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Authors: John Furlong

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BOOK: Patriot Hearts
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I left for Europe a couple of days later on a golf holiday. I spent most of that time away calling Jack from various pay phones, talking about people he wanted to hire and other matters. I had to get my board at the Arbutus Club to agree to a sabbatical, so I asked Jack to write a letter outlining why he needed my services. I thought the board would be honoured to have its
CEO
seconded for such a cause. The directors agreed.

In mid-October, on my first day in our sparse offices on Dunsmuir Street in downtown Vancouver, Jack walked into my office, eager to explain how our partnership was going to work. “My desk, no paper,” he said. “Your desk, all of the paper.” He wasn’t joking.

One of the first things we had to prepare for was an event being held in Singapore called SportAccord, a five-day gathering of 1,500 of the most important people in the world of international sport. Among them would be the heads of over 100 international sports federations and almost every
IOC
member who would have a vote on the 2010 bid. We needed to be there to start introducing ourselves to those who would be deciding our fate. Our competition was attending. This would be the beginning of our international campaign for votes. It was big. I knew enough about the
IOC
and how it worked to know that delegates didn’t waste a lot of their time with underlings. That’s why Jack needed to be there. He asked me to accompany him, and I agreed because I knew it would make him feel more comfortable if we were two at a convention full of strangers. But two days before we were to leave Jack walked into my office and announced he wasn’t going.

“What do you mean?” I said. “You have to go! You have no idea how important it is that you be there, Jack.”

Nope, he said. He had come down with a cold and just didn’t feel up to it. We argued some more before I finally gave up. He wasn’t going, I was, and that was the end of it.

A few days later I was walking into the conference hotel in Singapore with a knot in my stomach. I didn’t have a clue how I was going to penetrate this gathering. It was like bringing a rowboat up to the
Queen Mary.
Overwhelming.

There were a few familiar faces. One was Paul Henderson—not the famous hockey player but rather a champion for the Toronto bid for the 2008 Summer Games, a former Olympian and an
IOC
delegate. Toronto had lost out that summer to Beijing, and Paul wasn’t happy about it. He did not warm much to me, at least not there. He thought our bid had hurt Toronto’s chances because of the mixed message he believed it sent to
IOC
delegates: Canada couldn’t make up its mind if it wanted the Summer or Winter Games.

What Paul didn’t accept was that as soon as China threw its name in the ring for 2008, it was over for everyone else. Even though Toronto put together a world-class bid that was technically superior to everyone else’s, it lost in a landslide. I could understand why people on Toronto’s bid committee might be bitter, but being upset at us was unfair. Singapore was not the place to argue about it.

Another Canadian there was Bob Storey. Bob was from Ottawa and head of the International Bobsleigh Federation. He was brilliant and fiercely direct. As such, he was a man of major influence in this arena and knew all of the delegates who would be casting votes for the 2010 Games. We had met earlier in Vancouver, but I introduced myself again and it wasn’t long before he was letting me know what he thought of our bid: not much. One of his criticisms was that we hadn’t reached out to well-placed Canadians living outside British Columbia. This had created resentment in the rest of the country. He thought we were naïve and without focus. Without people like Bob on our side, the challenge we faced was going to be even more formidable. I pleaded for his help.

After a long conversation, he agreed. It was one of the most pivotal developments in the bid phase, though I didn’t know it at the time.

For the five days I was in Singapore I would shake as many hands as I could. If I saw someone identified as an
IOC
delegate I’d walk up and say hello. It was cold-calling at its worst and a bit like selling dictionaries in Oxford. No one wanted or needed one. Being a hardcore introvert I was lost, but I had no choice. It was my job, at least on this trip.

On the way home I thought about the nightmare that lay before us. Singapore made me realize what a monster this process was, how much work was going to be involved. While I had met many
IOC
members, I didn’t think the trip had gone particularly well. Votes secured—none. I phoned Jack as soon as I touched down in Vancouver and told him what a mistake it had been for him not to go. Never again, I said.

