Patriot Hearts (18 page)

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

T
HE 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 that 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.

Telus, of course, was just as enthusiastic. The company saw the Olympics as an opportunity to take Canada by storm and come out as the number one telecommunications company. The guy Telus put in charge of its bid was a ferociously competitive fellow named Rob Cruickshank. Rob was a good friend of mine. I had helped train his son, Greg, who would become a nationally ranked squash player. Rob had always been good to me. He was someone I never hesitated to call during difficult times. I wasn’t sure Rob’s appointment to head up Telus’s bid team was coincidental, but it did make the situation awkward at times, especially at the end.

My goal was to build as much competitive tension between the two companies as possible and elevate the level of public interest around the bids in the process. It was high drama. Financial commitments notwithstanding, either company, we were convinced, would deliver the telecommunications solution for which we were looking. I hoped we would not have to decide the outcome through a type of shootout. I preferred that the winner was a mile in front.

By the time the deadline had arrived, I was convinced we were heading into uncharted waters as far as sponsorship deals go. I could sense how desperate both companies were to sign on and spend the next five-plus years taking advantage of an association with the Olympics. When it came time to receive the two bids, I contrived a reason to be out of the office so that Terry Wright would be the person who would open the envelope. Devilishly, I wanted to hear his voice when he looked at the numbers. And I also sensed Terry wanted to be the one with the letter opener in his hand.