by John Furlong
“It’s young person’s work, John, and you’re young and have lots of energy so you’re going to do it.”
But what about the work that I was supposed to be doing in Vancouver? I was the chief operating officer. There were technical plans to organize and sponsors to recruit. Who was going to do that?
“You are,” he said. “When you absolutely need me I will be there.”
I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t believe he was asking me to take this stuff on. We went back and forth for another 30 minutes before I gave up trying to convince him why it wouldn’t work. He was going to look after the significant, sometimes unpredictable politics of the bid, dealing with the provincial and federal governments, and I would focus on international voters and do the best I could with everything else. This would be the genesis of my transformation from chief operating officer to president. My role was now fundamentally different. As far as IOC delegates were concerned, I was the head guy they were dealing with. I would end up handling huge numbers of the media interviews from this point on too—something I didn’t relish.
THE SALT LAKE CITY Olympics were a few months away. That would be another key milestone for us. Throughout any calendar year there are events where IOC people gather. In an Olympic year, there are even greater opportunities to buttonhole them. By the time the Games rolled around in February 2002, we had developed our strategy for hunting down votes.
We decided on a humble Canadian approach. We would tell IOC members that we’d never been involved in anything like this before, and solicit help and advice. We felt it was far more seductive to ask someone for their assistance than to give the impression that we were cocky. We also didn’t want anyone to confuse us with the U.S., who, we had discovered, had big issues within the IOC.
We needed to build relationships. The stronger the relationship the harder it would be for that delegate to vote for another city, and the stronger the rapport the greater the degree of trust we would have between us. The one thing we insisted on was not asking delegates for their vote directly. I thought that would be cheesy and too aggressive. We preferred to convince them we were trustworthy and then have them volunteer that we had their vote.
As the months went on, the international team we formed at the bid corporation developed profiles of every IOC member. We amassed massive amounts of useful personal information on each one, never knowing when a single piece of information might come in handy. If asking a delegate about a daughter’s graduation from high school helped seal a bond between us, it was worth it.
Salt Lake gave our team a chance to put our strategy in action and see a Winter Olympics up close. Organizers gave us good access. It was fascinating and scary at the same time. I spent a great deal of time flitting from one social and sporting event to another, trying to shake hands with as many delegates as I could. I felt far more at ease than I had in Singapore.
By now I had formed a good relationship with Bob Storey, the Bobsleigh Federation president. I often kidded him about his sport. “Anyone can jump in a canoe and slide down a tunnel of ice,” I would say. One day in Salt Lake City I got a call from Bob. “So, want to see if you’re man enough to try our sport?” he said. “I’ve got a ride for you, but you have to be here in half an hour. And by the way, you’re going to be in the sled with Princess Nora of Liechtenstein.” In an instant, my bravado disappeared.
Driving to the Sliding Centre I was terrified. Sure enough, Princess Nora was there. I knew she was an IOC delegate and it was going to be beneficial to share this common experience—if we survived. Besides the pilot, an American, there would be one other person in the sled with us, a fellow from England. A bobsleigh official gave us instructions about where to hold onto the sled and to put our feet. He told us how to keep control of the head so it would not rock back and forth and smash into the back of the helmet of the person in front of us.
We started down at a reasonable pace, and after making the first turn I thought everything would be fine. Then our bobsleigh fell off a cliff, or so it seemed. Suddenly, we were rocketing down the course. I had my legs wrapped around Princess Nora, who was in front of me and screaming as I’d never heard a person scream before. The helmet of the English guy behind me smashed into the back of mine 50 times, just as the instructor had predicted it would. It didn’t take long to get to the bottom, where we were all elated to be alive. I told Princess Nora that I thought I heard her screaming for her mother. She laughed. I was confident we had sewn up a vote.
