Sydney Marathon medal mistakenly depicts Munich stadium | Hacker News Reader

Sydney Marathon medal mistakenly depicts Munich stadium

bbc.com

109 pointsepestr73 comments

Easy mistake when there are 7 Allianz Stadiums in the world

https://www.allianz.com/en/about-us/brand/partnerships/stadi...

And it was probably 8 when they were designing the medal but Palmeiras didn't extend the naming rights contract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubank_Parque

I always thought these corporate naming deals for stadiums were gross. I remember when Canadian stadiums had names like "The Coliseum" and "The Skydome" instead of "The Roger's Center".

Wait til you see the names of the actual teams in the Japanese baseball league.

Any examples?

They basically embed company names directly into team names.

Here is a couple of examples: Fukuoka Softbank Hawks and Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.

Most of the NPB teams are corporate owned and named

- Chunichi Dragons > Chunichi Shimbun (news corporation)

- Hanshin Tigers > Hanshin Electric Railway

- Tokyo Yakult Swallows > Yakult Honsha (yes, the probiotic milk beverage company)

- Yokohama DeNA BayStars > DeNA (ecommerce/mobile games/online services)

- Yomiuri Giants > Yomiuri Shimbun (media conglomerate)

- Chiba Lotte Marines > Lotte Holdings (related to the South Korean Lotte Corporation mostly known for their confectionery and ice creams)

- Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks > SoftBank (I think everyone knows them on HN)

- Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters > Nippon Ham (food processing)

- Orix Buffaloes > Orix (investment banking)

- Saitama Seibu Lions > Seibu Railway

- Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles > Rakuten (I think everyone knows them on HN)

But that's not a Japanese only thing, the Korean (KBO) and Taiwanese (CPBL) baseball leagues are the same

Kia Tigers, KT Wiz, LG Twins, Lotte Giants, Samsung Lions

CTBC Brothers, Rakuten Monkeys, Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions, Fubon Guardians

And not even a baseball thing only the football teams in the region are the same

This Indian cricket team is splendidly named:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pune_Warriors_India

Real pro cycling teams:

    SmartStop-Mountain Khakis p/b Jittery Joe's

    Bodysol EuroMillions Pôle Continental Wallon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCI_WorldTeam#2026 for this year's crop of linoleum manufacturers, insurance firms, and sportswashing petro-states.

I mean F1 teams are literally named directly after their corporate owners too (who are not necessarily the ones designing the engines/...) and people seem to love that.

One German football team is named after a pharmaceuticals multinational.

(A special case, it was the workers team for the Bayer plant, like Woolwich Arsenal or 'Locomotiv' of many Slavic cities)

At least that one started as a worker's club. The worse offender is named after an energy drink.

Those two teams are/were not professional. Not that you are wrong about naming conventions.

E-Sports teams are still the funniest here. From Shopify Black/Rebellion Gold to T1.

They remind me of the "Brought to You by Carl’s Jr" scenes from Idiocracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAM1rSObk4c

Year of the Depend adult undergarment.

Brought to you by a burning desire to serve supremely my own interests.

Lower league european football kits are my favourite, there is a team behind the ads

https://files.catbox.moe/a3fxhw.webp

https://files.catbox.moe/0op34u.jpeg

My favourite is MAC³PARK Stadium, the home of FC Zwolle in Zwolle, the Netherlands.

It is named after MAC³PARK, a collection of extremely boring business parks (ie office buildings in an industrial zone). The business parks in question are in nowhere near Zwolle (for Dutch standards).

That's the closest to Nascar I've seen yet. At the same time, I'm still a fan for the idea that elected officials should be forced to wear their sponsor's logos on their suits like this as well.

There would be a bunch of Super PACs with a fabric swatch as a logo.

"BC Place" is still BC Place. It was the only World Cup venue that didn't have to hang drapes over its real name.

I get why they do it, but at the very least it should be "sponsor name real name", not "sponsor name generic description of arena".

Spotify Camp Nou is annoying and worse than Camp Nou, but at least there is some soul and belonging. "Spotify Arena" would have been disgusting and empty.

It always boggles my mind when fans say "so and so at the AT&T stadium"... Until a new sponsor comes in.

>so and so at the AT&T stadium

In at least one town with a stadium of that name, most people do not refer to it by that name. Instead, it is referred to as Jerry's World for the owner of the franchise.

Concert venues are another naming rights area that is confusing. There's one in particular that has had its name changed so many times that I do not know what it is currently called. Instead, it is often referred to by the original sponsor by pretty much anyone of a certain age. Even if you call it the older name to younger people, they know which venue. Some names stick.

Capital One Arena is the current name for where the Washington Capitals play at home so that's an example that kind of works.

Yes. Or in case of Berlin where whole places and other places get renamed when the sponsor changes. O2 Arena -> Mercedes Benz Arena -> Uber Arena. Even other locations around it changed as well as the plaza name.

And when a FIFA world cup is hosted the stadium gets renamed for the duration if the stadium‘s sponsor isn‘t a FIFA sponsor.

I much rather have corporations waste money funding sports that some people enjoy, than wasting it on commercial campaigns that does nothing but burn money and steal our attention.

