with the Athlete365 Business Accelerator Program. There are nearly 11,000 athletes competing in Paris this month, according to Kevah Mehrabi, Director of the Athletes’ Department at the IOC, and for the majority of them, this will be the only Olympics they ever participate in. In fact, approximately 70% of athletes in the Summer Games only compete once in their lifetime.
“The 365 Business Accelerator was born in 2018 when we realized that each of these athletes are naturally entrepreneurs; they are already basically the CEO of their own career,” said Mehrabi at a press event in Paris. “One of the challenges that athletes face is the transition from sports to life after sports — the average age of retirement from sport is 27-and-a-half. When you retire from sport around 27, 28 years old, hopefully you have another 40, 50, 60 years to live, so that career transition is very, very important. That’s why it’s important for us at the IOC to support them.”
Alibaba.com has been the official Ecommerce Services Partner for the IOC since 2017 and is continuing in that role for the Paris Olympics. “For the past seven years we have committed to helping the IOC transform the Olympic Games for the digital era — we’ve put all the content, every game, on the cloud, so more people can easily access and enjoy the Olympic Games,” explained Kuo Zhang, President of Alibaba.com in an interview with Retail TouchPoints.
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And now Alibaba is taking that partnership even further by becoming the first ecommerce partner of the Athlete365 Business Accelerator program as its fourth edition kicks off with the Paris Olympics. The IOC-led initiative supports Olympic athletes with dual-career and career-transition opportunities by empowering them to become entrepreneurs. Alibaba will add to this effort with a number of new offerings, including:
- Training in ecommerce sourcing and business basics for approximately 1,000 athletes and providing Accelerator packages worth $10,000 to 50 of them;
- Highlighting athletes with successful second careers as entrepreneurs in a new brand campaign called “Same Player, New Game” that is being fronted by two-time Olympian and four-time NBA winner Tony Parker; and
- The debut of a new “sourcing engine” that uses conversational AI to make it easy and intuitive for any entrepreneur, not just former athletes, to find products for their business on Alibaba.
“We want to use our platform to help bridge the divide between sportsmanship and entrepreneurship,” said Zhang. “We already see many athlete entrepreneurs who are sourcing from Alibaba.com, so that’s why that we started this. We have the technology, and with the help of the Olympic IOC we can reach even more athletes.”
Helping Athletes Harness the Potential of the Digital Era
There is perhaps no better place to start an initiative like this than at the Olympics: As the world’s only truly global, multi-sport athletics competition, the Olympic Games brings together athletes from more than 200 countries. Similarly, Alibaba.com connects B2B buyers and suppliers from over 200 countries and regions, serving as a hub for ambitious individuals around the world to go for the gold in commerce.
The IOC’s Athlete365 program already has established a similarly impressive reach, helping more than 8,500 athletes from more than 100 countries since 2018. The program features three main components, Mehrabi explained: Self-serve online business courses, workshops where athletes can test out and mature their business ideas and a mentorship segment.
“Thanks to this partnership [with Alibaba], we are hoping to take the program even further,” said Mehrabi. “We are living in a digital era — AI, technology, digital tools are very, very important and athletes are aware of that. Through the partnership with Alibaba.com we hope we can [harness the company’s] 25 years of experience and expertise in this field and put that at the disposal of athletes.”
Alibaba Offers Athletes Training and Digital Business Tools
For its part of the accelerator program, Alibaba.com will create an ecommerce- and global trade-focused multi-phase training scheme designed to build participants’ knowledge of business-critical areas, such as the use of AI tools, global sourcing and B2B export through digital marketplaces. Participating athletes also will have access to mentorship opportunities with Alibaba executives and the partnership’s athlete ambassadors who have all made the successful transition from Olympian to business owner.
Additionally, 50 athletes will be selected to receive Business Accelerator packages from Alibaba worth $10,000 that will provide a combination of logistics, operational and sourcing training and marketplace credit to help candidates unlock long-term, sustainable growth opportunities.
“Athletes and successful entrepreneurs share many of the same characteristics — passion, teamwork, resilience, leadership,” said Zhang. “But giving them training and even these acceleration packages is not a guarantee of success. With the help of technology, we can lower the barrier for them to go global, to find partners, to leverage the global supply chain, but in the end it’s their entrepreneurship, as well as their own insight, passion and leadership that will actually drive them to the succeed. We are looking for those kinds of characteristics [in selecting the 50 package recipients] to find the candidates who have the best possibility to win and that we can help with a boost in the beginning.”