The highlight in Salt Lake was the men’s gold medal hockey game. The Canadian team had been under so much pressure during the entire tournament, and now there was the chance to win gold for the first time in 50 years. Canadian golfer Mike Weir was sitting behind me at the arena. I was astonished to see the number of Canadian flags and jerseys in the crowd. We ended up beating the U.S. quite handily, 5–2, which helped produce a wonderful moment late in the game when people from all nations embraced each other and started singing “O Canada.”
The bid team’s experience in Salt Lake was beneficial but also sobering. IOC President Jacques Rogge neatly summed up the bottom line for all the bidders. “There’s only one gold medal,” he said, as he urged us to compete fairly and within the rules. At that point, there were still eight countries looking to win. Many hearts would be broken before this process was finished.
By now there were some internal frustrations inside the bid corporation. Even though we hadn’t been at it that long, Jack could see problems on the horizon with how things were structured. He was used to clarity of command. Now he had to answer to a board, in this case one that had not fully gelled. He thought the decision making was too slow. Far better for him to be chair so he could communicate more easily with the board and move operational decisions along at a greater speed. It would mean the current chair, the former Olympian Marion Lay, would have to step aside. Jack was insistent and the board accepted his instincts right after we returned from Salt Lake. Marion remained a director. I became president.
Our next big task was to draft a mini–bid book. This was to give the IOC a general idea of what we planned to deliver, what our venues might look like, how we intended to look after the athletes. It wasn’t to be accompanied with precise dollar amounts, but there needed to be enough information in it for the IOC to shortlist the real contenders.
This is one time when Jack and I had a pretty major disagreement. He wanted to make the contents of our bid book public, even though we had no obligation to do so. Bid books were normally handed to the IOC in private, but Jack thought that because this was ultimately a public enterprise, using a lot of tax dollars, there was an onus on us to be as open as possible. I understood, but this was also a competition. Why would we reveal our plans to our competitors? How did we know that they wouldn’t try and steal our best ideas or at least devise a way to nullify their impact? I believed there were a couple of areas in which we were going to be vastly superior to our opponents, and I didn’t want them scrambling to come up with something with an equal “wow” factor. I compared Jack’s proposal to a hockey player telling a goalie which corner he was going to shoot at.
But the day the Austrians submitted their bid book they also put it on the Internet. The Koreans did too. The media in Vancouver rightly began demanding we do the same. We had no choice. I quickly realized I’d made a significant mistake and hadn’t demonstrated good judgment. It would only dawn on me later that the jewels we had in our bid, like the Athletes’ Village, were going to be impossible for our competitors to match or copy. How was anyone going to duplicate False Creek, one of the choicest pieces of real estate in the world? Similarly, how could they copy our plans to bring the entire country together? None of our competitors had the geography to do something as grand and all-encompassing as we were planning.
If I learned a lesson, though, it was to be as transparent as possible. Worse was looking like you had something to hide.
IN AUGUST 2002, the IOC announced the four finalists
, and to few people’s surprise, we advanced, along with Salzburg, Austria; Berne, Switzerland; and Pyeongchang, South Korea. The next stop would be a five-day Olympic initiation course in Lausanne, Switzerland, at IOC headquarters on how best to navigate the process and a presentation by the ethics committee on what you could and couldn’t do in the company of IOC members. We sent about six delegates. I sat with Terry Wright during the sessions. Terry was one of our best team members and a logistical wizard. He was the person instrumental in putting together our technical bid, which covered venues, transportation and accommodation. He’d worked on countless provincial, national and international sporting events before this. We felt lucky to have him. He had the heart of a lion.
In Lausanne, we sat through many different sessions. During one, Terry had a question that was answered by an IOC official. I then asked Terry if he understood the response and expected him to say, “Yes, thanks very much,” or whatever. Instead, he whispered a little too loudly, “Yes, what he’s really saying is they are going to ding us for a bunch more money.” Well, the whole room heard the aside. My jaw dropped. By the end of the day, word had spread about Terry’s retort. Committee officials weren’t impressed, and more than a couple told me so. They said that the comment had made us look like rude, arrogant know-it-alls.