It's easy to say behind the comfort of the keyboard. For a sport team to exist and survive, there are only a few options:

- Charge the fans more, revolt guaranteed, "forgetting the root, ungrateful" and all that.

- Merchandise. Now teams change jersey every year -- with home, away, 3rd jerseys. Game, practice, and many more variations.

- Beholden to the leagues. Premier League is prime example, or for a scandal see European Super League.

- Advertising. Well, you know how HN hate advertising.

- Sell out to the highest bidders. Red Bull, private equity (Liverpool, Arsenal, etc.)

- Find a sugar daddy. Oligarchs or nation states (Roman Abramovich's Chelsea, Manchester City, Paris Saint Germain, Newcastle)

Pick the least evils.

Bayern Munich's stadium is one of the more famous in the world. More interesting that 0 people recognised it in the design process.

The US managed to issue a stamp with clearly the wrong Statue of Liberty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty_Forever_stam...

Which presumably everyone in the design process should have recognized, if not practically everyone in the world.

The moral being, uh, it's weird how blind people can be when they're not looking for it.

Wow, the sculptor got 3.5 million USD for copyright infringement from his copycat statue.

The Statue of Greed, located appropriately at a Casino

If you release an open source software with GPL license that is just a wrapper of an MIT licensed library, and someone manages to misuse your software, should you be entitled to damages?

To be fair, if I'm reading that right, the difference is "a small light patch on the middle spike"?[0] I can see people missing that easily enough!

[0] Absent contextual cues about height, location, etc., which aren't on the stamp

It means that they used a photo with unclear provenance, or they didn’t check the provenance. For issuing a stamp, you don’t just take a random photo of the statue and eyeball it and say “looks close enough to me”.

Coulda been worse. At least they showed a Munich stadium and not the Berlin Sportpalast.

The government of New South Wales (the Australian state of which Sydney is the capital) commissioned a corporate logo depicting a waratah (the NSW state flower) and got one showing a lotus. They still use it on everything.

And they just flat out told everyone who pointed it out -- nope, you're looking at it wrong; and anyway we already paid those consultants so we'd better use it, what?

"Good enough for Australia" is a phrase I frequently heard from Aussies. There seems to be this attitude there that they're a frontier country where one improvises (half asses?) everything.

Pretty much. A lot of the innovations of our nation, come from that. Things like utes, inflatable escape slides on planes, race cameras, are all "hacks".

But considering you can still see the gold mine which caused the foundation of my town, it isn't that surprising. We might not be the battlers we believe we are, but there's still a history of a people all around us.

"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck." - coined by social critic and journalist Donald Horne in his 1964 book The Lucky Country.

On the subject of flowers, the late Donald was a friend of a family friend who came over one night and after drinking a huge amount of wine decided in a midnight fit of inspiration (when we'd all gone to bed) to rearrange flowers throughout the house. We woke up in the morning to find little bits of flowers everywhere except the vases! Sadly, she passed away recently but it became a running joke in the family. Good sorts.

Wow, that always confused me since moving here. I thought I didn't know what a Waratah was, but no, it's the logo that's wrong.

Logo is https://www.nsw.gov.au/themes/custom/dcs_theme/favicons/sets... whereas the actual waratah looks like https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=waratah

The pun in this follow-up makes the whole mixup worthwhile: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4n4l1yyvro

"'We're not going to run from it': Sydney Marathon laughs off medal error"

I guess they are laughing it off because it was another Allianz sponsored stadium depicted, and they got the OK from Allianz to make the joke as it is free attention.

If the AI design had chosen a non-Allianz branded location I bet the response would be different.

The race has nothing to do with the stadium, other than running past it. They don’t have to get permission from anyone. Also, there’s no evidence that AI was involved, it could have just as easily been some designer googling for “Allianz Stadium” and illustrating the first thing that came up.

Years ago I was doing internal login pages for pay day loan insurance saas. Decided to put their logos to avoid mixups. Just googled. One was named Vision, copied logo from https://www.visions.ca figuring they did land on the side. Couple years later I realized my mistake & fixed, nobody else had said anything

Feels kind of pathetic high-schooler level response... "oh well, we're just going to laugh it off, please join us. Enjoy your sloppily* made medal!"

* whether AI-assisted or just lazy human slop that went unnoticed up all the chain.

My own footnote reminds me of this other slop: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/06/starbucks-sout...

> It turned out some managers who approved the campaign never opened the email attachments showing the marketing material.

Right there with the Milwaukee Marathon misspelling “Marathon” on their medals this year.

https://marathonhandbook.com/milwaukee-marathon-handed-out-4...

That time Ohio issued a license plate with the Wright Flyer flying backward and then the NC DOT razzed them about it:

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/25/1048991822/ohio-reverses-cour...

Someone vibed the medal design

AI slop all the way up to the physical world :D

Actually AI would have probably gotten it right.

The more likely explanation is that the person manually googled all the landmarks of Sydney to get some vector images to cut and paste into a CAD program to extrude, and accidentally got the wrong one.

Model bias towards northern hemisphere

You can tell it's an Aussie medal because all landmarks are depicted upside-down.

Allianz Marketing Head: My son's new favorite website is "Hackernews". They do not run ads, so how can we get the attention of their audience?

TCS. Say. no. more.

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