Can you shill for the system and shake it up at the same time? The answer is no, if Grace Tame losing her Nike ambassadorship is anything to go by.
Tame has discovered the hard way what should be blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever read the fine print on a corporate contract, or, to be blunt, possessed a modicum of common sense.
You can’t simultaneously be a hard-edged activist sticking it to the Jewish state and be a glossy ambassador for Nike – a global mega-brand with profits dependent on appealing to as wide an audience as possible – at the same time.
Tame was unceremoniously dumped by Nike (officially: they ‘mutually’ agreed to end their association) after repeatedly posting a series of highly charged, one-eyed pro-Palestinian messages on social media.
Tame called Israel’s actions ‘genocide’, reposted activist firebrands with a history of inflammatory rhetoric, and threw her full moral weight behind a cause guaranteed to divide public opinion.
That’s her right, of course, and many runners would no doubt agree with her.
But activism has consequences, especially when she’s cashing cheques from a company that really just wants to sell shoes to suburban mums and dads who might take a more conservative world view, including about the state of Israel.
Let’s not pretend this issue is complicated.
Corporates like Nike don’t do nuance very well. Marketing dictates who it chooses to be ambassadors and Tame’s divisiveness became a problem the deeper she delved into activism beyond what earned her n of the Year.
Nike was prepared to partner with her despite that. But a global brand has its limits.
And while they love the social justice aesthetic, they don’t love anything that makes customers pause before tapping ‘Buy Now’.
Simply put, Tame became a branding risk no longer worth partnering with.
But, boy, did she get in her corporate shilling while it lasted.
Scroll through her Instagram and you’ll find the usual fare from the modern corporate influencer: staged shots, Nike logos prominently displayed, references to her ‘Nike family’ and motivational guff layered with just enough grit to seem ‘authentic’.
After running the Hobart marathon in a quick enough time to get her on the podium she knew exactly what to credit: ‘It must’ve been the new @nike Alphaflys’ – presumably her shoes – because ‘red makes you fast. This is a scientific fact.’
Conquering Mount Kilimanjaro and the humid heat in Tanzania about a fortnight earlier, Tame also gave her shoes a big portion of the credit. ‘I was also grateful I wore my old solid-soled Nike Vaporflys as we dodged loose rocks.’
As time went by, she tried to sound a little more organic – slipping a casual reference to her brand of Nikes into a post about a 60km race along the Great Ocean Road in late May.
‘Despite running a 10 minute PB, last Sunday just wasn’t my day, and that’s okay… “This is going to hurt regardless,” I thought, putting on my Vaporflys and a stubborn smile”‘.
Vaporflys? Product placement alert!
The absurdity here is that Tame, for all her sharp-edged persona, didn’t seem to grasp the basic rules of the commercial world she so willingly entered.
If you want to be an uncompromising activist, all power to you – do that. If you want to be a brand ambassador, do that by all means.
But don’t become salty when those two roles collide and the corporation cuts you loose.
Some Tame defenders are already crying foul, attacking Nike for corporate cowardice or embracing conspiracy theories about Zionists.
But what happened wasn’t about the silencing of anyone’s views.
It’s about the consequences of expressing views in a context where you’re paid to project a very different kind of message.
No one working in the corporate world would try to publicly dovetail their role with edgy activism on weekends.
And if they tried and got shown the door, no one would be surprised.
Whether she likes it or not, Tame became a corporate worker selling shoes for cash.
Nike isn’t a human rights organisation.
It’s a company that sells overpriced activewear and it wants its brand ambassadors to talk about running, not Gaza.
You can’t ride the moral high horse and the corporate gravy train at the same time.