That night I went to Terry’s room and told him what people were saying. He felt sick. It could never happen again, we both agreed. That’s the way this thing worked. The smallest setback seemed like a bid-threatening development that could throw us into depression.
We managed to right the ship in Lausanne. Terry worked extra hard to make sure people didn’t think he was too self-assured or cocky. At the end of the final session, I got up and thanked the IOC officials on behalf of all of the bid cities for their time and guidance. We took a lot of notes. We realized our competition was extremely tough.
The next few months I would have to maintain a brutal pace. I would be flying around the world a couple of times. Votes. Votes. Votes. That’s what it was all about.
Our international strategy was pretty straightforward. We would have to count on Europe to get us over the top. We knew we weren’t likely to get far in Asia or most of South America or Africa. We had the U.S. onside—or so we thought. That left Europe, which we felt optimistic about. And our odds of making inroads there improved after Berne dropped out when an Olympic plebiscite in the city failed to produce the required number of votes to go ahead. Little did I know we would be facing a similar referendum of our own in a few short months. With Berne out, Salzburg and Vancouver were chasing many of the same delegates.
The bid process could hardly be described as logical. Sometimes we sought out Hail Mary opportunities on the off-chance something might work out. Delegates were scattered all over the world, so face time with them was often hard to arrange. When we had an opportunity, we pounced on it immediately. One such occasion occurred that August. Canada was hosting the women’s U19 World Cup of soccer. Sepp Blatter, the iconic head of the International Federation of Association Football, or FIFA as it is commonly known, was in the country and, we were told, was going to be passing through Vancouver on his way to Edmonton, where the tournament was being held. Working with our friends at the Canadian Soccer Association, we arranged to squirrel him away for an evening to talk Olympics. Sepp was an IOC member and an influential one at that. We wanted to make an indelible impression on him. We decided this would be a night for Jack Poole and his wife, Darlene, to put on the ritz at their sprawling estate in Mission, a rural community 90 minutes east of Vancouver. The plan was to send a helicopter for Sepp and fly him to Jack’s place, while showing off a little of the local geography at the same time.
We met Sepp when he touched down on the estate’s landing pad. Yes, Jack had his own landing pad. The Pooles poured on the charm. The steak was brilliant and so was the apple pie. We had a great evening talking to one of the most influential sports kings in the world, who waxed eloquently about sport politics, including those that surrounded the IOC.
Sepp was in his element—at the centre of attention with no pressure. I asked him at one point what his vision was for the game of soccer. “I will not be satisfied until every child on the planet owns a soccer ball,” he said. And he meant it. Sepp was a formidable man, short and stocky and with an imposing face, who seemed to dominate his surroundings the way someone much bigger might. By the end of the night we were friends. As always, we didn’t ask for Sepp’s vote but we were all smiles when he told us we could count on him.
One person who became important to our effort in Europe was Pat Hickey. I didn’t know much about Pat, only that he was from Dublin and was a heavy-hitter in the IOC. I figured if I couldn’t wrap up the vote of a fellow Irishman we were doomed. I phoned up my brother-in-law, Padraig MacDiarmada, in Dublin and asked him what he knew about Hickey. Padraig said he didn’t know much other than that Hickey was often in the news and seemed to be a controversial fellow. Padraig said he’d do a little more digging and get back to me. He phoned back a couple of days later. “You’re never going to believe it. Guess where Pat Hickey went to high school? St. Vincent’s!”
Pat had graduated four years ahead of me, but it was a wonderful tidbit and gave me a great conversation starter when I called to see if we could meet. A month later Bob Storey and I met him at a restaurant in Dublin. Pat is one of those guys who fills a room when he walks in, a real bon vivant. I told him we were new at this Olympics game, and didn’t have enough confidence and needed his help. I wanted him to adopt his former schoolmate. Take me under his wing. It worked. Pat would sign on to “help an old friend” as he often put it, doing as much intelligence work for us as he could.
