Sport Aid Outdraws the Competition by Holding Hands With the World

What if you threw a mega-event and nobody knew about it?

It was called Sport Aid and, with an estimated 20 million participants around the world on May 25, it dwarfed Hands Across America in scope, purpose and achievement.

The Sport Aid spectacle was televised live, via satellite, at a cost of $600,000, to a potential audience of 750 million in 80 countries. The radio audience was believed to be nearly 2 billion.

Ken Kragen’s incredible attempt to get 5.6 million people to hold hands from New York to California on the same day ran a distant second to Irish rock star Bob Geldof’s even more incredible accomplishment. Sport Aid outdistanced Hands Across America in terms of money earned, total participation and global audience.

Hands Across America organizers set a $100 million goal last fall. They pared the goal down to $50 million in March and, so far, have actually raised about $11 million after $17 million in expenses. Organizers also expect to receive an additional $8.6 million in outstanding pledges.

The $100 million that Sport Aid is estimated to have earned will be split between United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and Geldof’s Live Aid Foundation. Because UNICEF volunteered its small army of regular personnel in 119 offices around the world to help set up the 10-kilometer foot races that were the backbone of Sport Aid, the mega-event only cost about $1 million in overhead to stage, according to UNICEF public information officer Kristina Schellinski.

“It was a spectacular success,” she said.

Yet few in the United States heard much about Sport Aid until the day it happened.

Sport Aid was singer Geldof’s 1986 sequel to his hugely successful 1985 Live Aid concerts in London and Philadelphia.

Kragen said he picked May 25 as the Hands day as long ago as last September. He chose that day because it fell on a holiday weekend when the national weather picture promised to be sunny.

It came as something of a shock to Kragen when he had dinner with Geldof last December and discovered that Geldof also was planning a large-scale fund-raiser for Africa on May 25. At that point, Kragen said, Hands Across America had already been in the planning stages three months and could not be switched.

“I didn’t want people to think there was a rift between us the way they did during Live Aid,” Kragen told The Times, referring to a widely circulated rumor last summer that the two premier impresarios of pop charity were battling for media attention.

Geldof would not switch dates either, but not out of his rivalry with Kragen. He selected May 25 for Sport Aid because it was the Sunday before the United Nations General Assembly was scheduled to debate its long-term relief and development policy toward Africa.

When asked about conflicts between the two events, Kragen said simply that there were “none whatsoever.”

In exchange for mutual endorsements, they agreed that Sport Aid would not interfere with Hands Across America and vice versa.

As a result, the U.S. Committee for UNICEF did almost nothing to promote Sport Aid in the United States. Most major cities along the Hands route, including Los Angeles, were purposely ruled out as Sport Aid locations. And American media were preoccupied with Hands Across America on May 25.

“In the best of all possible worlds, the two events shouldn’t have been held on the same day,” said UNICEF spokesman Don Allan. “But the United States is the world’s biggest island. So I guess it’s kind of expected.”

Nevertheless, Sport Aid was a resounding success in most of the 78 countries where it took place. Millions of people in 274 cities around the world took part in Geldof’s Race Against Time on Sport Aid Sunday.

“The self-sacrifice those people made makes Hands Across America looks like a self-serving publicity stunt,” said a West Coast relief agency executive who spoke on condition of not being identified. “Sport Aid was a truly inspiring international event.

“And yet there doesn’t appear to be any comprehension in the U.S. of the problems in Africa. And the U.S. was the only country that was not asked to find any room in its generous, spirited heart to participate (in Sport Aid).”

Officials of the USA for Africa Foundation, which created and oversaw Hands Across America, declared their event an overwhelming success too, even though it fell significantly short of its original goal.

Its chief success was measured in how it focused the U.S. media on the hunger problem in the United States, said USA for Africa Foundation Executive Director Marty Rogol.