The Alibaba training will be primarily focused on business and sourcing basics, “helping them to understand what the global supply chain is and how to leverage the Alibaba network, [as well as] common insights about business like how to build out a team and set up reasonable goals,” said Zhang. However, if the athletes eventually want to tap into the many opportunities within Alibaba Group to also sell online, “we’ll help them with that as well,” he added.
Tony Parker to Headline ‘New Player, Same Game’ Alibaba Campaign
Among the athlete ambassadors who will help bring this program to their fellow Olympians are NBA champion-turned-entrepreneur Tony Parker; former women’s tennis player Simona Galik Moore and mountain biker Elias Schwärzler. All three athletes regularly use Alibaba to source products for their successful businesses, which in the case of Galik Moore is a professional pickleball brand, and for Schwärzler is a specialist mountain biking clothing brand and academy. For his part, Parker has become a successful investor, and a number of the businesses he is involved with source from Alibaba as well.
In addition to serving as mentors for accelerator participants, the three athletes also will star in Alibaba’s new brand campaign: “New Player, Same Game,” which aims to raise awareness of opportunities for athletes to transition from sporting success to entrepreneurship and how Alibaba can be a vehicle to do that.
Parker is perhaps unique among his peers, because as he shared at the press event, from the beginning of his athletic career he knew he needed to plan for what would come after, largely because “my parents always told me a sports career is going to be very short,” he said. “I was blessed to play for 20 years, but I tried to prepare myself early [for life after basketball].”
At 23, he reached out to a mentor that anyone would be lucky to have access to for advice — fellow basketball player Magic Johnson. “He was the perfect definition to me of how you can make it after basketball,” said Parker. “His advice was ‘create your network early; don’t wait until you retire because when you retire people forget about you very fast.’ So that’s what I did. [As a result], in 2019 when it was time for me to retire [from the NBA], I was excited to get into the business world. I didn’t feel like many athletes, who feel like they’re dying because they’ve been doing the same thing for 40 years; it was the total opposite for me. What helped me is I prepared during my career, to make sure that I was passionate about something else. I felt like I prepared myself for my whole career to be ready for business.”
Now Parker is intent on helping other athletes do the same through his role as an ambassador for Alibaba and the Athlete365 program.
“Tony, Simona and Elias are inspiring examples of the transition from sports to business, and we are thrilled to welcome them to the Alibaba.com team during the Olympic Games Paris 2024,” said Liz Wang, Global Head of Marketing at Alibaba.com in a statement. “This is a fantastic opportunity to put a spotlight on the business opportunities available to former professional sportspeople, and how platforms such as Alibaba.com can help turn their entrepreneurial ambitions into reality.”
Beyond the Olympics: Making Sourcing Easier for all Entrepreneurs
In addition to its work with the IOC, Alibaba also has announced plans for a new AI-powered conversational sourcing engine that the company said “will revolutionize the global sourcing process for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)” (of all kinds, not just those founded by Olympic athletes).
Leveraging the latest advancements in AI technology, Alibaba International’s new sourcing engine will synthesize vast quantities of information, interpret sourcing needs using natural language processing, match buyers with products and suppliers and provide advanced tools to support sourcing decision-making. The tool is currently undergoing internal testing and will formally launch for users at Alibaba’s CoCreate event for sellers and suppliers in early September.
“Using the power of AI, we can completely redesign the experience for global trading,” said Zhang. “Previously you would use a search engine to find partners, starting from keywords that give you millions of results. You’d have to go through each of them and then communicate with the suppliers and then you probably come up with an Excel [spreadsheet] or a table to make your final decisions.
“Now [with our new sourcing engine] you can interact with the platform using natural language,” Zhang added. “For example, you can start with ‘I want to explore the idea of pickleball’ and then the system will get more specific with questions about things like what market you are looking at. From there we use detailed filters to narrow down your selection of businesses and products. We also use some AI tools to understand and reconstruct all this information, so we will generate a table for you that shows, for example, the four suppliers you selected and similar suppliers that we select for you, with indications of price, highlight features, the MOQs [minimum order quantities]. It’s very easy for you to make decisions in the end. This will be game-changing for the B2B sourcing experience and lower the barrier for new SMEs to go global.”
