by John Furlong
Nodar’s uncle Felix was there, looking much like I had seen him on Saturday: broken, haunted, sad, lost. His difficult life had become that much more difficult. Private as the service was supposed to be, the funeral chapel started to fill up with Georgian Canadians who had come to support the young man. People came in and went up to the casket, some touching the body. There were quiet tears running down the faces of more than one person in the room; others sobbed uncontrollably. Some people dropped off flowers and left. Others knelt and prayed. Most wore black.
There was a short service. A minister offered a few informal words of comfort and prayers. When he was finished the coffin was sealed and I lined up to be one of the pallbearers who would wheel and then lift the hardwood coffin out to the waiting hearse. Pat Hickey was another one of the pallbearers. We were joined by some of Nodar’s teammates, including the two who had grown up with the young luger and been in his class at school. I was struck by how heavy the casket was, even for the eight of us.
We walked outside into another grey morning. A light drizzle had earlier coated the streets with a fine sheen. But the rain had stopped during the service, so those who had been waiting outside to pay their respects were able to stay dry. Most were from the local Georgian community, but there were reporters there too and lots of cameras.
A squad of Vancouver police officers on motorcycles was lined up on the street about 30 metres to the west of the funeral home. They had come impromptu to escort the hearse from the service to the airport, where the body would be loaded onto a plane to be flown back to Georgia, escorted by the president of the Georgian National Olympic Committee. The officers were lined up perfectly in their bright yellow jackets and saluted the coffin as it came out, which I thought was incredibly moving and professional and spoke so well about our police forces in Canada. I crossed over to the officers to shake their hands. I just wanted to say thanks, on behalf of VANOC but really on behalf of all Canadians, for the remarkable service they were performing that morning. Such a spirit of giving.
As I shook their hands, I noticed the most remarkable thing: almost to a person the officers had tears in their eyes. It almost made me start crying. Here were these officers who put their lives on the line every day, some of the toughest individuals you’ll find on the planet, and they were standing there in the rain shedding a tear for this kid from Georgia who had died in pursuit of a dream.
I was so proud of them that I wanted to embrace each one. Here we were in the middle of this nightmare, coming off this terrible weekend, and everyone outside the funeral home was feeling the same. These police officers wanted to do something, make a contribution in some way, and this is how they had decided to do it.
It was a profound moment. It said so much about our country and the people who make it what it is. Empathy is never in short supply in Canada. And we are a country that does not shirk its responsibilities. We help people. We show kindness. We do what’s right. And that’s what these officers were doing. Not because they were asked—they just felt it was right.
In the background that morning, I could hear a quiet rumble growing across the country, a low growl of encouragement. Canada was proud, I think, of the way we had responded to an extremely difficult situation. The Games would be dedicated to the spirit of Nodar and all the athletes like him. But Canadians wanted these Games to be great, they wanted us to shake off the criticism and courageously forge ahead. In some ways, we were like a hockey team that had fallen behind early in a game and now the crowd was encouraging us. It was a slow, silent cheer but it would be heard loud and clear later on.
When I hopped into the car after the service, I wanted everybody to be quiet. It was thinking time. The experience that morning would stay with me and ultimately inspire me to speak out on behalf of Canadians everywhere who were tiring of the attacks we were under, mostly from foreign media. But that chance wouldn’t come immediately.
Soon enough, I was heading to the Main Press Centre, where I would meet the media for the first time since the news conference on that first Friday with Jacques.
As usual, I had Renee Smith-Valade beside me on the podium in the press room. Renee was the primary media spokesperson for VANOC and would be our representative at the daily news conference that was held throughout the Olympics. Some days she needed a Kevlar vest, the questioning was so tough. But she handled it like the complete pro that she was, in both official languages; her French flawless.
On this Monday morning, I was joined in the news conference by Quebec Premier Jean Charest. It was Quebec Day at the Games, something each province and territory was allocated as part of the partnership agreements we had signed with them earlier. He was still beaming from Alexandre Bilodeau’s gold medal victory of the night before.
Inside the press conference room, a couple hundred journalists from Canada and around the world were waiting for us. It was an intimidating setting, no question. There was a bank of cameras stretched across the back of the room ready to catch every single breath we took. I had learned enough about the media that I knew everyone, especially in television, was looking for that one provocative statement, maybe a slip of the tongue, that reporters could hang their stories on. Body language was everything.
After congratulating Alexandre and the province of Quebec, I spoke for a few minutes about Nodar’s memorial service. I noted how the body was on its way home. I talked a bit about our ongoing challenges up at Cypress. Jean talked for a few minutes about Quebec Day and also acknowledged Alexandre’s historic win. Then it was time for questions.
The first one was for me. It was posed by a burly guy sitting right at the front. He had a shock of white hair and a white beard to match. It was Réjean Tremblay, a popular and influential columnist with La Presse. As I recall, he asked a question of me in French and asked that I answer it in French as well, a cheap shot intended to put me off balance.