“To be condemned because you’re the only country focusing on your own domestic homeless and hungry issue on that particular day is, I think, a fairly shortsighted view,” said Rogol. “We were propelled by faith and a belief that it (Hands Across America) would happen.”

The complex and expensive logistics of lining up 5.6 million Americans from coast to coast generally worked, he said, even though there were gaps--large and small--all along the 4,152-mile route.

But USA for Africa didn’t have the close working cooperation of UNICEF or any comparable existing relief agency. Several months ago, foundation officials decided to handle the whole thing themselves.

As a result, the Hands Across America price tag for salaries, insurance, administration and other expenses is at least 12 times the $1 million Sport Aid spent on overhead.

The two mega-events also differed in how organizers raised and will spend their money:

--Sport Aid funds, earned from the sale of millions of $10 Sport Aid T-shirts and entry fees will be evenly divided between the Live Aid Foundation and UNICEF. All donations, estimated to total more than $100 million, will be spent to help the starving of Africa.

Despite the international outpouring of aid last year, an estimated 67 million African children under the age of 5 still go hungry each day, according to UNICEF. The agency has no estimates on adults or children over the age of 5. Of the 67 million under 5 who go hungry, 14,000 die each day from malnutrition and disease, said the agency.

--Hands Across America funds were earned from corporate contributions and individual pledges of $10, $25 and $35 for premiums, such as a certificate of participation or a T-shirt. After expenses, the money will be given exclusively to domestic agencies, such as the Salvation Army.

A “domestic task force” of poverty experts will be appointed next week by the USA for Africa board of directors. The task force will screen grant applications for projects designed to aid America’s underclass, and the USA for Africa board will have final approval of which projects will receive a portion of the $20 million to $30 million that Hands Across America is expected to earn by the end of the summer.

According to the Physicians’ Task Force on Hunger in America, about 20 million Americans--adults as well as children--go hungry each day. Of that number, 2,580 adults and children died in 1985 from malnutrition, according to the National Center for Health Statistics in Atlanta.

But perhaps the most striking difference between the two mega-events was media coverage.

“They (Sport Aid) were much bigger than us (Hands Across America),” Kragen told The Times. “They had worldwide TV coverage.”

But in the United States, Kragen’s event had the coverage Sport Aid did not.

The global telecast of Sport Aid was shunned by U.S. networks. Three East Coast cable channels that specialize in sports coverage were the only U.S. outlets that carried the live Sport Aid video feed. It was not seen on the West Coast.

In the case of Hands Across America, however, several hundred radio stations along the Hands route covered Hands live but, visually, only Cable News Network and ABC provided live coverage. ABC’s camera work in New York, Washington and Long Beach was a last-minute substitute for its rained-out coverage of the Indianapolis 500 auto race and was panned by TV critics for failing to capture the grand scale of Hands Across America.

Nevertheless, Arbitron Rating Service conducted a special survey that indicated 40% of the country tuned in to all or part of the Hands spectacle. One in five Americans heard it on the radio and one in four watched it on TV, according to the survey.

Most of those who actually stood in line, however, had to wait until the evening newscasts to see Hands Across America. There, it was the lead story on all three major U.S. networks.

“Hands Across America was a very important and very, very worthy cause,” said UNICEF’s Schellinski. “I don’t quite agree that the U.S. paid no attention to Sport Aid. Hands Across America was the opening piece but we (Sport Aid) were on all the networks during that evening too. Both CBS and NBC said that, while Hands Across America attracted most of the attention here in the U.S., Sport Aid was the bigger event.”

The day after the two events, most U.S. newspapers put Hands Across America on the front page while Sport Aid was mentioned briefly on the inside pages if it was mentioned at all.

“Instead of sending someone over to the U.N. Plaza to cover it in person, the New York Times chose to cover it with a phone call (to the U.N.) from its London bureau,” said UNICEF’s Allan. “On the day of the event, they gave it a paragraph on the ‘What to Do on the Weekend’ column.”

