by John Furlong
While I was working at the Arbutus Club, I also took on a volunteer role with the BC Games and became involved with the Western Canada Games, which helped broaden my Rolodex of contacts in Canada’s amateur sport world even more. I helped evaluate presentations of cities bidding to host the Western Canada Games. It was during this process that I came to understand that when a city is trying to land a major athletic competition, the final decision is rarely based on its planning ability. More often the intangibles make the difference: Who are you? Can you be trusted? And the value-added proposition: What will the Games gain if we give them to your city? I remember Abbotsford’s bid to host the Western Canada Games, how they absolutely wowed everyone in the room with their presentation. It was full of passion and vision. I had no choice but to vote for its bid even though Prince George, a town I had sentimental reasons to support, was also in the competition.
After a term as chair of Sport BC, the umbrella agency for sport in the province, I got a call from John Mills, who was CEO of the organization during my time there. It was early summer 1996, and a local group was trying to drum up support for a bid to host the Summer Olympics. A local television station wanted to interview someone from Sport BC about the idea. John couldn’t do it, so he asked if I’d stand in for him.
“But I don’t know anything about this,” I said.
John convinced me that I could shadowbox my way through the interview, and I did. I talked about how the Olympics would open up a new world for amateur athletes in Canada. Somehow, I managed to sound as if I knew what I was talking about. I waxed on a bit about the beauty of Vancouver and the stunning backdrop it would provide. I tried to give those watching some idea of the colour and atmosphere the Games would create. It was a bit of a “can you imagine?” moment that might have sounded good but was pure fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants stuff. Heavy on the blarney.
I hadn’t really thought much about Vancouver hosting an Olympics until then. Little did I know what I would be talking myself into.
2
Enter Jack Poole
PEOPLE HAD BEEN talking about hosting an Olympics in B.C. as far back as the 1960s. But in the run up to our Games, it became accepted wisdom that Bruce MacMillan, a vice-president at Tourism Vancouver in the mid-1990s, was the person who got the whole ball rolling.
As the story is told, he walked into the office of his boss, CEO Rick Antonson, and suggested trying to land the 2010 Winter Olympics. Task forces were formed and feasibility studies commissioned as the idea gained currency and real enthusiasm and momentum began building up behind it.
Others, however, insist the first person to bring up the idea in the 1990s was Gary Young, who was director of parks and recreation for North Vancouver. After the district successfully hosted a BC Games, Gary called John Mills at Sport BC and asked him what, if anything, was being done to perhaps bring the Olympic Winter Games to British Columbia. (The idea of a Summer Games bid had been dismissed by now.) The two met and then invited Bruce Mac-Millan to a later lunch to discuss the idea further, and afterward plans were launched that resulted in B.C. vying for domestic rights to challenge for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Arthur Griffiths, the former owner of the Vancouver Canucks and someone who had good business connections in the city, was asked to chair the Vancouver/Whistler 2010 Bid Society. The first hurdle was securing the domestic rights. Quebec City was seen by many as the clear and early favourite, and Calgary was in the race too.
I became involved and was given the task of securing votes among the Canadian Olympic Association delegates who would determine the winner. Many of those votes belonged to the heads of various amateur sports organizations I had come to know through my volunteer work with the Canada Games and later the BC Summer and Winter Games.
The elephant in the room for all three Canadian cities was the fact that Toronto was in the hunt for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Many people in the amateur sports world thought Toronto had a decent chance and that going after the 2010 Winter Games for Vancouver was a waste of time and money. I didn’t see it that way. I thought the allure of bringing the Olympics to China for the first time would be too great for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to resist. This was a country of over a billion people, nearly half of whom were children. The emotional dimension of the 2008 Beijing bid was just too compelling.
On November 21, 1998, Calgary, Quebec City and Vancouver made their pitches to the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC). Vancouver’s ace in the hole was the B.C. premier at the time, Glen Clark. Clark became an enthusiastic supporter of the bid early on. He loved sports and could see the potential benefit to the province, even though many members of his New Democratic Party caucus didn’t like the idea. Clark was also an excellent public speaker and often at his best when he was talking without notes. He gave a command performance in front of the COC. He focused on how Vancouver had a better chance than Calgary and Quebec City of fending off the other cities around the world that would be going after the Games. It had an allure as a dynamic destination. Besides, Calgary had already hosted the Winter Olympics and the chances of the IOC giving them to the Alberta city a second time were slim. And Quebec City had earlier made a bid for the Winter Games and lost badly.
In December, the COC announced that Vancouver was the winner.
Now things really became serious. All of a sudden we had a major project on our hands. Money would need to be raised. A bigger organization would have to be built. A grand vision would have to be mapped out. A bid committee would have to be formed that included different stakeholder groups, including governments, Tourism Vancouver and relevant amateur sports organizations.
Above all else, the bid needed a chief executive officer to lead the project. My name came up as a possible candidate. I was surprised and extremely flattered and thought it would be a marvellous opportunity. I also thought I could do the job. By this point I knew a fair bit about Olympic sport and I thought I had the right mentality for the position. Suddenly, my mindset changed. I went from being a casual believer in the plan to land the Games to being obsessed with the idea.
