by John Furlong
On January 21, 2010, the relay left Banff for Golden. Crossing the B.C. border was a big deal for us. We could smell the magic of the Games now. Life was about to change. Former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed handed over the torch at the border to BC Lions football coach Wally Buono, who was excited about being involved in the relay. Premier Campbell was there to welcome the flame to British Columbia. The crowds were massive. It was bedlam everywhere the torch appeared, a reaction that exceeded many people’s expectations but not mine. The Olympic spirit was quickly enveloping the province. Resistance was gone.
Less than a week later, the torch was going to be appearing in Prince George, my old stomping grounds. I had always planned to be there so I could celebrate its arrival with old friends and my son, Damien. Damien is as solid a citizen as you’ll find and a major backer of the Games. I phoned him up the day the torch was arriving and said he needed to get to Exhibition Park with the family early because organizers were expecting big crowds. I could tell that Damien, who would be bringing my grandkids, Ethan, Max and Orla, thought that I was exaggerating just a bit about how enthused the community was going to be about the torch coming to town.
Sure enough, the place was jammed. Thousands showed up. It took Damien forever to find a parking spot. I brought Ethan up onstage with me. He was wide-eyed. I was asked to say a few words and talked about how great it was to be home in Prince George where my Canadian journey had started and how special it was to be celebrating the moment with my son and his family. The crowd gave me a loud, generous ovation. At this point, there were maybe 18,000 or 19,000 people jammed into the park.
Afterward, Ethan and I went looking for his father. Damien greeted his son with outstretched arms and me with a big smile. A quiet, introspective young man, my son seemed in awe. Later on, as we said our goodbyes, Damien looked at me proudly and said, “Jesus, Dad, from now on I’m going to be taking you a lot more seriously.” We both laughed. It meant so much to me, and to Damien, to be able to share that moment together. It was a big day for him and Stacey, his expectant wife, and their children. I wished I could have done the same with all my kids.
The torch relay ended up being everything we ever hoped for, a unifying force like nothing we had ever experienced before as a country. It would lay the groundwork, I believe, for the passion that would spill over during the Games. If we hadn’t touched so many people with the relay, the reaction in Vancouver and across the country may not have been so powerful. If we hadn’t included our Aboriginal neighbours in the countrywide torch parade, who knows how their participation in the Games might have ultimately been remembered?
I only wished Jack could have been there. I knew he was watching, though. He was always watching.
8
Little Big Man
THE OPENING CEREMONIES are often viewed as the jewel of any Olympics. Anxiously awaited, they set the tone and mood for everything that follows. After the Games are long over, they are often remembered by a shining moment that occurred during opening ceremonies— Muhammad Ali lighting the cauldron in Atlanta, a ski jumper flying through the night sky in Lillehammer, the archer and flaming arrow in Barcelona, the fireworks spectacle in Beijing.
After the display that the Chinese put on in 2008, many in the media wondered how we would possibly match it on February 12, 2010. We weren’t going to. Never planned to, never could. First, we didn’t have that kind of money to play with. Second, and more importantly, that’s not what our Games were about. We wanted our opening ceremonies to make Canadians proud, while at the same time tell the world our story. Our opening and closing ceremonies were always going to be about hearts and minds, about touching the soul of the country.
We needed to find someone special, someone who had the horsepower and creative ambition to stage a wondrous production that captured the deep essence of our country, striking a proud and emotional chord among those watching at home, while captivating those taking the ceremonies in live at BC Place Stadium.
Whoever we found would have to deal with the lingering albatross that was our bland contribution to the closing ceremonies in Turin in 2006. Fair or not, our production there had created doubt among some of our Olympic partners about our ability to pull off something as big, complex and important as the opening ceremonies.
After Turin, we formed a committee to find the right company to stage our ceremonies. We realized there were no more than three or four big players in the Canadian entertainment world who would be possible candidates. And then there were a number of international figures who had the depth of experience to handle something of this nature. We had Terry Wright put together detailed specs that set out the scope of the project and then we put out a call for tenders. We told prospective bidders to submit their credentials and tell us why they were especially qualified to do the job.
We realized that we were going to have to be somewhat kinder to any Canadian applicants. In an ideal world, the producer would be a homegrown talent. We got an excellent response and eventually put together a field of 16 contenders, including controversial impresario Garth Drabinsky. I met him a couple of times but discussions went nowhere. But we also got strong proposals from Scott Givens and Don Mischer, who produced the events in Salt Lake City; Andrew Walsh, an Australian who had a long list of high-profile events to his credit; and Blue Mountain Concerts, a B.C. firm.
Guiding our selection process was the notion that we wanted whoever got the job to weave together a uniquely Canadian story, using Canadian talent. We were looking for a giant in the industry and we found someone who was just over five feet tall: David Atkins.
