Where are the Tessa's Tour Tweets?

Last we heard from Tessa:

It's as if her twitter account vanished into a social media Bermuda triangle somewhere between the airport tarmac in North America and the Sea of Japan.

Edited because China is not Japan.

Where's all the "See these flat abs but I'm also fat because pastries?" What happened to sharing on social media her one-for-all, all-for-one team spirit showcased at the ISC golf event, while bonding with Olympic teammates, and during skating seminars with wholesome Canadian youngsters? Is Artistry on Ice chopped liver? We've got international travel, enthusiastic audiences, a bunch of other great skaters, and these costumes:

Nothing to say? Okay, they're not Kaitlyn Weaver, but skating stars don't come more lively and personable than Volosozaher and Trankov, who are also in Japan, and Maksim and Scott are meant to be friends. You'd never know from Tessa's twitter account. Maybe Tessa's ipad/iphone adapter malfunctioned.

ETA again: Since I confused DW's Japan tour with VM's China tour (or, I believe, it never registered it was in China, which is on me) I checked to see if it's possible to tweet from China, and apparently with a VPN, or with a phone with international roaming turned on, it is. Further googling showed that the firewall isn't even fireproof for Chinese residents, as one North American reports that her daughter is staying for three weeks in China with a friend of hers, and the friend's family has facebook (another blocked site). The US Embassy also tweets air quality reports to Americans in 3 Chinese cities, and those Americans have to be getting the tweets.

It might be a bit much to expect Tessa Virtue to want to work around a twitter block even with a VPN or roaming, being as she's so brand new to social media and so all thumbs on the internet. And besides, she's a recent product of Canton, and Canton is a place where, if Meryl Davis and Charlie White are anything to go by, they like to respect international local custom even if it's repressive.

Let's see how Kaitlyn Lawes is doing:

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Plucky, this one. No "Tour 1, Kaitlyn 0" here. No wine and pastries mention either, but otherwise she and Tessa are like a couple of tuning forks.

Love this ensemble:

 A/k/a  https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Hide_Your_Pregnancy

 Scott does look a little douche-istic, standing by with a box and a water bottle while Tessa's loaded down like a mule, but ... priorities.

I've been giving some thought to the sponsorship situation within this entire sham matrix, because it was getting depressing, the number of high profile corporate entities willing to partner up with a set of athletes engaged in actively hoaxing the public. It appeared to me that if you wanted to employ a bunch of athletes to tell us all how great your stuff is, you didn't want those people to habitually lie their faces off whenever they went on record. Even if people don't know the athletes are liars now, it could bite your company in the ass down the line. Especially when you're partnered with Scott and Tessa, who tell the opposite of the truth. What are potential Audi buyers supposed to think? Holy shit - Scott and Tessa are partnered with Audi - does that mean the engine mounts will give out, twist upward and pull open the throttle, causing rapid acceleration while disabling the brakes?

 Famous car recalls

Scott and Tessa say "Lindt is great chocolate!" Uh oh. How badly is Lindt contaminated with rodent effluvia and invisble particles of stainless steel?

Then I refreshed myself with marketing nomenclature, and confirmed that there's a difference between sponsorships and endorsements, even though the terms are frequently used interchangeably. I do think it's significant that so far Scott/Tessa and Kaitlyn Lawes/The Curling team, and all of the different Canadian athlete configurations we've seen on twitter, are shouting out sponsors, not so much lining up endorsement deals.

Sponsorships tend to be partnerships with an entity/class/category. Even if that entity is a human athlete, the partnership is with that human as an athlete, and generally the brand covers its bases by sponsoring a number of categories of athlete, thus emphasizing that the affiliation is brand/athletics, or, even better, brand/support of athletics/athletes, and not brand/individual personality. (I wonder, too, if there's any restrictions about renumeration; if the money needs to go to the athlete's athletic-related expenses, even if the "related" part can be stretched.)

Endorsements, OTOH, are brand/personality, and expose the brand to more risk should the person(s) representing their brand turn out to be a big, fat liar every time they open their mouths in public.

This link addressed the issue most directly:

Sponsorships are better and safer for corporations than endorsements 

From the link:

1) research findings that consistently show sponsorship generally fosters more positive feelings and behavior toward brands than endorsements; and 2) partnerships with organizations are less risky (though not risk-free) than agreements with individuals in terms of the likelihood of bad publicity due to scandal.

That makes sense. One approach - celebrity endorsement - just validates celebrity worship, while sponsorships align the corporation/brand with sports. As well, we can see where the corporate veil is between a given sponsorship of an athlete or category of athletes all connected by particular credentials - Olympic team, a developing sport, a para-team organization, women-in-sports - and an endorsement deal where the corporate entity is employing the athlete as a celebrity and creating an association between that athlete's individual appeal and individual credibility, and the brand. It's nice to know corporations still give a shit enough to at least cover their ass with semantics.