Former Olympic Champion: to create value for sports athletes

Recently, during an interview, Li Xiaopeng, the Chinese former Olympic Champion, claimed that sports industry should dig out more potential value for sports athletes.

After his retirement in September 2010, the famous gymnast who had got 16 gold medals established his own sports company in Beijing. Li announced that doing sports business is a special way in which he could express his deep love to sports. His personal experience and his deep love for sports make him stress more on the value of sports players.

Li believed that the commercial value of sports players is not lower than any entertainment stars because sports players can easily get their international fame and can make a difference to the whole world. Nowadays more and more sports athletes are participating in commercial activities or being invited as brand ambassadors of some products. However, all those activities could not supply with a full-scale improvement to players true value in business.

Li Xiaopeng argued that sports brokerage should become a new orientation for the development of Chinese sports industry. He pointed out that a successful athlete should not only show his or her heroic posture in arenas, but also interact more with his or her fans in daily life. If a player could share his or her efforts as well as pressure with fans, he or she could gain more support from sports lovers, thus more and more potential commercial value of a player could be discovered. Li said that his sports company mainly engaged in the brokerage of Chinese players, and he will spare no efforts to help Chinese athletes to find out their true commercial value. Up to now, Li had set up partnership with several Chinese sports players and helped them gain a lot of advertisement income.

Actually, Li indicated that to fully dig out the commercial value of a sports player, the support from media is also essential. He believed that with the cooperation between brokerage companies and media, Chinese sports players will have a bright future in sports industry.