by John Furlong
Along with a few other members of the team and the media, I flew home a day later aboard an Air Canada flight. I was on a complete high, still not quite believing what we had just accomplished. The last 48 hours had been emotional for everyone. It was difficult not to think about how life-changing the result was going to be for many of us.
I took my seat on the plane, feeling more relaxed than I had in months, maybe years. Everyone in the delegation got an upgrade. As we began to taxi over to the main runway the captain came on the intercom. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Welcome aboard Air Canada flight 2010 to Vancouver.”
The words gave me the shivers.
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Employee No. 1
IGOT A TASTE of the euphoria surrounding our win when our plane landed at Vancouver International Airport. We had been told by our pilot that there was a mob waiting for us, but to see the thousands gathered in the international arrivals area when we got through customs was still a shock. People had signs. Many were outfitted in red and white. My eight-year-old daughter Molly sprinted past everyone to greet her dad, still not sure what all the fuss was about. But she was not about to be left out. There was media everywhere. Dozens of friends showed up as well. I was flabbergasted.
It was one thing to pick up the phone to say thank you, or write a card, but to make the trip to the airport to say it in person meant a great deal to me. It was like nothing I had ever experienced. I was asked by the media about my future and whether I was interested in being CEO of the Vancouver Organizing Committee that would put on the Games. I said I was but that if Prague was my last day working for the 2010 Olympics, I was good with that too. Others were going to decide my future.
A number of events were held over the next few days in recognition of the honour that had been bestowed on Vancouver. It was impossible to walk down the street without being stopped by someone who wanted to say thank you for what our group had achieved.
Shortly after returning home I received a phone call from Brian Burke’s office looking for a meeting. Brian was the president and general manager of the Vancouver Canucks at the time and one of the most recognizable personalities in town. When I showed up at the boardroom at GM Place, I was met by Brian and his chief operating officer, Dave Cobb. I sat down to hear what this was all about. “John, I just wanted to thank you personally for an extraordinary performance in Prague,” Brian began. “I wanted to thank you for doing incredible good for the country and just wanted to say it was a genuine delight to see you guys win.”
He told me how he and Dave had been in GM Place for the announcement at 5 AM and were a little miffed that the cheer that went up inside the stadium was louder than any he had heard at a hockey game. Before I left he said that if there was anything he could do to help us out, all I had to do was call. It was an offer he lived up to often in the years that followed. Many like Brian were already stepping up to say “Well done” and “Count me in if you need any help.”
While it was fun basking in the glow of our victory for a few days, there was also work to be done. There was a huge transition to make between being a bid city and a host city. The Vancouver-Whistler 2010 Bid Corporation would now make way for the Vancouver Organizing Committee, or as it would eventually be known, VANOC. It would mean a new board would have to be chosen and the jockeying to be on it would be fierce. While it was understood that Jack would be chair of that board, at least initially, what wasn’t known was who the CEO would be. That was the big job, the ringmaster of everything that would happen over the next seven years.
Over the next couple of months, newspapers and television and radio talk shows were consumed with the project. There were never-ending debates about the amount of money that was going to be needed. There was much speculation about who might be on the board and who would get the CEO’s job. The rumours, gossip and conjecture seemed to be endless. As the weeks rolled on, I could sense the euphoria of Prague beginning to evaporate among the office staff, which was composed of a small group of us from the bid phase who were managing the transition. People were wondering if they were going to fit into future plans. There were a few trying to position themselves for certain jobs. It made for an uncomfortable environment, and the Irish worrier in me triggered more sleepless nights than I could count. It was energy-sapping in the worst way. I had no idea how long it would be before a CEO was chosen, but we couldn’t afford to put the organization in neutral while we waited for a decision. Meanwhile, I was driving the transition and was involved in all major decisions related to the project. We tried to press on.
Construction to improve the Sea to Sky Highway began almost immediately. Talks were also heating up over the possibility of building a new rapid transit line from the airport into downtown. While it wasn’t promised to the IOC during our bid, we had certainly dangled it as a possibility. It was a commuter link that needed to be built at some point; we were hopeful it could get done in time to help deliver Olympic visitors to downtown hotels. Critics, of course, put what came to be called the Canada Line at our feet— especially the cost.
On October 3, 2003, the VANOC board was announced. As expected, it was a group that included heavyweights from government, sport and business. The Canadian Olympic Committee had seven spots at the table. Canada and B.C. had three each; Vancouver and Whistler each provided a pair, with one each from First Nations and the Canadian Paralympic Committee and one at-large member, Jack Poole.
With the board in place, hiring a CEO was expected to be its first priority. The IOC, meantime, had announced that my good friend René Fasel would be heading up its coordination commission. This was another huge break for us. It was the commission’s job to monitor the progress we were making—or not making—in delivering on the promises we made in our bid. René had been a huge supporter of our project going back to our first Olympic conversations in Salt Lake City. He wanted us to succeed and would more often than not give us the benefit of the doubt as we moved forward. With René in that job we felt like we were up 1–0 early in the game.
