by John Furlong
It was a delight phoning them. I remember telling Bobby Orr that he would be in the last row holding a corner of the flag, because if he entered first the place would go nuts and we wouldn’t be able to hear the announcer introducing the other flag-bearers. The Fox family was delighted with this role for Betty, who would walk in first, flanked by Donald Sutherland. So everyone seemed to be happy. I realized, as we informed the various individuals, why they were held in such high esteem by Canadians. Magnificent in their own right, sure, but each one was humble and patriotic. When asked, they all said, “Are you sure? There must be better choices.”
When we finally decided on having the second cauldron, there wasn’t much discussion about who would light it. We made the call that it should be Gretzky. I thought that because we were asking the networks to stay on the air for an extra five or 10 minutes to cover the lighting, the person we selected needed to be a compelling figure. Gretzky fit the mould perfectly. He was a known commodity. Pure star power. But how to get him from the stadium to the waterfront? There was some discussion about having him run with the torch to the second cauldron. But that was ruled out when we realized it would take too long. I thought, “Who cares if it gets on television?” There would be thousands of people lining the streets to watch it happen. An all-time Canadian hero waving to the crowd along the way. In my opinion, the route couldn’t be long enough. But David said the police were concerned they couldn’t properly protect the route so that idea was eliminated.
David decided to put Wayne in the back of a pickup truck. I didn’t like the idea right from the start. It seemed odd and I couldn’t picture it. Or I could and I didn’t like what I was imagining. I thought it might make us look like hicks. I came up with another idea: Why don’t we put Wayne in a specially designed basket that is carried by a helicopter and tracked by spotlights? Really, I thought it would have been fantastic. He would have been flying over the city, holding his torch, and then the helicopter would set him down at Jack Poole Plaza for the lighting. Are you kidding me? The networks would have been all over that. They wouldn’t have dropped a second of coverage for the promise of that. It had all the drama they could have dreamed of. Again, David came up with a million reasons why it wouldn’t work. In the end, I just gave up fighting. But I still think the helicopter idea was a winner that would have produced iconic images from our Games. Maybe someone else can steal the idea.
I thought the real gem of the opening ceremonies and where David showed his genius was with the athletes’ walk-in. Over the years the walk-ins had become pretty perfunctory. They were always one of the highlights of the opening to be sure, and always produced camera-popping moments, but they had become a little bland and seemed to drag on. And they are predictable. David wanted to do something profound, make it something we would remember in Vancouver. Something uniquely Canadian. He thought we could use the moment to give the world a real insight into Canada’s view of the Aboriginal community. David came up with the idea of having representatives from Canada’s First Nations welcome the athletes of the world to their country. A brilliant but thoroughly complicated plan, and how to keep it secret?
The idea was to first identify top young people between the ages of 19 and 29 from all of Canada’s several hundred Aboriginal communities. We would ask those communities to send us their best and brightest, their future leaders. Métis, Inuit, First Nations, they would all be represented. We would dress them in modernized versions of their tribal regalia to create the colour and pageantry for which we were striving. In practical terms, this was going to be hard to do. It would mean separate discussions or negotiations with someone from each of those native communities. And we had to get between 300 and 400 young people to Vancouver and keep them quiet about what they were here for once they arrived. We decided to invite them to Vancouver for a Native youth forum and added the confidential piece about the ceremonies when we had them locked in a hall in Squamish, a week or so before the Games.
David mapped the plan out and even mocked it up on his computer to show us. This piece was pivotal to the show’s energy and authenticity. I was emotional just looking at the computer screen. But to make sure this was going to be okay, that Canada’s Native organizations would be onside, we decided to seek the blessing of Phil Fontaine, who was then National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations. If there was a problem with what we were proposing, Phil would surely let us know. I knew Phil was a fan of the Games from an earlier meeting we’d had, but I also knew he would put his members above anything. So we brought him to David Atkins’s office in downtown Vancouver to show him what we had in store. This was probably early in 2009.
“We are going to show you something that is completely confidential,” I began. “And so everything that is said in this room today must stay here, regardless of what we end up agreeing or not agreeing on. It can’t go out the door.”
We started telling Phil what was going to take place. He sat with his glasses perched on his nose, his chin resting on his hands saying nothing. He wore no expression at all. He was impossible to read. So I took him through how the idea originated, how it centred around the notion of Canada’s First Peoples welcoming the world, validating the Games and validating the opening ceremonies in the process.
“The chiefs of the four host nations would be like heads of state at the opening,” I said. “And then the young native leaders would come in from east and west and north and south, and the whole country would be represented through them. And they would be on the floor singing and dancing with all their colour and charm forming the welcoming honour guard for the athletes of the world. It would be the duty of those young people to welcome the world to Canada.”
Phil continued to regard me with a sober look. I had been talking for about 20 minutes by that point. I talked about the legacy that these young people would take from this, how they would go home enriched and pass on this experience to their kids, who would pass it on to their kids.
