Whipped Cream Difficulties

Clif Bar, the people who make Clif Bars, gives out sponsorships to various athletes. There are a whole bunch of sponsored athletes in various sports, including mountain climbing.

Recently, the Clif Bar folks decided they were going to stop sponsoring five of those athletes. Four of them are mountain climbers, and one is a BASE jumper. According to the company:

Over a year ago, we started having conversations internally about our concerns with B.A.S.E. jumping, highlining and free-soloing. We concluded that these forms of the sport are pushing boundaries and taking the element of risk to a place where we as a company are no longer willing to go. We understand that some climbers feel these forms of climbing are pushing the sport to new frontiers. But we no longer feel good about benefiting from the amount of risk certain athletes are taking in areas of the sport where there is no margin for error; where there is no safety net.

One of the funny things about this is that several of these climbers were recently featured in a documentary, “Valley Uprising”; Clif Bar was a major sponsor of the documentary.

The NYT has more coverage of this issue, including quotes from the athletes in question.

This is an interesting debate, at least to me: Clif Bar isn’t saying “don’t do this stuff”; they’re saying “we won’t sponsor you to do stuff that we think is too far out on the edge”. And you can sort of understand that they don’t want to be associated with some guy who reduces himself to a thin red smear while BASE jumping. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem (from what the NYT is saying) that there’s any shortage of companies that are willing to step in where Clif Bar left off. On the gripping hand, if everyone free-soloed a rock, would you? Does it matter that other sponsors are stepping in; isn’t Clif just taking a moral stance? But if it is a moral stance, what about this documentary? Should they still be attaching their name to it?

I’ve got no idea. I just think it is an interesting debate.