Patriot Hearts (29 page)

9

Tragedy
in Whistler

T
HE 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 and 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.

When I finally emerged from my office, I could feel the penetrating eyes of the organization fall upon me. By that point the members of my team knew what had happened. It was all over the television. In the build-up to the Games we had developed protocols for just about every crisis scenario you could think of. We had confronted make-believe plane crashes, riots, major injuries, mustard gas—you name it and we had prepared for it. But never in our wildest dreams did we imagine the death of an athlete on opening day.

By now, we had learned more details about what happened. Nodar had lost control at the end of the course and was flipped over the side wall of the track into a pole. I saw the crash played on television once and would never watch it again, despite the networks showing it repeatedly for the next several days. Nodar was travelling at 143.3 kilometres an hour at the moment of impact. It was his final training run and his twenty-fifth time down the Whistler track.

A joint ad hoc meeting with the
IOC
was quickly convened. I had never felt a room so heavily burdened with sadness and grief. I looked at Jacques Rogge, who always seemed to be completely in control of his emotions. He seemed completely lost. He was not alone.

People were expressing views on what needed to be done, and for the first while everyone seemed to be talking at cross purposes. It was an uneasy environment. I remember looking over at Jacques sitting at the end of the table and listening to him say that our Games were now going to be remembered for this tragedy. No argument from me. I told him it was critical that we managed this moment with extraordinary dignity and compassion or the Canadian public would be deeply disappointed in us.

I told Jacques that it was imperative that we acknowledge without hesitation what had happened, be honest and forthright and not try and explain it as anything other than what it was. In other words, the worst thing we could do was to try and make excuses and sound defensive or rationalize the accident in any way. I felt we needed to lead first with our hearts.

This was a day to honour a young man who died pursuing his dream. We needed to express that in the most profoundly human way we could. His teammates would be devastated. Fellow lugers would be devastated. The people of Georgia would be grief-stricken— his family heartbroken beyond words. The athletes in Vancouver and especially in Whistler would be overcome with sadness. We also needed to start thinking about how we were going to address this loss in the opening ceremonies that night. On that point we all agreed.

Gilbert Felli was a commanding presence in the meeting. He did a good job of assuring people that, as dark as this moment was, we would get through it. We
had
to get through it. And we would respond with dignity and composure. I was willing to listen to any idea, provided it not diminish the empathy we both felt and needed to show.

Jacques and I would be attending a swiftly called news conference at the Main Press Centre later that morning to discuss the tragedy. Our communications staff tried to impress upon us the message we needed to impart to the media, but I wasn’t interested in talking points. Not today. I didn’t want to hear about what issues may or may not be in play. I had no intention of discussing the factors that may have contributed to the young man’s death. I was simply going to be honest about how I was feeling: devastated, for the young man and his family. I wanted the public to know how wounded my team was by what happened. I was going to speak from the heart—that’s all I knew how to do. There would be plenty of time in the days ahead to dissect exactly what had happened on the track.

In the meantime, there were practical matters to be dealt with such as an autopsy and returning Nodar’s body to Georgia. What were our legal obligations? We discovered that Nodar’s coach was his uncle and two of the athlete’s teammates had been classmates. Nodar’s life was intertwined with the life of every villager where he lived in the mountains of Georgia. His uncle had the horrible task of phoning Nodar’s family back home to give them the news. I ended up cancelling a number of events scheduled for that day, including one with the Governor General.

Jacques and I took separate cars to the Main Press Centre for the 11:30
AM
news conference. We arrived early and sat in an ante room. Jacques was not someone who was comfortable expressing his emotions publicly. He was always so stoic, reserved, coming across as cold and detached at times. But for most of the morning he had looked on the verge of tears. I realized that I was going to need to help him get through this news conference and he was somehow going to need to help me. At one point while we waited we hugged one another. He told me that over his career as an orthopedic surgeon he had performed countless difficult surgeries, even lost some patients, but those experiences had not prepared him for this tragedy.

We were both barely able to hold back the tears we felt welling up. It was not the best shape to be in just before walking into a room to stare down the world’s media, knowing they were going to have some tough questions about someone who had lost his life on our watch. If I had felt this lonely or vulnerable ever before, I could not remember.

I honestly don’t recall much about the news conference. A lot of camera clicking and tape rolling. Every chair seemed to have someone in it. I remember Jacques having to stop and compose himself at one point. I patted his back to support him and help him along. I told reporters how heartbroken our organization was, how I felt I’d lost a son myself. Jacques said Nodar’s death had cast a shadow over the Games.

There were questions about the speed of the track and whether it was too dangerous. I wasn’t planning to spend much time answering hypothetical questions at this point. There were investigations underway and it wasn’t a day to assign blame; it was a day to honour the life of an Olympic athlete who had died doing what he loved. A young man with the hopes of an entire country behind him. The media were quite decent and respectful during the press conference. Indeed, most there seemed to share the deep sense of grief that overwhelmed the day. I think the men and women in the room could tell our feelings were genuine, knew that we were in shock, that we were hurt, that we wanted to do the right thing for this young man’s family. Not a good day to push anyone too hard.

Meanwhile the torch relay continued to the delight of tens of thousands of people jamming the streets, oblivious to what had happened. I was getting grateful e-mails every other minute from people telling me how this was the greatest thing that had ever happened to Vancouver. I wished I could have shared in that elation.

After the news conference, my attention turned to my staff working at the Whistler Sliding Centre, where the accident had occurred. I knew they would be on the verge of breaking down completely over the accident and I was especially worried about our top man there, Craig Lehto. This group was responsible for the operation of the track, so if anyone was going to feel responsible for Nodar’s death it was these people. There were also big decisions to make. I called Craig later in the day to see how he was doing. A physically imposing but soft-spoken man, he was barely hanging on. I planned to see him the next day in person.