“Phil,” I said, “that is what we’d like to do and what we need is your blessing. We may even need a bit of help because financially it’s extremely difficult to do, but we want to do it. We think it could be an amazing moment, one that would make the entire country proud.”
Phil continued to stare at me for a few more seconds before he slowly removed the glasses perched on the edge of his nose and placed them on the table. “John,” he began, “if you do what you say you’re going to do, exactly as you have laid it out, you will have done more to connect Aboriginal Canada with the rest of Canada than what we would have been able to achieve in a hundred years.”
Sweet mother of mercy. It was music to my ears. Of all my Olympic memories this one is near the top. I quickly rolled up my papers and left to tell David Atkins we had liftoff.
PUTTING TOGETHER THE ceremonies is never without controversy, and we would have ours.
About a month before the event, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra conductor Bramwell Tovey told the media that he was refusing our invitation to pre-record the music for the opening ceremonies after being informed that he and the symphony would not all be performing in person at the ceremony and that their music would be mimed by other performers, which he called “fraudulent.” We were all stunned to pick up the paper and see what Bramwell had said. We hadn’t heard a word from him, or at least I hadn’t. And I considered it poor sportsmanship to go to the media before coming to us and seeing if something could be worked out. Basically, he was taking exception to a process that was quite common for international live spectacles of the size and scope that we were putting on. It was standard practice to pre-record musical segments to ensure security of the broadcast transmission. The last thing a television network wanted was a bunch of dead air should something happen at the artist level. The pre-recorded music was all about achieving top quality results and certainty.
The story, however, seemed to have legs, because it just would not leave the front pages of the newspapers. I phoned Christopher Gaze, one of o
ur Games ambassadors and a big player in the cultural community. It was his view that if we were going to get this story to go away I was going to have to phone Bramwell and explain our side of the story and hopefully talk him down from his position. Bramwell was having some personal air time at our expense, which I didn’t think was very classy. I also thought he was saying things that weren’t true and created the impression that the situation he was describing was akin to what happened in Beijing. An infuriating notion.
The Beijing organizing committee ran into trouble when it came out that they intended to have a young girl mouth the words to a song pre-recorded by someone else. The Chinese authorities thought the girl who would be mouthing the words would look better on television than the original singer. We weren’t proposing anything of the sort.
I called Bramwell in Whistler and asked him about his position. He was still quite indignant. I told him we were not trying to offend him in any way. In the end, I had to fall on my sword. I apologized even though I didn’t think he deserved an apology. I just wanted the story to go away and if that was what it took so be it. Bramwell made sure the media knew that I had called to apologize. I thought he ended up missing a great opportunity to be part of something that was remarkably special. Several, if not most, members of his orchestra ended up playing for us anyway. Proud, happy cast members in our country’s most memorable artistic production.
There was lots of speculation in the final days before the cauldron was lit about how ready Vancouver was to host the event. There were even stories that suggested the city was pretty much indifferent and apathetic, that people didn’t care. There were articles about people preparing to flee the city during the Games because of the chaos that the Olympics was going to create. Make-believe chaos.
I would talk to some of those people later. They were miserable that they had bought into all the spooky talk and missed an event that would be talked about for decades. Some complained they watched from Hawaii or Arizona feeling completely duped.
I wasn’t picking up the lethargy toward the Games that others were talking about. I thought the opposite was true: that there was a very vocal 10 per cent who were major Games boosters and 10 per cent at the other end who didn’t want anything to do with them. In between there was an 80 per cent that was quietly looking forward to Vancouver becoming an Olympic city, with everything that entailed.
Comments that the citizens of Vancouver weren’t ready to embrace the Games were an insult. If anything, I thought the city wasn’t ready for how big this thing was going to be. I told Mayor Gregor Robertson that in person one day, just weeks before the opening ceremonies: “I honestly don’t think you are prepared for what is coming. You need to get ready for a shocker. The celebration event being planned for David Lam Park the night the torch arrives in the city? I can tell you that site will not be nearly big enough to handle the crowds that are going to come out to see the magic of this thing.”
The city was going to experience something it wouldn’t experience again for generations. The fun was about to start.
9
Tragedy in Whistler
THE WESTIN BAYSHORE was once the home to eccentric multimillionaire Howard Hughes. During the 2010 Winter Games, it became base camp for my executive team. We occupied makeshift offices in the hotel’s northwest wing. The IOC was also headquartered in the hotel, making it easier to convene meetings of its coordination commission throughout the Games. The meetings were an opportunity for the IOC and VANOC to discuss any issues that might emerge during the Games. Given the hotel’s occupants, the place was behind a security fence and on 24/7 lockdown, which meant no one entered the building without the highest level of security clearance.
On the morning of February 12, 2010, I arrived at the Bayshore early, feeling nervous but excited. My Canadian Armed Forces driver, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, had arrived at my door at about 5 AM to transport me to the hotel, where I would stay for the duration of the Games. The big day had finally arrived. The spotlight was going to be fixed firmly on the Games now, our organization to be tested like never before. This was it. For 17 days we would be the world’s biggest sports story.
