The way the offer was made it looked like him calling himself a "sponsor" was all he wanted out of it. He gets that for about 11 months out of 12, and then withdraws the offer. Does not seem right no matter how I try to look at it.
Yes that's an accurate analysis, I just found only a few days ago that the rewards were reduced...
For an event scheduled to last 12 months, if you get the prestige of being its "sponsor" for 11 months and back out of the deal in the last month, naturally this cannot be considered ethical.
Since that contest was mentioned only in this forum and mainly on that particular thread, this didn't get much attention, but if this were a larger scale event, there would be legal repercussions against a sponsor backing out like this, and also going forward all the funds should be secured by the organizer long before the event is concluded for the benefit of the participants...