So this is how it’s going to be, I thought.
It was perhaps fitting that on Quebec Day the question of French content in the opening ceremonies would dominate the news conference. Not that anyone outside Quebec was much interested in the topic, but Réjean and another writer from Quebec did a pretty good job of monopolizing a good chunk of the time set aside for queries.
While I certainly had handled all types of questions in my time with the Olympics, I had rarely faced a journalist who was as hostile and surgical as Réjean was that morning. He wanted to know why there wasn’t more French content in the opening and wasn’t satisfied with any answer that I gave. So he continued to ask the same question several different ways, in an increasingly belligerent tone, until he elicited sighs from other journalists in the room who were as tired of the line of inquiry as I was.
Tempting as it was to take a run at the lack of cooperation we had received in Quebec trying to secure talent and music rights, I chose to take the high road instead.
It was a dead certainty that the pair were going to put Jean Charest on the spot and ask him what he thought of the opening. I knew what Jean was going to say. He loved the show but was disappointed and wished there had been more French throughout the production, though he was happy with VANOC’s effort overall to promote and respect French Canada at the Olympics. If he hadn’t said there should have been more French in the opening, he would have been fried by Réjean in his next widely read column, which would have led to some piling on by others in Quebec. That’s how the media game often works. So I wasn’t really upset that the premier said what he said. He had little choice. He was far from being an adversary.
But the French journalists wanted me to apologize for the opening and I refused. I said we had nothing to apologize for and that I was proud of the measures we had taken both during the opening and throughout the organizing of the Games to promote Canada’s other language. I sure wasn’t going to say sorry. “What we tried to do was include all the elements that we needed to do at various levels— words, music, artists,” I said. “Let me be clear about what we ar
e trying to do here—we are putting on the Olympic Games. It is a 17-day project and there are multiple, multiple layers.” The show was unmistakably Canadian to any observer, I explained, and the global coverage was incredibly favourable and glowing with praise.
Eventually, we were able to move on to other topics, but the first 20 minutes or so of the press conference was no fun at all. It took every ounce of discipline in my body not to sound off and let the world know that this was trumped-up, pseudo-political opportunism intended to embarrass. But I remained composed, answered the questions the best I could and waited for the conversation to change.
Afterward, however, I was steaming at those who were attacking us about the French content for purely political reasons, a group that included federal Heritage Minister James Moore. Canada’s Commissioner of Official Languages, Graham Fraser, also jumped on the bandwagon, announcing he would investigate the complaints that there wasn’t enough French content in the show.
An investigation? This had to be some kind of joke.
The sum total of complaints Fraser had received, we were told, was about 30. Unlike his predecessor in the role, who had been a great collaborator and supporter of our efforts, Mr. Fraser pointed fingers from a distance but rarely pitched in with ideas or support. I told him more than once that his approach was not helpful and asked him to identify any project he had experience with that had outperformed us—he did not have one. Privately, he would tell me how impressed he was but in front of a parliamentary or senate committee he would bail on us. So proud was I of our efforts to deliver a bilingual Games, I invited Parliament and Senate committees for official languages to visit us and see what we were doing. We received no response.
Later that day, the Quebec government was hosting a reception at Quebec House, which was in a sparkling and innovative temporary building on the shores of False Creek, across from the Athletes’ Village. Under the circumstances, it wasn’t an event I was dying to attend. I knew it would be awkward from the moment I got there. But I’d be damned if I was going to be intimidated into not going. I wasn’t going to run from anybody. Quebec had been our first provincial partner. Jean Charest had been there for us from the beginning, his mild but reasoned criticism of our opening aside.
When I arrived, the atmosphere inside was terrific. People were in a great mood, still high from Alexandre’s gold medal run. Although no one was saying anything to me directly, I could feel the French controversy floating above the crowd. I wasn’t there long before I saw James Moore heading toward me. James is a big guy you can see from anywhere. He has jet black hair combed straight back and always reminds me of someone from the cast of Mad Men. He was smiling. I doubt I was.
We shook hands.
“You’re probably a little annoyed at me,” James said, almost right off the bat.
“Well, I was certainly disappointed by your comments, no question,” I said.
“Well, I hope you understand that I was just doing my job,” James answered. “This isn’t anything personal.”
I told him I understood he was doing his job, but if he was going to criticize us I thought he at least needed to put the matter in context. When James was appointed Secretary of State for the 2010 Olympics, we gave him insider access to virtually all of our decisions. He was certainly aware of some of the challenges we had had trying to inject French content into the opening. And he knew about the myriad of other things we had done as an organization to reflect the French culture and influence in Canada, initiatives for which we had won wide praise. Instead, he just dumped on us for the lack of French in the opening, when we were still reeling from the death of Nodar. His timing was impeccable.