I went to my office to prepare for the day. My office team was led by Monica Jako, or Mighty Mouse as she was affectionately known—tiny in stature but tough, relentless and completely loyal. Christine Chan, another tireless colleague, was already at her desk too, working on the French content in the speech I was to give that night at the opening ceremonies. Christine wore my mistakes as if they were hers. My whole team did, for that matter.
Dave Cobb and I met for breakfast at 6:30, as we would most days throughout the Games. We started to strategize over some of the items that would be on the agenda when Jacques Rogge convened the first meeting of the coordination commission early that morning. My team would be updating the IOC on everything from protests to the first official event that was scheduled to take place that day up in Whistler—ski jumping. We would be talking about transportation plans and laying out the general agenda for the day. After breakfast, we met up with Gilbert Felli, the IOC’s director for the Games, to make sure everyone was on the same page and there were no unpleasant surprises when the coordination commission meeting began.
When it got underway seconds after 8 AM, spirits in the room were high. There was a lot of intelligence sharing. The IOC representatives and staff members in the room were complete pros, many of whom had worked at several Olympics. There was little they hadn’t seen. Everyone was itching for the curtain to rise on this incredible show that had been over 10 years in the making. As we talked, the final day of the torch relay was underway, its long, 106-day journey about to wrap up. The energy on the streets had reached a fever pitch.
At Stanley Park, Sebastian Coe, the great British long-distance runner and Olympic gold medallist, was going to be accepting the torch from California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had flown up from Sacramento to take part. Sebastian was chair of the London 2012 organizing committee and had become a good friend of mine over the previous few years. He asked if I wouldn’t mind coming down to Stanley Park, where he and the governor would undoubtedly be swarmed by a gang of reporters and camera operators. I could just imagine the atmosphere so I promised Seb I’d try my best.
After the meeting with the coordination commission, which went smoothly, I grabbed my Blue Jacket and asked my driver to head in the direction of Stanley Park, which wasn’t that far away. We barely got around the corner from the hotel, however, when traffic came to a dead halt. It was people gridlock. It was as if everyone in Vancouver had decided they were not going to miss out. Thousands and thousands of people, young, old, some dressed in red and white, others in business suits and dresses. We moved maybe 100 metres in half an hour. There was no way we were getting anywhere near so we turned back for the hotel. I ended up watching the handoff on CTV.
It was some time after 10 in the morning when my BlackBerry rang. It was Dave Cobb. I could tell instantly it was a serious matter by the sober tone of his voice. He was shaking at the other end. There had been a catastrophic accident during a training run on the luge course, Dave said. The athlete involved was from Georgia, and the early word was he was not expected to survive. There were medical personnel on the scene almost instantly, and the athlete had been taken to hospital. I knew they would do everything humanly possible to save his life. Dave was understandably sombre and subdued, so different from his usual ebullient self. I told him to phone me back as soon as he heard anything definitive.
It was the beginning of a nightmare.
I sat in my office for a few minutes unable to move. All I could think about was this poor young man. Who was he? What was his Olympic story? What were his dreams? A young athlete with the world before him—likely gone. I could find no solace in the idea that if he died at least he died doing something he loved. He was 21 years old, and life was not supposed to end that young. After a couple of minutes I snapped to. I got up from my desk a
nd closed the door.
Who to call? I thought about calling Jacques Rogge but realized he probably already knew. The IOC had dealt with matters this grave before. The Munich massacre came to mind. They would know what to do. But even as I went down a mental checklist of people I’d need to speak to, a part of me was grasping at the hope that the young man might somehow pull through. I wanted so badly to believe that was the next call I was going to receive: he’s going to make it. Instead, the next call was from Dave. Nodar Kumaritashvili of Georgia had just been pronounced dead.
I felt as if I’d lost a son.
My face fell into my palms. I thought about my father and mother’s deaths and my sister’s untimely demise 10 years earlier from lupus. I had experienced the pain of great loss before. I felt empty. Lonely. Powerless.
I tried to come to grips with what this meant. I started to think about the boy’s family in Georgia. Did his mother and father know they’d lost their son? Did the world know but not them? There was a minute or two where I wondered if this tragedy was beyond my capacity to manage. I’m typically pretty calm in crisis situations, but this had me rattled. I was also worried about my team—they would be devastated, I knew that. I needed to tap into a private well of strength I wasn’t sure existed. I’d been to dozens of leadership and crisis seminars over the years, but none had prepared me for this. I’m not sure what could have. I was going to be relying on gut instinct to get me through the days to come.
I was concerned that members of my team were somehow going to feel responsible for what had happened, that they had contributed in some way. At times like this, one’s mind is flooded with raging emotions and irrational thinking with almost no way of controlling them. But we were dealing with a matter that was going to be talked about around the world. It already was. It would pose an enormous communications challenge for the organization and drain its spirit, at least for a while.