Patriot Hearts (9 page)

I remember a key gathering in Buenos Aires. A full complement of sport delegates would be there, but I was going down to focus on the eight
IOC
members in attendance. I went to Argentina with just one person, Carlos Garcia, a Toronto-based colleague and a member of our international team. He had strong South American roots and was fluent in Spanish. The Austrians had a delegation of three. The Koreans had more than 20. My eyes grew even wider when a squad of beautiful young Korean women walked into the presentation hall carrying gift bags full of goodies. I saw one delegate pull a watch from one bag. Someone lifted a compact disc player out of another.

More than one person had asked me if I wasn’t concerned that we were losing ground to the Koreans because of their blatant tactics. The flip side of that was the implicit suggestion that perhaps we should start employing the same tactics. I was never going to do it and was never convinced it was a guaranteed strategy anyway. My feeling was that if you were inclined to accept something that effectively amounted to a bribe, then you were just as likely to take it, promise something in return, and renege on that promise 10 seconds after you walked away.

While the
IOC
had certainly cleaned up its protocols since the debacle in Salt Lake City, there were still some marginal characters around the organization. One who represented the worst of the
IOC
was a fellow by the name of Ivan Slavkov. Slavkov was an
IOC
member from Bulgaria who did not have a sterling reputation. He had been investigated by the
IOC
in connection with bribery allegations levelled by officials from Cape Town who were bidding to stage the 2004 Games that went to Athens. The South African officials had said Slavkov had promised to deliver votes in exchange for money. After an inquiry, the
IOC
decided not to pursue the matter.

I met Slavkov at a restaurant in Sofia in the winter of 2002 while attending a meeting of the International Sports Press Association there. As a courtesy I brought him a small gift, a corkscrew that had a First Nations design on it. It came in a beautiful box that also had a Native motif embossed on it. The whole thing might have cost $25. I noticed that Slavkov had two bags beside his chair, one more full than the other.

During our conversation he talked about how expensive the bidding process was for cities and how difficult it could be to get
IOC
members onside. Reading between the lines, I thought that he was suggesting there was still work to do and people to influence if we were going to be successful. Then he talked about his son and how he wanted him to get into Canada. That’s when I started to feel a bit uncomfortable and began wrapping up our conversation. I presented him with our token gift. He opened it and examined the corkscrew, seemingly in disbelief. He took the arms of it and moved them up and down slowly a few times, as if he’d never seen one before. I imagined Ivan in a T-shirt that read
“I MET JOHN FURLONG AND ALL I GOT WAS A LOUSY CORKSCREW.”

He set the wine opener down and reached for one of the two bags beside him, the smaller one. “And this is a little something from me,” he said.

I waited to get back to my hotel room before peering inside. In it was a T-shirt with a picture of Slavkov embossed on the front. If I was being generous I’d say it probably retailed for $2.50. I guess this was his way of saying he didn’t think too much of the corkscrew.

The meeting with Slavkov gave me the creeps. What an oversized ego. He was definitely old-school
IOC
and the type of member the committee was trying to rid itself of. In 2004, the
BBC
would secretly film Slavkov offering to deliver votes for London’s bid for the 2012 Summer Games in exchange for bribes. A year later, Slavkov would be charged with bringing the organization into disrepute and kicked out.

There were all sorts of strange characters out to make a buck from the Olympics. We were constantly approached by people who were essentially influence peddlers promising to deliver votes in exchange for money. Some were subtle, others downright blunt. These weren’t
IOC
members but people who operated on the periphery of the committee and were apparently tight with people on the inside—or so they would tell you. I liked to call these guys secret agents because they always seemed so mysterious. The
IOC
had warned us about them.

We heard about this one guy who boasted that he had sway in the ski world and beyond. Former Canadian Olympian Steve Pod-borski, who was on our international team, had suggested we meet with him. The guy claimed to have worked at one time for the Israeli secret service and to be well connected. That was enough to make me reluctant to even talk to him, but Steve convinced me that it might be worthwhile so we set up a meeting in Zurich.

Bob Storey and I met him in the courtyard of a hotel. He was a stocky, tough-looking character and not exactly brimming with charisma. We listened to his pitch, regretting every second of the rendezvous. He claimed he had connections throughout the
IOC
and could put us in a position where we would know with certainty how many votes we had. And, he said, he could also help secure votes we didn’t have. And just to make sure we understood how vital he was to our success, he told us we would likely lose without his services.

I felt utterly uncomfortable. All I could think was this was some sort of set-up—that hidden cameras were trained on our conversation. Out of curiosity, I asked him what he was looking for. He wanted $40,000 a month, and for that he would provide us with regular reports as well as other documentation that would give us all the intelligence we would need to win. I didn’t say much but could not wait for the meeting to end. Bob and I thanked him for his time.

I felt sick as we walked away. Bob too. The experience left me feeling so grimy I wanted a shower.

That man would not be the last foreigner who offered to help us out. But I felt that relying on a lineup of internationals said you didn’t have much confidence in people in your own country— which looked horrible. These guys were everywhere and I wasn’t interested. If we lost because we didn’t hire them, so be it. I was prepared to live with that. We all were.

LIKE OTHERS ON
our team I was giving speeches everywhere by this point, at
IOC
-sanctioned events and also across Canada as I attempted to drum up national support for our project. Most of my speeches were based on a document I wrote in September 2002 entitled “What Dreams May Come.” I had written it in the hopes it would be published in the
Vancouver Sun
—it was rejected. The editors felt it was too long and also that it was too rah-rah. Maybe it was, but it was really the outline of the vision we had from the start for these Olympics, one that admittedly might have seemed audacious back then. In it, I asked people to imagine a six-week period in which the entire planet would stand and watch “in amazement as the spirit of higher-faster-stronger sweeps Canada off its feet.”

