by John Furlong
I was told a great story about a Native father and his son who were part of one of the construction teams in the Callaghan Valley. At one point, the father noticed the son taking a break, sitting on a rock admiring the scenery. He got off his machine, walked over and told him to get back to work. They were there in the service of their country, he told his boy, and there was no time to waste. Such was the spirit of the men and women who came to work on the project from First Nations communities in the Sea to Sky corridor from North Vancouver to Whistler.
AT VANOC, WE worked extremely hard to ensure that the culture at all these projects was healthy and that there was a keen focus and desire to complete the facilities on time and on budget. We needed to make all construction workers feel as much a part of our Olympic family as the person working on logo designs or the one putting together our ticketing program. We were all striving for the same thing and needed to be guided by the same principles.
To make sure that the workers felt included, I would visit construction sites often, and if not me then another member of the executive. We instituted a program in which the workers were given Olympic jackets by one minister or another and were awarded beautiful medals by the premier, who thanked them personally for their work. It was a small thing to remind the workers, who had come from across Canada, of the key role they were playing in helping to prepare the region and the country for the extraordinary experience we were about to have.
By the end of 2006, most of the concerns about construction costs had waned. At least the public debate had quieted down. We were ahead of schedule on many venues. Finding enough accommodation in Whistler still presented challenges, but overall we were being given high marks by the IOC for stability. We felt we had weathered the first early storms that every organizing committee faces and had come out even stronger as an organization. We were finding a second wind. I could feel morale improving.
Our first venue was completed in early 2007—that was the freestyle skiing and snowboarding stadium at Cypress Mountain. By the end of the year, all of the venues at Whistler would be finished—including the ski jumping facilities, the Sliding Centre and the cross-country ski course in the Callaghan Valley. The last venue to be completed was the new curling rink in Vancouver, which opened in 2009, a year before the Games began but just when we needed it.
THE BIGGEST CONTROVERSY surrounded the construction of the Athletes’ Village in Vancouver. We had entered into an agreement with the city early on to provide $30 million toward construction— any costs beyond that were the city’s responsibility. The plan was to build the village on an iconic site on the south shore of False Creek, just across from where Expo 86 was staged—by any measure it was a jewel of a location. Under the plan envisioned by the city, the condominium units would be used by the athletes during the Games and then sold at market prices afterward. The plan called for more than 200 units to be set aside for social housing.
Millennium Development Inc. won the right to build the village complex and they soon produced plans for a state-of-the-art community built to the highest environmental standards in the world. The cost was about $1 billion. Rumours aside, everything seemed to be going fine with construction until fall 2008 and the beginning of the worldwide financial panic. Millennium had arranged financing with a New York–based hedge fund company called the Fortress Investment Group. Fortress, also the parent company of Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort, was really feeling the pinch and was increasingly concerned about overruns that Millennium was incurring at the Athletes’ Village. That fall, it stopped making its monthly loans to Millennium, which forced the City of Vancouver to step in and provide a financial lifeline to the developer. It really had no choice since our deal to provide the village was with the city, not Millennium.
But the decision to provide the financing was made on camera and leaked to Gary Mason. Mason’s stories in the Globe and Mail were published on the eve of a civic election. The governing Non-Partisan Association (NPA) bore the brunt of the scandal that erupted around the secret loan, and the party was all but wiped out at the polls. The election ushered in Mayor Gregor Robertson and his Vision Vancouver party, which took swift political advantage of the situation. Behind the scenes, bureaucrats would lose their jobs, including City Manager Judy Rogers, who sat on our board and had been a champion for the Games from day one. It was a shame to lose Judy because she was smart, savvy and had done a great job for us. Penny Ballem, a formidable administrator, succeeded her.
Eventually, the city would completely take over financing for the project. It wasn’t ideal from the city’s perspective, but there were few other options. The complex would eventually get finished on time and would become easily the best Athletes’ Village in the history of the Olympics. It would be a marquee project for a twenty-first-century global city.
Although we weren’t directly involved in the problems the Athletes’ Village experienced, we couldn’t help but get a little wet when the story splashed over the front pages of the papers for months on end. The new mayor didn’t help by trying to play politics with the situation he inherited, making the NPA look as bad as possible in the process. He suggested that taxpayers had been left with a $1-billion nightmare. I thought it was a lot of overhyped rhetoric that wasn’t particularly helpful or especially fair. In fact, it would come back to haunt him a bit. By the fall of 2010, the Athletes’ Village was back in the news for all the wrong reasons. A suddenly soft real estate market had stalled sales, which whipped up more doom-and-gloom stories about how much money the city was going to lose over the project. The mayor’s handling of the issue was coming under constant attack.
The Athletes’ Village controversy did seem to ignite a whole new round of negative publicity about the cost of the Games. I won’t ever forget the morning I woke up to see the front page of the Vancouver Sun and the massive headline: “ADD IT ALL UP, AND YOU’LL FIND THE OLYMPICS IS GOING TO COST US $6 BILLION (SO FAR ANYWAY).” The story was by Daphne Bramham, the same reporter who had suggested I wasn’t qualified to be CEO. It seemed to spark a whole new round of negative stories about the cost of the Games.
