The Willingboro Olympics 

It’s no wonder I was late to the meeting. To get to the Medco Health Automated Pharmacy in Willingboro, NJ, you needed to get on the Turnpike South to Cherry Hill, then several local highways before a turn off into an industrial park.

The pharmacy was a huge facility, a converted department store built to impress potential clients with high-tech machinery and a conference room with a long table and windows that overlooked a maze of conveyor belts and technicians emptying jars of pills into automated dispensing systems. I sat off to the side of the conference room and scoped it out. Seated around the table were a couple of Medco execs, some folks from an outside marketing agency, plus Mark Spitz, Greg Louganis, Al Oerter, Peggy Fleming, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Bruce Jenner.

Wow.

During my ten years there, Medco went from Merck subsidiary to the Fortune 100. Management craved  some sort of big national advertising campaign and hiring a group of gold medalists with chronic health conditions to hype our mail order pharmacy and lower prices, seemed like a good way go. There were even whispers about a possible Super Bowl ad. (The crucial caveat that everybody seemed to overlook was that a consumer couldn't just order medicines from Medco. Your health plan had to be using Medco as its pharmacy benefit managers.).

There was a presentation, then a tour of the pharmacy. Jenner’s gold medal performance had been 31 years earlier, but he was a big dude with broad shoulders and easily recognizable (even with the facelift – nobody but Jenner knew he was on his way to being reincarnated as a real-life Roberta Muldoon) and the pharmacy techs on the floor were walking away from the kind of machinery that requires a watchful eye just to shake his hand.

Watching the group dynamics during breaks, the athletes gravitated together into smaller groups. I imagine that when astronauts got together it was the same thing -- the natural camaraderie of people who'd experienced something the rest of us will never get close to.  

The meeting broke out into smaller sessions as the agency people and some of us from Medco went over campaign speaking points and answered the athletes' questions.  I sat in with Greg Louganis and Peggy Fleming. I corrected her handler on one point and answered a couple of questions she had. All I could think of was getting this issue of Sports Illustrated in the mail when I was 13 years old:

That morning in Willingboro may have been the high point of the campaign. For whatever reasons, Fleming dropped out. Al Oerter’s chronic health condition turned out to be cardiac related and he died suddenly a few months later of heart failure. (Oerter may have owned the most impressive Olympic achievement, four consecutive gold medals in the discus between 1956 to 1968). He was replaced by Bob Beamon, who broke the world long jump record by an astounding 22 inches during the 1968 Olympics.

In the end, the campaign wasn’t podium worthy. Beamon and Kersee made a few personal appearances at client meetings or gave talks to employees. I don’t recall Jenner being very active. Things fizzled out quickly, with only Spitz appearing in a couple of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ten-second TV ads that got sandwiched into commercial breaks during late afternoon talk shows. Later, he sued Medco for using his image after his contract expired.

Two years later, Medco was gone after merging with its biggest competitor.

Spitz, Beamon, Louganis, Kersee and Jenner in their Medco track suits