Visa Congratulates Team Visa Athlete Valerie Vili

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Visa Congratulates Team Visa Athlete Valerie Vili on Yesterday’s Gold Medal

Beijing, 18 August 2008 – Congratulations to Team Visa athlete Valerie Vili on her exceptional performance yesterday in the shotput finals; this achievement exemplifies the Faster, Higher, Stronger spirit of the Olympic Games, and the entire Visa team is proud of this accomplishment.

It has been a big year for Valerie, taking out the World Champs in Osaka, the 2007 Supreme Halberg Award and topping it off with her gold medal in Beijing last night.

The result will be welcomed by Valerie’s large fan base. According to recent research conducted by Visa athletics/track and field was second only to rowing as New Zealanders’ most eagerly anticipated Olympic Games sport.1

Visa supports more than 200 athletes on five continents as part of Team Visa, a sponsorship program launched in 2002 to help athletes from around the world as they train for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

In the Asia Pacific region, other Team Visa athletes include: Liu Xiang, Chinese 110 meter hurdle champion; Yao Ming, Chinese basketball sensation; the China national women’s hockey team; the China national men and women rowing, sailing and sailboarding, canoeing and slalom canoeing teams; Li Ching, Hong Kong table tennis competitor; Sze Hang Yu, Hong Kong swimmer; Chang King Yin, Hong Kong windsurfer; the Japan national swimming team; the Singapore national sports teams; Zhang Ming-Huang, Taiwanese shot put champion; the Taiwan national women’s softball team; and the Taiwan national archery team.

About Visa: Visa operates the world’s largest retail electronic payments network providing processing services and payment product platforms. This includes consumer credit, debit, prepaid and commercial payments, which are offered under the Visa, Visa Electron, Interlink and PLUS brands. Visa enjoys unsurpassed acceptance around the world and Visa/PLUS is one of the world's largest global ATM networks, offering cash access in local currency in more than 170 countries and territories.

1Between 17 March and 9 April 2008, Nielsen conducted 4,556 online and door-to-door interviews on behalf of Visa with people aged 18 years and above from nine countries and territories (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and India) in an effort to measure interest levels in global sporting events, China as a travel destination and, in particular, the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. For each market, quotas were set by key demographic variables to ensure the sample was representative of the general population. In New Zealand this involved 501 participants.

ENDS

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