The $6 billion in costs accusation was patently unfair, an exaggeration on steroids. It included the cost of Vancouver’s new Convention Centre, but we had never included the centre in our bid proposal because it wasn’t being constructed for us or by us. It was being built regardless, and we had had no idea if it was going to be on time for the Games. Now that we were confident it would be ready, we were going to pay a considerable rent to use it for the broadcast media.
The same went for the new rapid transit line from the airport into downtown. This was another project that had been on the province’s radar for years, long before the Olympics was being discussed. Originally the hope was it would be built by 2012, if I’m not mistaken. After we won the right to host the Games, an effort was made to move up the timeline so that the line would be in place for the Olympics. After all, the world was coming. But we never made the Canada Line part of our presentation in Prague, and I never mentioned it in a single bid speech.
Now, admittedly, we did include the upgrade to the Sea to Sky Highway in our bid presentation. It was a well-known fact that the road was a killer stretch of highway. The provincial government had been promising to fix it, and there was a timeline to get the work done. Did the province agree to accelerate that timeline for us? Yes, absolutely. If critics wanted to ding VANOC for the cost of the acceleration, fine. What would that be? Maybe $20 or $30 million at most. But to say the project was only in the works because of the Olympics was simply not true. And the people writing those stories knew that.
In the end, these were battles we were never going to win. And frankly, after a while we just gave up trying. There was nothing we could do about what people wrote and said. All we could do was focus on staging the best Games possible. Besides, most of the people working for newspapers or radio or television were complete professionals. And even if I didn’t always agree with what they
wrote or said, I respected the fact that they carried out their duties honourably and, for the most part, fairly.
The rage I sometimes felt about the misinformation constantly being spread by the organized opponents of the Games was much harder to suppress. On that front, I had little time or respect for Chris Shaw, the de facto head of the Olympic resistance movement in B.C. Chris was a professor of ophthalmology at the University of British Columbia and author of an anti-Olympics book called Five Ring Circus. Almost from the beginning of the bid, he led the campaign against us, trashing Jack, me and anyone who came within a country mile of the work we were doing.
One time, I was invited on Bill Good’s talk show on CKNW to debate Shaw. Bill is a local broadcasting legend, and has the number one talk show in B.C. Well, right on cue Chris did his thing, ranting about how much the Games were costing, how much damage the Games had left behind in every country that had hosted them, the poverty the Olympics caused, how the poor were booted out of their homes and communities to make way for the rich and powerful. He had statistics that apparently showed the damage that Expo 86 had done to the poor in Vancouver. There was nothing good about the Olympics. All they did was cause chaos and pain—and ruined Christmas for children. Or maybe that was the one thing he didn’t accuse the Olympics of doing . . .
I tried the best I could to maintain my cool and give thoughtful answers. The last thing I wanted to do was to sound as if this guy had succeeded in getting under my skin. I was not going to give Chris’s tiny legion of supporters any cause for celebration even though I wanted to push their man out of the window. When it was time to leave, however, I looked at him and said: “You call yourself a man of science. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should care much more about getting it right and being dead certain you are. That is the one thing that your students should be able to count on from you. But you don’t seem to care about the facts or about getting them straight. You just care about the agenda that you have. It’s a disgrace, quite frankly, that you get away with this.”
Bill Good looked at me with a wry grin.
“Darn it anyway,” he said. “I wish the microphones were still on.”
EVERYONE AT VANOC was now facing a huge workload and attendant pressures. A lot of our staff members were young and enthusiastic, but few had ever faced this kind of stress before. In a project that spanned several years, there were going to be emotional peaks and valleys. It was my job to keep spirits up and, in some cases, put jobs in perspective.
Every year, I sent out a Christmas card to staff containing a letter with a message that I felt might be useful to them. The letters usually got a good response, but the one I sent in Christmas of 2006 really hit home. I talked about how my mother and I had enjoyed an extraordinary relationship over the years, even when we lived thousands of miles apart. We would phone each other, write letters and see each other at family celebrations. We had an intense bond. Then one day, we had our first argument ever and it was a bad one.
“For the first time the phone was placed on the receiver with a blunt thud,” I wrote to my staff. “And it was all my fault. Four months passed without a word or a letter . . . too stubborn and all over nothing. Then my brother phoned. Mum was dead. And I was filled with remorse, tears and guilt. For one more hug, one more smile, I would have given anything.”
After her funeral, I was alone in her apartment going through old photo albums and other family history. I came across a sealed envelope on top of the mantel with my name on it.
“I picked it up almost trembling,” I wrote. “Inside was mum’s last letter to me, written as if nothing had happened at all. Words of compassion, kindness and love, as if she knew we might not see each other again. It was carefully folded around her photos of me growing up, our happy memories from times long past. It was her final but lasting lesson on how to live better . . . her gift of peace and joy.”
