The Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games, the olympics for the horse set, open this week in Lexington. It will be the first time the Games have ever been held in North America and Lexington, a rather sleepy town of 250,000 nestled in the Bluegrass of Kentucky is preparing for a worldwide invasion of 800,000 people over the next two weeks. Competition will take place in eight different disciplines, which , unless you are involved in the horse business in some way, breeder, rider, relative of the foregoing or a really devoted fan, you will not be familiar with most of them.  I know that I wasn't and I used to be heavily involved in the thoroughbred racing and breeding industry.

Have you ever heard of Alltech?  I thought not.  The title sponsor of the Games is a Central Kentucky based company that is a world leader in animal health and nutrition, including  horse feed supplements and beer, algae and to be introduced at the World Equestrian Games, coffee.  Alltech originally committed $10 million to become the title sponsor of the Games.  As the planning for the Games continued, Alltech realized an opportunity to strengthen its brand recognition and the ability of Lexington to put on a successful Games if it committed additional money and manpower to the organizing committee.  To date, Alltech has spent about $30 million and, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader, "the line between  the Games organization and Alltech has seemed increasingly blurred."  Alltech pllans to use the Games to roll out several new products and to build relationships with 67 customer companies. 

There is no doubt that Alltech's involvement in the planning and marketing of the Games has been unusal.  Jim Host, former CEO of Host Communications and a ground breaker in the field of sports marketing said of Alltech: "I don't think we'll see anything like this again. I've never seen anybody execute better what's been done by Alltech. And it's helped the games."