We were not at all surprised when one of the most impressive submissions came from the creative and immensely likeable Australian. David had formidable credentials. His credits included the jaw-dropping fireworks show in Sydney Harbour that marked the close of the 2000 Summer Games. But he’d also put together the opening ceremonies for the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, which were considered among the best ever staged anywhere. The highlight occurred when Sheikh Mohammed Bin Hamad Al-Thani, riding a chestnut brown Arabian horse, mounted one hundred steps to light a giant cauldron in the form of an astrolabe. It was raining— the first time Doha had seen drops of water from the sky in 50 years, so I was told. Despite his horse slipping near the top, the sheikh pulled it off. It was brilliant and all on account of David’s gutsy genius. That was difficult to ignore, as was his ability to inspire teamwork and confidence.
Even before the selection process began, many people, including me, assumed that we would end up choosing Cirque du Soleil, the Quebec-based entertainment company, admired and celebrated throughout the world. The Cirque has its own unique brand of show, a dazzling hybrid of street entertainment, space-age gymnastics and traditional circus fare (without the lions and tigers). One of the company’s co-founders is Guy Laliberté, a former street entertainer who would later become known for paying to get on a flight into space. On one visit to Cirque’s headquarters in Montreal, I discovered just why this company had such success: focus, creativity beyond description, state-of-the-art facilities and a cast of thousands, including hand-picked former Olympic stars. But the true secret of their success was practice, practice and more practice.
It was pretty clear to us that Cirque was of the view that it should be doing the opening and closing ceremonies, full stop, end of story. We knew that a lot of people, including some of our partners, would applaud a relationship with Cirque, given the company’s reputation and expertise. A sure bet. Except we were looking for a collaborative relationship with whomever we chose.
As an organization we weren’t willing to abandon our involvement in the process or set our vision aside. I know I had some pretty strong views about pieces that I wanted to see in both the opening and closing ceremonies if they were going to reach the soul of the country in the way we hoped. And I was not alone.
In our conversations with Guy Laliberté, he made it clear that he wanted the theme of the opening to be about wat
er and, more specifically, about the fact that there was a water crisis in the world. I think he saw the ceremonies as a way to tell a story that he felt needed telling. No doubt it would have been beautiful, but it bothered me that Cirque never seemed to want to talk about or acknowledge the vision we had.
We got down to a small group of finalists and we had an open mind. Guy walked into the interview with his colleagues, and we could tell he just didn’t want to be there. He was in a sullen mood and managed to annoy everybody. His whole attitude seemed to be “Look, give it to us, we will do a great job, this is what we do.” To a person, the committee was flabbergasted. We were looking for a partner, not just a contractor. We weren’t confident Cirque understood our goals. As a company, it had an independent streak that was personified by the genius Guy Laliberté himself.
Shortly after the final interviews, we got a call from his office informing us that Cirque was withdrawing from the process. The reason given was that the company didn’t think it had the time to devote itself fully to this enterprise because of its other commitments around the world. True or not, the withdrawal was okay with us. It made our final decision that much easier.
In the end we picked David Atkins, largely because of his track record for greatness and the fact that he understood the complicated world of the IOC. There were expectations to be met, but David had the competitive instincts of a champion and knew how to handle adversity, which an opening and closing ceremonies producer always had to be prepared for. After all, you could count on one hand the list of global productions with this kind of complexity.
But what impressed so many of us was David’s knowledge and love of Canada. He had schooled himself well on geography, history, Aboriginal Canada and weather and had honed a dazzling insight into our national culture. He seemed to know more about Canada than those interviewing him. And he had a real sense of what his challenge was going to be. He was an easy guy to embrace when he said his job was to extract a great story out of Canadians and tell it beautifully. He said the approach he wanted to take was to identify everyone in the country who might have a contribution to make to the planning and talk to them. Mine them for ideas of what the opening and closing ceremonies should include, who should sing and who shouldn’t. He proposed staging a number of symposiums to give the cultural community a say in what might make it into the productions. He was going to hold them all over the country—and he did just that.
But David had another daunting responsibility as far as I was concerned.
“David,” I told him one day, “one of the big jobs you are going to have to accept is you must be prepared to save us from ourselves. You need to stop us from making dumb decisions. You will need to have the courage to get in front of the bus and if necessary lie down on the road. Throw your body in front of it, if you have to, to prevent us from doing something that would make us look stupid or naïve.”
We shook hands. He would remind me more than a few times along the way of our deal.
We announced David and his carefully selected team in September 2007. There were predictable grumbles from some quarters about our giving the job to a non-Canadian. So we had David agree to surround himself with some top-quality Canadians from the entertainment business, a group that included Vancouver-based music agents Sam Feldman and Bruce Allen; Nettwerk Records’ Dan Fraser, and Jacques Lemay, co-founder of the Canadian College of Performing Arts, among others.
Shortly after, David made a great presentation to the board about his experiences elsewhere, specifically about how important it was to protect the integrity of the project by ensuring no details of the show ever got leaked. David came across as someone who was open-minded but would fiercely defend his show, who would demand a supreme effort and loyalty from everyone around him and inspire superb performances. No one was going to work harder than him, that’s for sure.