My point was to share my mother’s lesson with my Olympic family at VANOC. Each year represented a new beginning, a chance to get a fresh start, make wrong things right. I wanted to make sure that those working with me didn’t make the same mistake I had.
“So go on,” I wrote. “Make your mother proud. Celebrate the gift of family and friends. A kind word, a warm hug, a long overdue call. Spread some joy. Semez de la joie. ”
6
Diving for Pennies
THE DOOR SLAMMED with a loud crack. A picture hanging on the wall of the boardroom crashed to the floor. Those of us left behind at our Gastown headquarters looked at one another self-consciously in the wake of Terry Wright’s emotional departure. The silence was deafening.
In the early going, dust-ups over the value of corporate sponsorships were fairly common. VANOC was responsible for two very different budgets. One was the budget to build the venues. The second was to run the Games—money for transportation, staff, accommodation and a myriad of other costs. While the public perception seemed to be that taxpayers’ dollars were being used to finance this budget as well, it was not the case. Only about 10 per cent came from government. The majority of the funding came from the private sector, which included our share of the money the IOC received from the sale of television rights to broadcasters. There was also money from ticket sales. But the bulk of the budget would derive from our ability to convince corporations to pony up millions of dollars to become Olympic partners.
During the bid, our target for corporate sponsorships was set at a sobering $450 million—the most we thought we could raise. Many thought that was a wildly unrealistic goal. Even the IOC had its doubts and said so. Terry Wright, my top lieutenant, and Linda Oglov, who headed up our marketing team during the bid phase, both felt that the maximum amount we were likely to get out of the biggest corporations in the country would be between $20 and $30 million. That is what history had shown. Canada was not known for deep pockets like those found in corporate America.
I knew that if these estimates were true we were going to be in big trouble. We would never be able to stage the kind of Games that I and others envisioned. Even with $450 million we would be putting on the Low-Cost Games. Or worse, we would be in a nasty deficit position when it was all over, with the public screaming bloody murder.
Terry and Linda often became exasperated listening to me ramble on about the value a company could derive from an association with the Olympics. I’m sure there was more than a little violin music played when I was not in the room. Terry, in particular, grew tired of me constantly challenging his assertion that Canadian companies had a fairly modest ceiling when it came to sponsorships. It was during one such meeting that Terry, having had enough, slammed the door behind him with enough force that it caused a picture to fall off the wall.
Linda thought I’d been a bit rough on Terry and told me so the next day. What’s more, she thought Terry was right when it came to forecasting what we’d be able to raise through sponsorships—give or take a few million. We agreed to disagree. Clearly, our visions were not aligned. Some of us were thinking about two great weeks of sport—others were dreaming about taking the Olympic spirit into every home in Canada, nation building, one Canadian at a time if necessary. I was among the latter.
To me, the first deal that we struck with a corporate partner was going to establish the bar against which all other partnerships would be measured. We had many conversations about which business sector would give us the best chance at success in this regard. We finally agreed it would be telecommunications.
It was clear to us that Telus, based on the West Coast, desperately wanted to be associated with the Games. The company had generously donated nearly $5 million to help us put together our bid. It was evident in some preliminary discussions that I had with Bell Canada that it wanted in too, badly. Bell also didn’t want Telus seizing the Olympic spotlight at its expense. At the time, Bell was the telecommunications partner of the Canadian Olympic Committee.
It was important to us that we not only get a deal that was a runaway financial hit, but t
hat we also attract a new teammate that was aligned fully with our values and our vision. We wanted a company that had the capacity and desire to help us take our story to all corners of the country. Telus and Bell both set up teams inside their respective companies to work on their bids.
I have a wonderful memory of walking into Bell’s executive offices in Montreal and sitting down with the company’s CEO, Michael Sabia, a man with a deep love for the country. I talked about our vision for the Games, the many challenges we faced, the once-in-a-generation opportunity the Olympics presented Canadians. I looked him in the eye and asked him if Bell could become a champion for these Games. I remember Michael’s passionate response. He told me how much Bell wanted to be our partner, how much the company, and he himself, believed in the nation-building adventure we had embarked on. He said Bell would be a partner VANOC could count on to help spread the Olympic spirit throughout the country and deliver a flawless telecommunications set-up for the Games. He gave me his word that Bell would live this experience with us moment by moment if we were to accept it as our first partner.
I believed him.
Michael saw the Games as an opportunity to take a company that had been in Canada for almost a century and revitalize it. It was a chance for Bell to rebrand itself in a more youthful, relevant image and connect with younger customers. His biggest concern, and one he expressed many times in different ways, was that the bid process be fair. I think there was a worry in the executive ranks at Bell that we might try and give Telus a bit of a hometown discount and award it the deal no matter what Bell put on the table. I gave Michael my word that the winning bid would be the winning bid even if the distance between the two was a dime. We shook on this promise.