Enormous congratulations to Nike, which this week moved one giant step closer to its assumed goal of branding a swoosh on to the forehead of all human athletes. The champion middle-distance runner Nick Symmonds has been dropped from the United States team for this month’s World Athletics Championships for his failure to agree to draconian apparel-related terms in the USA Track and Field contract.

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Symmonds won 800m silver at the 2013 worlds in Moscow, but will not be making the journey to Beijing on account of his refusal to don a Just Do It T-shirt even while showering before bedtime (I paraphrase, but only slightly). To clarify: Symmonds, who is sponsored by Brooks, was entirely happy to wear the Team USA gear in competition, in training, at any awards ceremony, and for press conferences. What he took issue with – and really, who do these uppity trackbots think they are? – is USATF’s stipulation that he should “pack ONLY Team USA, Nike or non-branded apparel”, to prevent a single off-brand moment even during his downtime in the athletes’ hotel. (If only McDonald’s and Coca-Cola had the courage to insist footballers dined solely on their wares during all Fifa competitions.) Apparently, the mere act of being in the hotel constitutes an “official event” under the terms of USATF’s deal with Nike, and Symmonds’s refusal to accept this has seen him left off the team, despite having qualified by winning the 800m at the national championships in June.

A Tweet from @NickSymmonds detailing a letter he received from USATF. Photograph: Twitter

Which raises a few points. The first is that I hope there is going to be a Nike advert about all this. Remember, there is no piece of poor PR that the alchemists in the Nike marketing department cannot and will not shamelessly co-opt into a spine-tingling, inspirational commercial. The masterclass example has to be the ad that came in the immediate wake of the revelation that Tiger Woods had a raging cocktail waitress habit, and which featured Woods staring solemnly into the camera as the disembodied voice of his dead father – his dead father! – asked him pointedly: “Did you learn anything?”

Well I don’t know about you, but I learned that there were no places Nike, and indeed Woods, would not go in the interests of selling sneakers. (Don’t even start me on Tiger’s presidential-style press conference with his mum in the front row. He literally was sex addiction’s greatest-ever competitor.)

Anyway, back to Symmonds. Quite what form the Symmonds-related advert would take is unclear, though in keeping with the presidential theme for moments of stress, perhaps Nike could make it a traditional attack ad, in which Symmonds is accused of being un-American and unsporting, and – by implication – either a communist or a Muslim or whatnot.

I’m sure they would contrive to contrast him very unfavourably with Team USA captain – and Nike star – Justin Gatlin, who’ll clearly put anything on his body to be able to compete. I’m talking about sweat-wicking performance apparel, of course, as opposed to patchouli-and-testosterone scented buttock cream.

Doubtless Symmonds could also be thrown into unsympathetic relief against Galen Rupp, the leading light of Nike’s Oregon project – currently mired in what might kindly be referred to as controversy – and believed to actually sweat swooshes. Meanwhile, the firm’s dominance of the visuals for Team USA has increasingly resulted in other companies withdrawing from the sponsorship market, on the basis that at their biggest moments athletes will be wearing swooshes whether they like it or not. Which handily drives down the price of contracts for Nike, and partly accounts for Symmonds’ protest.

He won’t be short of cautionary tales about the perils of crossing Nike. I recall being in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics after the local hero Liu Xiang had to pull out of the hurdles. When an anonymous web poster claimed that Nike had forced Liu’s withdrawal, knowing he wasn’t going to win, the firm took the nuclear step of reporting the matter to the notoriously cuddly Chinese government and asking it to investigate. I wonder what happened to that blogger? I doubt Nike does.

That Nike is on the wrong side of practically every moral argument barely needs stating. But with his sacrifice, the business-minded Symmonds is shaping up as an interesting advocate for athletes’ rights in an age where competitors are still required to be self-defeatingly unworldly even as the vast corporations that have carved up sports with the governing bodies watch major events spray money into their bank accounts.

In this looking-glass world, contravention of their demands becomes the worst possible sin in the hierarchy. It is the same moral environment in which Uefa fined the Spanish FA £45,000 for fans’ racist chanting, half what Cameroon were relieved of for wearing the wrong kit in the Africa Cup of Nations that same year.

It’s funny how quickly the grim double standard extends beyond the commercial and into the political, particularly as governing bodies insist on awarding sporting events to repressive regimes, then preventing the athletes that make those events from making any protests. Beijing, Sochi, Baku, Qatar … why should nation states be allowed to allowed to use entire sporting events for obviously political purposes, but athletes cast from the firmament for raising so much as a placard?

This is a question unlikely to bother any corporation, and it is certainly something the Nike-underwritten USATF is way too craven to address. But more power to all athletes who refuse to accept their subjugation not to Corinthian ideals, but to autocratically imposed corporate ones. Sport is irrevocably commercialised – that ship has sailed. But athletes ought not to be its galley slaves, and Symmonds deserves support from across the spectrum.