I knew one of the big issues that would be on the minds of the hiring committee would be the CEO’s ability to raise money to fund the operation until July 2003, when the IOC would make its decision. It was estimated we would need almost $30 million to hire staff, travel, commission studies and draw up plans, among other things. I assumed the committee would be looking for someone with strong corporate connections. In other words, someone who had a more distinguished business pedigree than I. Still, I thought I could make a good case for the job.
The night before I was interviewed I went to see a movie about the Nagano Games that was playing at Science World in Vancouver’s False Creek. I remember sitting through it with a handful of patrons and not being moved by the experience at all. It seemed that the Nagano Games lacked soul. After it was over I went out to my car, sat for a few minutes and decided to go back in and watch the film again. I needed to better formulate in my mind what it was about Nagano that wasn’t going to be good enough for Vancouver.
After watching a second time, I realized that to win our bid had to centre on people. We had to reject the traditional model that this was about building infrastructure and boosting the local economy. Those were benefits undoubtedly. The physical and financial legacies of the Games would be enormous. But that wasn’t a vision. That wasn’t going to get people to buy into what we were selling.
My interview was at 11 o’clock. I was nervous. I walked into a boardroom in a building downtown, where there was a clear view of the North Shore Mountains and the homes that dotted the hillsides below them. The committee chair, Arthur Griffiths, asked me right off the top what I thought these Games should be about. I pointed to the window.
“If the Games don’t mean anything to the people living in those homes over there,” I said, “if those people don’t talk about them in their kitchens, if we don’t touch and inspire human beings with the idea of ho
sting the Games, then our chances of winning will be greatly diminished.”
I talked about how we had to offer the IOC something no one else could: an Olympics that included the entire country and that would make its presence felt in every corner of its vast expanse. Our advantage over our rivals was our geography, our sheer size. It was a canvas upon which we could design a Games none of our competitors could match.
Finally, I talked about money. While I didn’t have the corporate connections that others did, I believed I could sell a vision for these Olympics that would get the business community excited and eager to climb onboard. I believed I could raise money by being passionate and articulate about what these Olympics could deliver to the country—that would be the easy part.
On the way out of the interview, one of the committee members followed me to the elevator and told me I had been the only candidate to provide a real vision of what the Games could do. Not that it did me any good, as it turned out.
The next day I was told I didn’t get the job. It went to Don Calder, a former president of BC Telecom. Don was a solid guy with impeccable corporate credentials. I was disappointed, no question. I wanted the job and thought I could do something special with it.
However, the committee saw something in me and asked if I would sit on the executive and chair the strategic planning committee. I agreed. I felt a little awkward at first, as Don knew I had been a finalist for his job. But that feeling soon passed, and I dug in to help as much as I could. After a year, however, there was a feeling that not enough progress was being made. Things were uneasy and we were limping along. I don’t think Don and the job were ever a particularly good fit. He decided to step down, and the search for a new CEO began. Again, I was asked to throw my name in.
I was hesitant at first. What’s that old adage? Once burned, twice shy? And I thought the hiring committee might be asking me so it could fill the quota of candidates it needed. I nevertheless agreed. This time the interview process was more rigorous, the questions tougher and more probing. I elaborated on the vision I had outlined the first time around. I presented some new ideas for raising money, uniting the country and engaging Aboriginal Canadians. Overall, however, my presentation hadn’t changed much in a year.
The next day I got a call from Rusty Goepel, a senior executive with the investment firm Raymond James Financial, Inc., and one of the most connected businesspeople in town. He headed up the hiring committee.
“I’ve got good news and bad news, John,” Rusty said. “The good news is we found a great guy for the job. The bad news is it’s not you. We have selected Jack Poole. However, the committee believes it’s a job for two and thinks you and Jack would make a great team. So we want you to sit down and talk to Jack about the two of you working together.”
The news left me more disheartened than it had the first time around. Losing twice in a row really stung. I didn’t know much about Jack except that he was a big-name developer in town. I wasn’t much in the mood for sitting down with the winner to talk about how I might work with him. Besides, I didn’t think it was fair for the bid committee to be foisting someone on the new guy. But Rusty was insistent, so to be a good sport I agreed.
I had put down the phone no more than 10 seconds when it rang again. “John,” the voice said, “Jack Poole. I’ve heard lots about you.”
He was warm and friendly, as if he’d known me a lifetime. We talked for five minutes, and he asked if we could get together to chat further. We agreed to meet at his office in two days.
When I turned on my car radio that Tuesday morning on my way to the meeting I thought I was listening to an old broadcast from the Second World War. It was real-time coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. I would never forget the date of my first meeting with Jack.