The next day I went over the trip with Jack almost hour by hour, reciting the names of every person I had met. I told him the process was too unforgiving for blunders and miscalculations. There were going to be dozens and dozens of similar occasions that he was going to need to be at to press our case to
IOC
voters.

Jack looked at me. “John, I’m not going to do this,” he said.

I looked at him, astonished. “What in heaven’s name do you mean?”

“It’s young person’s work, John, and you’re young and have lots of energy so you’re going to do it.”

But what about the work that I was supposed to be doing in Vancouver? I was the chief operating officer. There were technical plans to organize and sponsors to recruit. Who was going to do that?

“You are,” he said. “When you absolutely need me I will be there.”

I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t believe he was asking me to take this stuff on. We went back and forth for another 30 minutes before I gave up trying to convince him why it wouldn’t work. He was going to look after the significant, sometimes unpredictable politics of the bid, dealing with the provincial and federal governments, and I would focus on international voters and do the best I could with everything else. This would be the genesis of my transformation from chief operating officer to president. My role was now fundamentally different. As far as
IOC
delegates were concerned, I was the head guy they were dealing with. I would end up handling huge numbers of the media interviews from this point on too—something I didn’t relish.

THE SALT LAKE CITY
Olympics were a few months away. That would be another key milestone for us. Throughout any calendar year there are events where
IOC
people gather. In an Olympic year, there are even greater opportunities to buttonhole them. By the time the Games rolled around in February 2002, we had developed our strategy for hunting down votes.

We decided on a humble Canadian approach. We would tell
IOC
members that we’d never been involved in anything like this before, and solicit help and advice. We felt it was far more seductive to ask someone for their assistance than to give the impression that we were cocky. We also didn’t want anyone to confuse us with the U.S., who, we had discovered, had big issues within the
IOC
.

We needed to build relationships. The stronger the relationship the harder it would be for that delegate to vote for another city, and the stronger the rapport the greater the degree of trust we would have between us. The one thing we insisted on was not asking delegates for their vote directly. I thought that would be cheesy and too aggressive. We preferred to convince them we were trustworthy and then have them volunteer that we had their vote.

As the months went on, the international team we formed at the bid corporation developed profiles of every
IOC
member. We amassed massive amounts of useful personal information on each one, never knowing when a single piece of information might come in handy. If asking a delegate about a daughter’s graduation from high school helped seal a bond between us, it was worth it.

Salt Lake gave our team a chance to put our strategy in action and see a Winter Olympics up close. Organizers gave us good access. It was fascinating and scary at the same time. I spent a great deal of time flitting from one social and sporting event to another, trying to shake hands with as many delegates as I could. I felt far more at ease than I had in Singapore.

By now I had formed a good relationship with Bob Storey, the Bobsleigh Federation president. I often kidded him about his sport. “Anyone can jump in a canoe and slide down a tunnel of ice,” I would say. One day in Salt Lake City I got a call from Bob. “So, want to see if you’re man enough to try our sport?” he said. “I’ve got a ride for you, but you have to be here in half an hour. And by the way, you’re going to be in the sled with Princess Nora of Liechtenstein.” In an instant, my bravado disappeared.

Driving to the Sliding Centre I was terrified. Sure enough, Princess Nora was there. I knew she was an
IOC
delegate and it was going to be beneficial to share this common experience—if we survived. Besides the pilot, an American, there would be one other person in the sled with us, a fellow from England. A bobsleigh official gave us instructions about where to hold onto the sled and to put our feet. He told us how to keep control of the head so it would not rock back and forth and smash into the back of the helmet of the person in front of us.

We started down at a reasonable pace, and after making the first turn I thought everything would be fine. Then our bobsleigh fell off a cliff, or so it seemed. Suddenly, we were rocketing down the course. I had my legs wrapped around Princess Nora, who was in front of me and screaming as I’d never heard a person scream before. The helmet of the English guy behind me smashed into the back of mine 50 times, just as the instructor had predicted it would. It didn’t take long to get to the bottom, where we were all elated to be alive. I told Princess Nora that I thought I heard her screaming for her mother. She laughed. I was confident we had sewn up a vote.