He became an important insider for us. Whenever he heard any negative scuttlebutt about our bid, he passed it along. One time he told me that someone, likely another bidder, was spreading a rumour that we had no intention of fixing the road from Vancouver to Whistler, which needed to be widened in order to give our bid a shot at success. The B.C. government had committed to making it happen. Pat’s tipoff was important because it allowed us to go out and address the misinformation that was being spread.
It had become clear that the Russians would be crucial to our bid. They had six or seven votes, and we had already done quite a bit of spadework to get their support, telling their officials that we’d be happy to help them launch a later bid of their own. The person who ultimately influenced where their votes would go was a man named Yuri Luzhkov. Luzhkov had been mayor of Moscow since 1992, having been appointed by Boris Yeltsin. Since then, he had consolidated his power base in the region and had become one of the most influential people in the country. He owned all the McDonald’s restaurants in the city and was quite wealthy.
Late in the game we had arranged to meet Luzhkov during a trip to Moscow. His office was near Red Square. There were about a dozen people milling about in the foyer an hour before the meeting was to start, though I wasn’t sure who they were or what role any of them played. We weren’t there long before a message was delivered that Luzhkov wasn’t going to be able to make it and was sending his deputy. I choked. We had come halfway around the world for this. He was the key guy. He was the one who influenced all of the Russian votes. The room quickly cleared after that news arrived.
Bob Storey and I were then told of another change of plans and were soon escorted into a large, ornate room with massive chandeliers and billboard-sized oil paintings. Within minutes the door swung open and who should walk in but a short, powerfully built man with a bald head and a general demeanour that suggested you didn’t want to mess with him. It was Luzhkov.
As it turned out, the earlier message had been a ruse. If he said he wasn’t coming, all the would-be power chasers, sycophants and hangers-on would disappear, we were told. We quickly got down to business. Moscow was now fully declared and bidding on the 2012 Summer Olympics. Luzhkov said the country wanted our help with the planning of its bid. We talked about the deal we
had earlier worked out with Russian officials: we would show them the ropes, explain how a bid was prepared, and give them our campaign strategy in exchange for their votes.
It seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Bob had structured the deal, and we had spent months finessing it. There was certainly nothing illegal or unethical about it. When we shook hands I never doubted for a second Luzhkov would be good for his word. Say what you want about various aspects of Russian life, the people are loyal. We kept our word and staged a formal workshop for the Moscow 2012 team. We got Russia’s crucial support in return. Moscow would lose out to London for 2012.
By the time the bid phase was over in July 2003 I had travelled nearly 2 million kilometres chasing down votes. There were days I could really feel it and had to push myself to go out to some restaurant or cocktail party in Madrid or Reykjavik or Mexico City to have a chat with an IOC member. But I figured that as long as I was asking my staff to test the limits of their endurance, to work harder than they’d ever worked before, I had to do the same. Also, I believed that the tiniest, seemingly most inconsequential gesture or conversation could affect us. That extra mile we went to get a single vote could be the difference between utter joy and utter dejection.
There were days, though, when I was seriously beat. I remember one trip to St. Moritz. It was at the end of a long European jaunt, and I had travelled by car through the mountains most of the day and evening to get to the famous Swiss resort town. It was almost midnight when I finally checked into some no-name hotel, got to my room, threw on my pajamas and flopped into bed. In seconds I was out cold. I woke up around 3 o’clock in the morning in an utter fog. I honestly had no clue where I was. I looked around the drab room for hints, but nothing helped me.
I walked downstairs to the lobby, but there was no one working at the front desk. I still had no idea where I was. I went outside and started walking down the street. I was in my pajamas. I had no shoes on. I remember thinking: What on earth are you doing, man? But I was genuinely lost until I came across a confectionery shop a couple doors up from the hotel. I looked in the window and there were some cakes with little bobsleds and curling rocks on top of them. Bobsleds. That’s right. I was at the World Bobsleigh Championships in St. Moritz! I felt like such an idiot. And I was scared. I scampered back to the hotel on the balls of my cold feet, praying no one would see me.