(Years earlier, I had sought the broad, savvy advice of Salt Lake City Olympics CEO Mitt Romney, who would later go on to become a governor and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. He had lots of good advice but most prominent was the wisdom he shared about the opening ceremonies. Stay no further than an inch away from them, he said. You will be judged harshly if they are a failure. I never forgot that, so my relationship with David was a priority and we became good friends.)
By 2009, the show was starting to take shape, and David and his team began framing it up. I was constantly in awe of what technology could do. David developed a computerized, 3-D version of the ceremonies, so as another piece of the story was crafted he could show us what it was going to look like. That gave us a pretty good idea of what kind of impact various elements of the show were likely to have. The first time I heard “O Canada” using David’s system, my eyes welled up. Everyone in the room was blown away by the technology.
A huge variable from the beginning was the fact that we were staging the ceremonies indoors. The opening and closing ceremonies at all past Olympics, Summer or Winter, were held in outdoor stadiums, where the cauldron burned high and bright for all to see. Some thought having an indoor stadium gave us the advantage of having conditions we could rely on. Not entirely true. The roof, for instance, moves all the time because BC Place Stadium is pressurized. This was going to present issues if we tried to cast finite images on the roof. The light in the stadium was pretty bad as well. And let’s face it, the building overall was a bit jaded and tired looking.
David felt valuable time had been wasted in the Beijing ceremonies with moving props and people on and off the performance area. He wanted the show to be a non-stop dazzler. To cut down on dead time in Vancouver, he conceived the idea of supporting the production from underneath the performance area. It would help make the stadium more intimate too. The crowd would be up close and personal with the performers. So that is how David came up with the idea of building a false floor, under which people and props would appear and later disappear. The new floor made the old stadium feel new again and gave us a far more efficient way to keep the production moving without long interruptions.
One of the most compelling aspects of the opening ceremonies should be the first few minutes. You want those early moments to be as powerful as possible, to have them make a heart-stopping impact, to create a “wow” moment upon which the entire production will build. As the show was developed, David started talking about this one-of-a-kind video idea with which he wanted to begin the show. It would be seen by those watching on television at home and on big screens inside the stadium.
David said the idea was to get a helicopter and shoot scenery of the host city and region and especially the pristine backcountry areas in the mountains. The video was going to be taken with cameras compatible with the latest high-definition technology, and it would feel to everyone watching as if they were in the helicopter, along for the ride. It would be that intimate, David said. And then the helicopter would hover over top of a mountain in Whistler and there, standing by himself, would be a lone snowboarder. The snowboarder would take off down the mountain with high-definition cameras in hot pursuit.
I remember thinking, “Boy, this is really out there.” But David kept going. The snowboarder would blast through miles of flawless powder, performing a few daring stunts as he went along. Images of the Maple Leaf would be emblazoned in the snow. He’d blast through an honour guard of people holding candles on the mountainside. The boarder would barrel along and then hit a breathtaking jump—right into the stadium, through a set of elevated Olympic rings, onto a ramp that takes him to the floor. And from there he would welcome the world to the Olympics in two different languages.
How about that for a show starter?
David proceeded to show us on his computer how it would all look. You could feel the confidence of people in the room surge. It was the first of many times I would murmur quietly to myself, “Looks incredible! My God, I hope he makes that jump inside the stadium.” It was tricky and was going to take nerves of steel for the young boarder we finally sel
ected for the assignment. If he wiped out, it would go viral within seconds. The trick could be a disaster, or it could be magnificent. It was a risk we were willing to take. I attended the practices and could see the risks and rewards. It was an awesome stunt.
Another idea David had was to fly Céline Dion in to sing the national anthem at the opening. He had David Pierce, the ceremonies’ musical director, prepare a unique bilingual arrangement of “O Canada” specifically for Céline. He even somehow managed to put together a dead ringer of a soundtrack of what it would sound like—the best make-believe music I had ever heard. It was so breathtaking that everyone in the room demanded to hear it two or three times.
Unfortunately, Céline was trying to get pregnant around the time we needed her so she had to say no. That was a huge disappointment, as I think the public’s expectations were pretty high that Céline would be involved in the opening ceremonies somehow. She was Canada’s best-known international singing star—a face and name the world recognized. Thankfully her replacement and now rising global star Nikki Yanofsky performed beautifully on the night.
Céline wasn’t the only star who couldn’t make it. Comedian and actor Martin Short was supposed to be in the closing ceremonies, but had to back out at the last minute because his mother was ill. We tried to secure Leonard Cohen, Mike Myers and Jim Carrey, but again no luck.
Dealing with artists was a whole other experience. David would often fill me in on artists’ demands and complications. The first question the stars or their agents invariably asked was, who else was going to be taking part? And what were those other artists being asked to do?