The headline might read like alphabet soup, but IronMind is recommending that IMG ban from the World’s Strongest Man (WSM) contest anyone who competes in a WSF or ASF strongman contest—not to punish the athletes, of course, but rather to send a clear message to the WSF and ASF that infringing on the World’s Strongest Man trademark will not be tolerated by IMG.

It began with releases describing the just-completed WSF strongman contest in Abu Dhabi as being the World’s Strongest Man contest, and in addition to using that name, the promotional materials featured photos taken at the 2011 World’s Strongest Man contest.

IMG developed and first produced the World’s Strongest Man contest in 1977, creating not just a commercially successful TV property, but also a new sports-entertainment product category.

The WSF’s Vlad Redkin was notified of this infringement by IMG, and he said that he was not using either the World’s Strongest Man name or logo, and IronMind speculated that the mixup might have stemmed from a mistranslation of ASF language.  Redkin told IronMind that the ASF was innocent and the offending material disappeared.

Today, however, the misrepresentations have resurfaced in full force, so now it’s time to check whether the WSF and ASF claims of innocence are genuine.

IronMind recommends that IMG give Vlad Redkin (speaking for WSF) and Omid Amiri (speaking for ASF) 24 hours to publicly renounce the statements that misrepresented their contest held in Abu Dhabi as being WSM and that within 48 hours, Messrs. Redkin and Amiri must ensure that gulfnews.com, sport360.com and emirates247.com, as well as other websites to be named by IMG, publish similar corrections. 

Failure to meet these conditions will result a WSM ban for all WSF and ASF competitors, along with whatever other sanctions and claims IMG is pursuing relative to the organizers.

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