You can also look at it from the point of view that this sponsorship was an investment in his rating here on the forum. Now that that rating has been destroyed, it makes no sense for them to put money into it.
Isn't this an extra argument for negative feedback, if he did that for the sole purpose of increasing his reputation?
I might be wrong, but when I saw this thread a couple of days ago, Symmetrick's name was not present--and I'm not even sure I've seen that username before.
You definitely didn't see that name before as Ratimov changed name 3 days ago.
Now after sleeping on it for a few minutes, you could argue that people mostly joined the contest because of that money
While I don't think that money he added drastically affected amount of participants, it is nevertheless a shitty thing that he just did.