The bare essentials?

One has to smile at the efforts of pole-vaulter Romain Mesnil to find a new sponsor.

A French pole vaulting champion ran naked with his pole through the streets of Paris and posted the video on the Internet, hoping to draw attention to his quest for a new sponsorship deal.

Romain Mesnil, who won a silver medal at the 2007 Athletics World Championships in Osaka, was sponsored by Nike but says his contract expired last year and was not renewed.

"It was probably for budgetary and strategic reasons. It's the crisis," he wrote on his Web site.

It certainly attracted attention! Quite apart from being a feature of French news bulletins, it leaked onto YouTube, and even CNN's Anderson Cooper picked it up.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to have attracted any new sponsors as yet. Could this be because the wrong pole is attracting all the attention? Or is it that the recession has circumcised circumscribed the ability of companies to do that sort of thing?



Peter