Patriot Hearts (28 page)

David wasn’t at all keen on the idea at first. Creatively, he didn’t think it would produce the moment I was predicting. He thought Rick would have to wheel up this ramp onto the floor of the stadium and it would be slow and might put an awkward drag on things. David could become fairly fixed in his ideas, and I had the feeling he was going to be hard to persuade on this one.

“David,” I said to him one morning, “I don’t ask you for much and I’m really wanting you to consider this. I think it could be fantastic. I can hear the crowd. You have to know this guy is an icon in Canada. He deserves a very special moment in all this and he will not let you down—trust me.”

David was mostly quiet. We didn’t talk about it for a while after that.

Later on David came back to me. He said he had taken another look at the ramp, and there was no way that Rick would ever be able to get up it. He had even put himself in a wheelchair to prove the point, and fit as he was it was tough going for him. It was a performance ramp and not designed to be wheelchair-friendly.

“David,” I said, “you do not know this guy. He will make it up that ramp, no problem.”

“No, he won’t,” David insisted. “I tried. It’s a brutal climb.”

“Yes, he will,” I barked back. “I guarantee you. You try telling him he can’t make it up that ramp. I dare you. Let me tell you, David, I do not have the kind of courage a person needs to tell Rick Hansen he cannot do something. Get him over there. Let him try.”

A few days later, David humoured me and got Rick to come over to the stadium to give it a whirl. Minutes later he called me at the office. “I thought I had seen everything,” he said. “He went up the ramp on the first go. I can’t believe it, and what a great sport he is. I think it’s going to work.”

Victory that time was mine.

The other big decision was who would carry in the Olympic flag, which was a highly prized, emotional moment. There would be eight people escorting the flag into the stadium on opening night, each holding a part of it. It was David who thought we should use the opportunity to showcase Canadian talent, specifically Canadians who the world might not know were Canadian. David, Dave Cobb and I put together a long list of possible candidates. The Canadian-born director James Cameron was on someone’s list. Leonard Cohen on another. In the end we settled on actor Donald Sutherland, singer Anne Murray, astronaut Julie Payette, Betty Fox, hockey legend Bobby Orr, skating legend Barbara Ann Scott, Formula One racer Jacques Villeneuve and un commander Roméo Dallaire. There was a view that a lot of people around the world probably thought that performers like Sutherland and Anne Murray were Americans, not Canadians. And they probably didn’t know we had an astronaut program either. This assembly of fine Canadians would surprise some people.

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 our 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.