“You should know, James, that the number of people who are bilingual and working for VANOC is dramatically higher on a percentage basis than the number of bilingual people working for the federal government in Vancouver,” I said, as I had many times before.
“I don’t doubt it,” he said.
The truth was the number of bilingual volunteers we had amassed to deliver the Games was equal in size to a mid-size Canadian town. By any measure, we had moved heaven and earth to live up to this obligation. And he knew it.
“James,” I said, “I briefed you in person on this stuff and you had my direct line. All you had to do was pick up the phone and talk to me first and I might have helped give you a little background to everything that was going on to get French content into the opening. You are our partner and we deserved better. That’s all I ask for. Just give us a chance to explain our side of the story before you go out there and attack us for not doing enough. I thought you were completely unfair. And frankly I didn’t appreciate waking up Saturday morning and reading what you had to say in the paper.”
By Monday there was mounting pressure from commentators like Réjean Tremblay and representatives from other cultural organizations to increase the amount of French content in the closing ceremonies to make up for the perceived lack in the opening.
Ironically, Réjean was in the crowd at the Quebec House reception too. We spoke and he told me he was just “doing his job” when he ripped into me at the press conference. And then he went on to say that, the ceremonies aside, he was having a perfectly bilingual experience and that these were the best Games he had ever experienced as a journalist. Too bad he hadn’t put any of that in his column.
You can imagine how thrilled we were about demands for the closing ceremonies to incorporate more French. I phoned David Atkins to warn him about what was being said because it was going to reach him sooner or later. David was even more annoyed than I was. What did people honestly think? That we could be changing acts and inserting new production numbers at the last minute to suit the tastes of a few aggrieved people? I couldn’t agree more with David. The show was long since ready to air.
It would be one of the biggest shows ever produced in Canada. It had been carefully put together over a couple of years. Rehearsals had been going on for months and would be ramped up throughout the course of the Games. The artists had already arrived and were rehearsing. All of the songs had already been recorded. Compact discs with all of the music would be coming out five minutes after the closing ceremony ended. Now people wanted us to just kick someone out of the lineup and insert someone who sang in French?
I knew already that there was more French in the closing than the opening. That was just how it was put together. But I couldn’t be more specific without spoiling the surprise. Still, publicly I needed to be seen as listening to the complaints. I did not want to come across as rude or arrogant. But the matter was becoming a big problem because it was zapping energy out of our ceremonies team, who were already running on empty. And David Atkins was ready to blow a gasket at any moment.
I was hearing that we might soon be getting a call from the Prime Minister’s Office about the matter. When I heard this I thought, “Okay, that’s enough. I’ve got to put an end to this now.” I managed to track down the number for the PMO through a friend. I told the woman who answered the phone that I needed to talk to the prime minister.
“Who is this?” she said.
“This is John Furlong,” I replied. “I’m the chief executive officer of the Winter Games in Vancouver and this is a matter of considerable urgency.”
The woman asked me what did urgent mean? Today? Tomorrow?
“No,” I said. “Right now. I need to talk to the prime minister right now. This is a significant matter related to the delivery of the Games.”
She said she would go and find out what his schedule was and get back to me. It couldn’t have been more than a half-hour later when my cellphone rang. The voice on the other end said, “The prime minister would like to talk to you.”
Deep breath.
I thanked Stephen Harper for calling me back and began outlining the predicament VANOC was facing generally but more so as it related to potentially making changes to the closing ceremonies to include more French content. I wanted him to know that we cared gre
atly about this issue and always had. I told him that there was going to be more French in the closing as it was and then explained what had happened with some of our attempts to beef up the French content in the opening. I also shared my thoughts with him about some of the personal criticism I was receiving for my efforts to speak French in my opening night address.
One blog I came across accidentally was merciless in its attack on me. “John Furlong’s attempt at French was a disgraceful symbol of bilingualism,” the person wrote. And for good measure he said my attempt at our second language was “atrocious” and “disgusting.” Boy, that made me feel good.
I shared my frustration about this with the prime minister, whom I saw as an introverted and private man, just as I am. “This is not my language,” I told him. “This is very, very difficult, sometimes terrifying for me.”
The prime minister couldn’t have been more thoughtful and sympathetic. “I’ve had the same challenge in my own career,” he said. “I’ve had it my whole political life.”
He told me that one of the ways he managed around it was to speak French early in his remarks. He found that francophones were more respectful when people made an attempt at French early on in such a situation. “This is the advice I would give you,” he said. “Put the French up front and people will cheer you for it. Don’t worry about the critics. The people in Quebec will be delighted that you made the effort. It’s all about effort.”
“But prime minister,” I said. “You’re a rock star at this compared to me. This is not comfortable for me. I look down at my notes and the words start moving on me.”
He chuckled but was generous with his support and assurances.