The biggest losers in the Beijing Games

"There's never been an athlete whose been as well-positioned to leverage his success in the Olympic games as Michael Phelps," says Howard Bloom, who teach sports management at Ottawa's Algonquin College and has worked with several Olympic athletes.

Bloom believes there's a potential $50 million deal to be had with Nike — assuming Phelps doesn't renew his recently sweetened contract with Speedo — among many other sponsorship opportunities.

There isn't the same sort of general consensus on the marketability of a silver- or bronze-medalist, however. While some argue a gold is critical to land sponsorship contracts, others believe the two don't always have to be so closely aligned.

Simon Wardle, senior vice president of insights and strategy at sports marketing firm Octagon Worldwide, argues that fan affinity toward an athlete can and should prove just as important as medal standings, particularly at the Olympic games.

"You're playing in very different emotional territory with the Olympics," he says of a heavily covered two-week event packed with scene-setting and emotional tales of the athletes involved. The way Wardle sees it, it's not crucial that the athletes walk away with gold medals, because the emotional connections fans have built with them become more important than their performances.

Take swimming's silver medalist Dara Torres, whose much-covered personal history — a 41-year-old mother competing against women half her age in her fifth Olympic Games — makes her both a remarkable and marketable fan favorite, with or without a gold medal dangling from her neck.

In fact, her agent argues this is the rare case where winning the silver medal may actually make her more appealing to marketers: "If you're a 41-year-old mom and you win the 50-meter freestyle, which is the crème de la crème of speed," Morgenstein says, "it takes too much attention off of why you did what you did and what you hope to do with it and makes it just about the performance."

We'll see.

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