Also, the stakes were very high for René. He was the head of the International Ice Hockey Federation. Having the Olympic hockey tournament on Canadian soil represented a huge opportunity for him. If we failed, he failed. So there was a big incentive for him to become a partner in our success. He had once been a top referee and had an even temperament, making him an ideal chair. The stars were aligning nicely for us.
That fall, René, Gilbert Felli, who was Olympic Games executive director, and other members of the commission visited Vancouver to begin their oversight and see what progress we had made since Prague. They wanted to take a look at where the venues would be built, meet team members and sit down with our various political leaders to establish relationships.
We organized a trip to Whistler and thought it would be fun, efficient and novel to fly rather than take a car. So we hired a float plane out of Vancouver Harbour and headed up right over the top of Grouse Mountain and some jaw-dropping geography before landing in Green Lake in Whistler. René and Gilbert seemed a little puzzled about the route we were flying. I’m quite sure they took this as a sign that we hadn’t started work on the highway that we’d promised would begin right away.
It was just as baffling to us that there were doubts, especially this early. I think it was more to do with the IOC’s history with other Olympic cities and the many broken promises the committee had to deal with over the years, in different countries. In Whistler, René asked me if it would be possible to take a different route back to Vancouver so we could fly directly over the highway. He was pretty blunt about it: you’ve told us there is progress being made on improving it so we’d like to see for ourselves.
I was happy to oblige, and when we flew back down René and the others could see bulldozers and construction workers all over the place. There were plenty of nods of approval inside the plane. When they left town, I was confident they felt good about the partner they had in us. I reminded them what I h
ad said in Prague—a promise made here is a promise kept in Canada.
THE NEXT FEW months would be one of the most difficult periods of my professional career. Not a day went by when there wasn’t something in the media about the search for a CEO, including lots of speculation about who might be in the running for the job. Media commentators offered their views about the kind of résumé a person needed to oversee what would be the largest project of its kind in Canadian history. There were indeed people who felt I deserved the chance to take on the job based on my performance throughout the bid phase. But there were plenty of others who didn’t think I had the skill or the horsepower.
I remember a column written by Daphne Bramham of the Vancouver Sun that pondered the type of candidate she felt was being sought for the CEO position and why it would almost certainly not be me. The headline screamed: WHY JOHN FURLONG WON’T WIN GAMES’ RACE. The story went on to suggest I was a nice guy, but there was nothing in my résumé that showed I was ready to run a multibillion-dollar project. Daphne even apologized to me later about the scorching headline, telling me it was the work of another.
I won’t deny how much that hurt. Deep down I was confident I could not only do the job, I could do it well. And I didn’t think anyone possessed the passion for the project that I had, or the vision for what it could do for the country.
At the board level I was aware that some directors weren’t comfortable with the relationship I had with Jack Poole. A small group felt there wasn’t enough distance between us to allow for the kind of objectivity a chair needed to have with a project as grand as this. Without that distance and objectivity there wouldn’t be the necessary level of accountability—or so some believed. I thought the opposite was true. It probably didn’t help that shortly after we won the bid, Jack had come out and said I would be his choice to be CEO. To many, that was just another sign that the two of us were too close.
In November, the formal process to recruit the CEO got going in earnest. I was contacted by Kyle Mitchell, with whom I had had several dealings during the bid phase. He was the organization’s recruiter of choice from the beginning and knew the inner machinations of the project well. I sat down with Kyle and provided him with everything he needed from me, including a synopsis of the approach I would take as CEO and my overarching vision for the project.
In December, I wrote Kyle a letter that outlined why I wanted the job, and why I thought I was the right candidate for it. “Success will not come down to the ingenuity and drive of one person but to the sterling performance of many,” I wrote. “It will take a talented, comprehensive, star-studded team to give the world great Games in 2010.”
I also addressed a perception held by some that it took a different type of team to organize an Olympic Games than it did to win the bid. “Such a belief caused enormous grief in Athens until finally the bid leader was recalled after three years of organizational pandemonium and poor performance,” I wrote. “Frank King was with Calgary for the duration and was viewed in the most positive light in both roles. Indeed, Calgary went the distance with mostly the same team that they started with.
“I cannot imagine approaching this opportunity without some form of trepidation, perhaps even a little fear . . . The challenge has been defined in countless ways and, yes, although there are many complex elements to the project, in summary, it primarily comes down to leadership. The leader will be the passionate, loyal custodian of a major trust. This someone will guard and protect and will instill a spirit of relentlessness in the team. This is someone who others will believe in and be prepared to follow. This person will have unassailable human values, known integrity and a never quit attitude.”
I also made it clear that I didn’t want this job just because people felt I deserved the opportunity due to our success in Prague. I wanted it only if people felt I could do it.