“Volunteers,” I wrote, “will come from small towns, villages, hamlets and big cities. Not just ordinary volunteers either. The blood of generations of pioneers flows in the veins of this generation too. . . We carry their flame, their inspiration and their legacy of drive and tenacity.”

I said that for the people of the world coming to Canada would be like coming home. That’s the kind of people we were. The word
Canada,
I noted, was derived from the native word
Kanata,
meaning “meeting place.” How appropriate. I imagined what the Games might do for our country. “The Games will come and go. . . And as they pass into memory we will emerge uplifted for the experience and our country will seem a little better, a little taller than before. Folks may use the words ‘the best there has ever been.’ And we hope we will have earned that distinction.”

When I first started talking publicly in these terms, there were far more skeptics than believers. But the document would become my Olympic manifesto, the credo of our bid, the inspiration for our business plan, the foundation upon which the 2010 Games would stand.

Before the vote in Prague, I decided to send all
IOC
members a letter thanking them for the time they had shared with me over the previous couple of years. Even if I knew they were not going to be supporting our bid in Prague, I thought it was important to acknowledge the journey we’d all been on and to express, in a heartfelt and personal way, my gratitude for the role they had played. This was going to be a huge job: almost 120 letters I’d need to write by hand. I thought I could do a lot of them while on planes, jetting from one place to another, and I was happy we had good files on each member.

My hand began cramping up after the tenth letter, but I was determined to get them written and sent off a month before Prague. While I wasn’t really expecting to get any votes in return for the gesture, you also never knew. It might help sway a fence-sitter. Plus, I thought it would reflect well on the bid and on Canada generally. I thought it might say something about the type of people we were.

One day, I was flying back from Mexico via Los Angeles with 50 or 60 letters neatly stacked on the empty seat beside me. The flight attendant came by with a tray loaded with water and proceeded to stumble and dump it all over my letters and me. Honest to God, I could have opened the door of that plane and thrown her out. She was mortified. She ran and got some paper towels and frantically started drying the letters. Some we were able to salvage, many we weren’t. What I didn’t know at the time was that she had been trying to drum up the courage on that flight to pitch her case to leave the airline and work on the 2010 Games if we won the bid.

Fast forward several years. We were having an open house at my office so I could spend time face to face with our staff, many of whom were slaving away day and night on the project. About 600 or 700 people came by that day. A woman who looked vaguely familiar came up to say hello. “Do you remember a time when you were on a flight from Los Angeles and the flight attendant spilled water all over some letters you were working on?” I did, I said. “That was me.” She told me about losing the courage to ask me about working for us after she’d spilled the water. We managed to have a good laugh. She was a great catch for us too.

Five days after I put those letters in the mail I had a call from an
IOC
member from the United States. He wanted to tell me how touched he was by the letter. He then said, “Stop worrying about me. I’m onside and will help any way I can.” I was beaming. If his was the only win I got, it was worth all the pain and suffering.

As we got closer to Prague, I grew concerned about the quality of our presentation. Establishing the right mood in the conference hall where our final pitch would be delivered was going to be essential. Beyond the speeches, we hoped to knock people out with a breathtaking video that captured the beauty of Canada and the wonderful spirit of our people. From the second our team walked through the door we needed to own that room.

There would be a massive screen upon which we would be casting images of our country. I had decided with Jack’s support to use the song “Here I Am” from the movie
Spirit
as our main anthem. It was a beautiful piece, sung by B.C. rock star Bryan Adams, which made its use even more salient. I thought the lyrics would strike a chord with the
IOC
members too.

Here I am—this is me
There’s nowhere else on earth I’d rather be
Here I am,
Just you and me
And tonight we make our dreams come true.

But it was going to be essential that the images in the video strike the hearts of everyone in the room. We needed to find a way to take their breath away. On a Saturday less than two weeks before we left for Prague, I went to our cramped offices, now located in the historic Landing building on Water Street in Gastown, to take a look at the video that our creative wizard, Marti Kulich, had put together. There were about 10 of us in the room. Marti darkened the lights and turned the video on. For the next few minutes we all sat in silence as dozens of images crossed the screen.

I began getting worried. Others were too. It was awkward.

What Marti had put together was fine, but it didn’t wow me. If you took out the iconic images of the Mounties and the Maple Leafs, it could have been put together by any country. I also didn’t think it was nearly inspiring enough. There were no children. There wasn’t enough soul or talk about hopes and dreams and aspirations for Canada. So when the lights went up I looked at Marti and told him how I felt.

“This is just not going to work,” I said. “We need to light up the screen and we’re not doing that. It just isn’t nearly human enough, Marti. It doesn’t connect with our vision. It lacks the thunder that we need.”

One of the ideas we were tossing around at the time was having a ring of fire around the roof of
BC
Place Stadium, where the opening and closing ceremonies would be held. It would effectively become the Olympic cauldron, the biggest in history. I wanted to show delegates what that would look like in our video. Possible or not, it would make for stunning imagery. There was a lot of arguing and people talking about all the reasons why we couldn’t do the video revisions, how much money it would cost and how little time we had. “I don’t care how much money it costs,” I said. “If it’s technologically possible, then we must show it. For starters we need the ring around the stadium to explode into flames.”

The discussion developed into quite a row. There was a screaming match at one point before I stopped it all. Marti was deflated. “Marti,” I said, “that’s it. We’ve got 10 days. Let’s get it done. You are the only one here who can pull this off.” A few days later, Marti had a new video ready that was everything I hoped for.

(There were other people in the building that day who could hear the yelling going on inside our conference room. As I was walking down the hall, an assistant came up and asked me what had just happened. “I think maybe we just became a real team,” I said.)