We carried on seamlessly from our telephone conversation. Jack was just an impossible guy to dislike. He had some of the halo effect that Trudeau had and a Kennedyesque charisma. He was a good-looking guy, tall, athletic. We talked about everything: the task ahead, sports and people in town whom we both knew. He joked a lot. He asked me what I thought the vision for the bid should be. I gave him a brief version of my pitch and he agreed. At the end of our conversation he looked at me and said, “John, if you don’t agree to work with me on this project I’m not going to do it either.”
It would occur to me later that in that moment I had been “Jack Pooled,” a phrase I used to describe the man’s ability to get people to do things for him. How could I say no? We shook hands. I walked outside and stood on the sidewalk for a moment looking up at Jack’s office. He wanted me to be his second-in-command, in charge of several key aspects of the bid’s operations. That was an enormous responsibility. And as I stood there, I couldn’t help thinking about the significance of this moment. I’d spent my whole life dreaming I’d be part of something this big, but never in a million years had I thought it would happen. I was elated—and a bit scared.
I left for Europe a couple of days later on a golf holiday. I spent most of that time away calling Jack from various pay phones, talking about people he wanted to hire and other matters. I had to get my board at the Arbutus Club to agree to a sabbatical, so I asked Jack to write a letter outlining why he needed my services. I thought the board would be honoured to have its CEO seconded for such a cause. The directors agreed.
In mid-October, on my first day in our sparse offices on Dunsmuir Street in downtown Vancouver, Jack walked into my office, eager to explain how our partnership was going to work. “My desk, no paper,” he said. “Your desk, all of the paper.” He wasn’t joking.
One of the first things we had to prepare for was an event being held in Singapore called SportAccord, a five-day gathering of 1,500 of the most important people in the world of international sport. Among them would be the heads of over 100 international sports federations and almost every IOC member who would have a vote on the 2010 bid. We needed to be there to start introducing ourselves to those who would be deciding our fate. Our competition was attending. This would be the beginning of our international campaign for votes. It was big. I knew enough about the IOC and how it worked to know that delegates didn’t waste a lot of their time with underlings. That’s why Jack needed to be there. He asked me to accompany him, and I agreed because I knew it would make him feel more comfortable if we were two at a convention full of strangers. But two days before we were to leave Jack walked into my office and announced he wasn’t going.
“What do you mean?” I said. “You have to go! You have no idea how important it is that you be there, Jack.”
Nope, he said. He had come down with a cold and just didn’t feel up to it. We argued some more before I finally gave up. He wasn’t going, I was, and that was the end of it.
A few days later I was walking into the conference hotel in Singapore with a knot in my stomach. I didn’t have a clue how I was going to penetrate this gathering. It was like bringing a rowboat up to the Queen Mary. Overwhelming.
There were a few familiar faces. One was Paul Henderson—not the famous hockey player but rather a champion for the Toronto bid for the 2008 Summer Games, a former Olympian and an IOC delegate. Toronto had lost out that summer to Beijing, and Paul wasn’t happy about it. He did not warm much to me, at least not there. He thought our bid had hurt Toronto’s chances because of the mixed message he believed it sent to IOC delegates: Canada couldn’t make up its mind if it wanted the Summer or Winter Games.
What Paul didn’t accept was that as soon as China threw its name in the ring for 2008, it was over for everyone else. Even though Toronto put together a world-class bid that was technically superior to everyone else’s, it lost in a landslide. I could understand why people on Toronto’s bid committee might be bitter, but being upset at us was unfair. Singapore was not the place to argue about it.
Another Canadian there was Bob Storey. Bob was from Ottawa and head of the International Bobsleigh Federation. He was brilliant and fiercely dir
ect. As such, he was a man of major influence in this arena and knew all of the delegates who would be casting votes for the 2010 Games. We had met earlier in Vancouver, but I introduced myself again and it wasn’t long before he was letting me know what he thought of our bid: not much. One of his criticisms was that we hadn’t reached out to well-placed Canadians living outside British Columbia. This had created resentment in the rest of the country. He thought we were naïve and without focus. Without people like Bob on our side, the challenge we faced was going to be even more formidable. I pleaded for his help.
After a long conversation, he agreed. It was one of the most pivotal developments in the bid phase, though I didn’t know it at the time.
For the five days I was in Singapore I would shake as many hands as I could. If I saw someone identified as an IOC delegate I’d walk up and say hello. It was cold-calling at its worst and a bit like selling dictionaries in Oxford. No one wanted or needed one. Being a hardcore introvert I was lost, but I had no choice. It was my job, at least on this trip.
On the way home I thought about the nightmare that lay before us. Singapore made me realize what a monster this process was, how much work was going to be involved. While I had met many IOC members, I didn’t think the trip had gone particularly well. Votes secured—none. I phoned Jack as soon as I touched down in Vancouver and told him what a mistake it had been for him not to go. Never again, I said.
The next day I went over the trip with Jack almost hour by hour, reciting the names of every person I had met. I told him the process was too unforgiving for blunders and miscalculations. There were going to be dozens and dozens of similar occasions that he was going to need to be at to press our case to IOC voters.
Jack looked at me. “John, I’m not going to do this,” he said.
I looked at him, astonished. “What in heaven’s name do you mean?”