There was much speculation about who was in the running and many of the names of those mentioned hadn’t even applied, I would learn later. I thought my interview with the selection committee had gone well. The questions were tough and penetrating. I really felt I was in a dogfight for the job. I had the sense that I was proving myself all over again. One thing was certain: no one was cutting me an inch of slack.
I tried to make clear to the selection committee that if it was looking for the perfect candidate who had all the qualities needed for this job, it was never going to find that person because he or she didn’t exist. The best they could hope for was the right leader who would surround himself or herself with the right people and then lead them to the finish line. But it had to be a leader who had the capacity to build a unique team, and who could successfully ask extremely prominent people to abandon great jobs to take a big risk on a project that was going to reflect on our country’s reputation around the world.
There were times during the interview when it felt as if the committee was looking to fill the job of CEO of a construction company, someone whose top priority was to get venues built on time. Yes, that was vitally important. But I thought the CEO’s most important job was selling the Games to the country. I was going to hire people who could get the venues constructed on time. That would be one of the easier challenges.
Eventually, I heard that the board was deadlocked around two candidates: me and another person who was rumoured to be a senior executive in the hotel industry. I was frustrated because I could see that the delay in choosing someone was paralyzing the organization. I could sense morale slipping. It was now February 2004, eight months since Prague, and the organization still had no CEO and no real budget to speak of, and there were people who needed to be hired.
At one point, Jack walked into my office obviously frustrated himself and said that the winning candidate needed the approval of three quarters of the board and I was a vote or two short. Jack said that an idea had come up that he wanted to talk to me about. What if the board appointed the other person CEO and I took any other position I wanted in the organization? In Jack’s words this was an opportunity for me to have plenty of responsibility and influence on the Games with none of the pressure associated with the top job. Although he had the best of intentions I was extremely annoyed. I asked him if the same question had been posed to the other candidate. It hadn’t. We both knew he would have rejected it out of hand.
That was almost the final straw for me. I drew up a letter of resignation dated February 10, 2004, which I handed to Jack and copied to Mike Phelps, who was chairing the search committee. In it I wrote: “It is very clear to me that the way must be made clear for the board of directors of Vancouver 2010 to unite behind one candidate for the position of CEO. Although I hoped it would not come to this, it is clear I cannot achieve such support. But someone must. I believe that a unanimous decision on leadership is essential.
“To facilitate this I hereby withdraw my name as a candidate for the position of CEO and tender my resignation as a member of Vancouver’s Olympic team to take effect on a date mutually agreeable to the board of directors and to myself.
“I will explain my decision in more detail in a separate letter to the board. I have been privileged to be part of this historic achievement and wish you all great success.”
Jack came to see me almost as soon as the letter arrived on his desk. There would be no resigning, he said. He understood my frustration—he was angry and frustrated himself. He knew the project was bleeding and in desperate need of a decision on the CEO. Jack vowed he would get the matter resolved one way or the other. But I knew where he stood. He wanted us to continue on in this together.
Within days I was told that a vote had been taken and that I was the successful candidate and would be recommended to the board. I was told to expect to be named CEO shortly, likely within days.
I was more relieved than elated. The drawn-out process had zapped any feelings of elation right out of me. I knew that I wasn’t a unanimous choice, which bothered me a lot. But I wasn’t going to dwell on that. It was time to get on with things. I j
ust had to prove my detractors wrong. Outwork them all, as my dad would have urged me to.
That night, Thursday, February 19, I was at home contemplating the road ahead when the phone rang. It was a reporter from the Vancouver Sun. He said the paper was going to be running a story the next day quoting Dick Pound as saying the CEO selection process was rigged in my favour. And for good measure, Dick was quoted as suggesting I wasn’t up for the job. I couldn’t believe it. I told the reporter I had no comment. I tried to get to sleep while anticipating what the full story was going to look like the next day. I was also mad that someone on the board had obviously leaked the news. I don’t remember sleeping much.
I got up before 6 AM the next day and immediately went out to grab the papers off the front step. It didn’t take long to find the story—it was on the front page, right across the top—a gulper. “PREMIER ‘RIGGED’ CONTEST FOR 2010 GAMES CEO, BACKS INFERIOR CANDIDATE: POUND,” the headline roared. In the story, Dick was quoted as saying the selection process had been hijacked by Premier Gordon Campbell’s office. “My belief is always that when you hire somebody for a very senior position, what you look to is a record of dealing with challenges similar to what will be faced in the job for which you’re recruiting. Mr. Furlong is a perfectly capable person and a nice person, but he doesn’t have the experience that you need for this job.”
I could scarcely believe what I was reading. I felt ill and incredibly angry at the same time. To be rebuked in such a public way was worse than a punch to the gut. I couldn’t help feeling that Dick was motivated to say these things because I hadn’t found a role for him during the presentation in Prague or because he felt I had avoided seeking his counsel throughout the bid phase. Either way, it was ugly and humiliating, and all I wanted to do was buy up every paper in the city so my family and friends didn’t have to read the story.