Curiously, USA for Africa officials measured the success of their event chiefly in terms of the media saturation given the issue of America’s homeless and hungry. A week before Hands Across America, Kragen declared the event a success on grounds that Fortune, US and other magazines, as well as two of the three television networks’ morning news shows, had devoted attention to the hunger issue.

“It doesn’t matter how well we do. We’ve already gotten the message out there,” Kragen told The Times in a pre-Hands interview.

After the event, Kragen and his chief lieutenants continued to call Hands Across America a major success because it “raised consciousness” via the media, if only for a few days.

“Newsweek did four pages on the issue of the homeless and hungry,” said Rogol. “That wouldn’t have happened (if it hadn’t been for Hands Across America).”

The last time national magazines like Newsweek scrutinized a hunger issue to such a large degree was a year ago, when Live Aid and USA for Africa called attention to the starving half a world away.

The idea of Sport Aid was to keep pumping charitable dollars into last year’s cause celebre, the African famine. Virtually all developed--and many underdeveloped--countries gave generously. But in the United States, the giving and participation appeared to match the meager media coverage.

“I think the donations will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in the U.S.,” said Schellinski. Outside of the U.S., she put donations in “the tens of millions of dollars.”

She estimated 10,000 U.S. runners participated in a dozen U.S. cities where the 10-kilometer Sport Aid Race Against Time foot races were held.

In San Francisco, the only California city where a Sport Aid run took place, the Race Against Time only drew about 500 runners, said Schellinski. Another 1,000 paid $10 apiece for a T-shirt, she said.

By contrast, 27,000 ran in the east African nation of Burundi, raising a million Burundi francs for Sport Aid. In Hong Kong, 15,000 ran the Shatin Race Course, raising 1 million Hong Kong dollars.

“There was 56,000 (people) in Barcelona and another 10,000 in Geneva,” said UNICEF’s Allan.

In the entire United Kingdom, 200 races involving more than a million runners were held. The biggest of those races--around London’s Hyde Park--drew more than 100,000 runners. Britain alone is probably responsible for raising more than $10 million, according to UNICEF estimates.

UNICEF officials say the United States might have matched or even surpassed the U.K. figure if it had not been preoccupied with holding hands.

The largest U.S. turnout was in Manhattan, where 3,000 people ran near U.N. Plaza just four hours before Hands Across America was to begin a few miles to the south in Battery Park. More than 150,000 New Yorkers lined up for Hands Across America.

Kragen and singer Harry Belafonte, co-founder of USA for Africa, received last-minute invitations to appear on the Sport Aid stage at U.N. Plaza and did so as a show of solidarity with Geldof.

A week after Sport Aid, the General Assembly approved a policy statement calling for an allotment of $128.1 billion for African development over the next five years. Geldof declared it an important first step in a post-Sport Aid press conference at which he castigated developed nations like the United States for not doing enough to help.

On that point, Kragen is both pragmatic and philosophical. As president of the USA for Africa Foundation, he is sympathetic toward Africa but, as a promoter of entertainers like Lionel Richie and Kenny Rogers, he is also sensitive to the careful and accurate exploitation of the public mood.

“Truth is sort of cyclical,” he said. “There are cycles and we’re on an upswing of generosity and caring. People are looking to help the disadvantaged. But things will change over history. They have always.”

Before they do, he says, Kragen wants USA for Africa to have as much influence in changing mass attitudes toward hunger as possible. If that involves shifting the spotlight away from Africa’s starving millions for a time in favor of America’s starving thousands, that is simply how it has to be.

“You try to influence a time, whatever it is. Five, 10, 15, 20 years. You try to influence a period. The song ‘We Are the World’ did that. The kids who grew up with ‘We Are the World’ as one of their major influences will make a society that is better about giving. It’s a big mistake to try and accomplish too much.”

Next: Hands Across Capitol Hill , mega-events as political power.