The highlight in Salt Lake was the men’s gold medal hockey game. The Canadian team had been under so much pressure during the entire tournament, and now there was the chance to win gold for the first time in 50 years. Canadian golfer Mike Weir was sitting behind me at the arena. I was astonished to see the number of Canadian flags and jerseys in the crowd. We ended up beating the U.S. quite handily, 5–2, which helped produce a wonderful moment late in the game when people from all nations embraced each other and started singing “O Canada.”

The bid team’s experience in Salt Lake was beneficial but also sobering.
IOC
President Jacques Rogge neatly summed up the bottom line for all the bidders. “There’s only one gold medal,” he said, as he urged us to compete fairly and within the rules. At that point, there were still eight countries looking to win. Many hearts would be broken before this process was finished.

By now there were some internal frustrations inside the bid corporation. Even though we hadn’t been at it that long, Jack could see problems on the horizon with how things were structured. He was used to clarity of command. Now he had to answer to a board, in this case one that had not fully gelled. He thought the decision making was too slow. Far better for him to be chair so he could communicate more easily with the board and move operational decisions along at a greater speed. It would mean the current chair, the former Olympian Marion Lay, would have to step aside. Jack was insistent and the board accepted his instincts right after we returned from Salt Lake. Marion remained a director. I became president.

Our next big task was to draft a mini–bid book. This was to give the
IOC
a general idea of what we planned to deliver, what our venues might look like, how we intended to look after the athletes. It wasn’t to be accompanied with precise dollar amounts, but there needed to be enough information in it for the
IOC
to shortlist the real contenders.

This is one time when Jack and I had a pretty major disagreement. He wanted to make the contents of our bid book public, even though we had no obligation to do so. Bid books were normally handed to the
IOC
in private, but Jack thought that because this was ultimately a public enterprise, using a lot of tax dollars, there was an onus on us to be as open as possible. I understood, but this was also a competition. Why would we reveal our plans to our competitors? How did we know that they wouldn’t try and steal our best ideas or at least devise a way to nullify their impact? I believed there were a couple of areas in which we were going to be vastly superior to our opponents, and I didn’t want them scrambling to come up with something with an equal “wow” factor. I compared Jack’s proposal to a hockey player telling a goalie which corner he was going to shoot at.

But the day the Austrians submitted their bid book they also put it on the Internet. The Koreans did too. The media in Vancouver rightly began demanding we do the same. We had no choice. I quickly realized I’d made a significant mistake and hadn’t demonstrated good judgment. It would only dawn on me later that the jewels we had in our bid, like the Athletes’ Village, were going to be impossible for our competitors to match or copy. How was anyone going to duplicate False Creek, one of the choicest pieces of real estate in the world? Similarly, how could they copy our plans to bring the entire country together? None of our competitors had the geography to do something as grand and all-encompassing as we were planning.

If I learned a lesson, though, it was to be as transparent as possible. Worse was looking like you had something to hide.

IN AUGUST
2002, the
IOC
announced the four finalists, and to few people’s surprise, we advanced, along with Salzburg, Austria; Berne, Switzerland; and Pyeongchang, South Korea. The next stop would be a five-day Olympic initiation course in Lausanne, Switzerland, at
IOC
headquarters on how best to navigate the process and a presentation by the ethics committee on what you could and couldn’t do in the company of
IOC
members. We sent about six delegates. I sat with Terry Wright during the sessions. Terry was one of our best team members and a logistical wizard. He was the person instrumental in putting together our technical bid, which covered venues, transportation and accommodation. He’d worked on countless provincial, national and international sporting events before this. We felt lucky to have him. He had the heart of a lion.

BOOK: Patriot Hearts
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