The Olympics: Inside the Inner Circle

If you are looking for the perfect job, or a change of career, you could do a lot worse than joining the Olympic movement as a member of the board. Not only are you responsible for promoting amateur athletic sport both in your country, and around the globe (a very worthy endeavour), you will also live the life of a Banana Republic potentate by everyone you meet on the planet, with the possible exception of your wife. When you also consider many athletes are no longer amateur, but millionaires from their day jobs, you don’t even have to be very successful at your main purpose, either. It’s one of the easiest jobs on the planet – especially when you consider you are paid one of the best salaries in history, and are on expenses. But why are you treated the way you are?

 

Ever since the politic debacle’s of the early ‘80’s, when politics dictated an amateur athlete’s career arc, consider the size of the venues that have hosted the games. On the winter games side, Calgary, Lillehammer, and Nagano, and Atlanta and Athens in the summer months weren’t’ exactly global metropolises. After Moscow and Los Angeles, it looked as if a leaner, more stripped down games would soothe the diplomatic wounds we were all suffering from, and also get back to basics for the quadrennial celebration. Unfortunately, it also opened the experience of actually ‘getting’ the games up to local governments. In many cases these meant the very first time that the venue in question were going to be the focus of the world. So anything spent at the time to sway people’s minds, would be repaid exponentially in future tourism and investment cash. Therefore whatever these cities could do ‘above the table’ the better. Unfortunately, as is usual with human nature, these lessons were well learned by future venues, expanded, and therefore expected by the inner circle of a few thousand that make up the Games’ secretariat.

 

For this Olympiad, we have been shocked as host cities what we have to do when this Star Chamber gets here. First class travel, complimentary tickets to final events, penthouse hotel rooms, changes of traffic patterns in their favour, and member’s individual choice of meals during official Olympic events are not only expected, they are demanded – a necessary part of the host’s responsibilities. This is all for the handful of decision makers, and their support staff, and secretaries, their whole families, and members from their own countries. All in all, about 2% of all expenditure expected to be made by us proles on the sidelines is given away in order to make these people feel at home. Unfortunately, Vancouver is the largest city ever to host the winter games, so we are now using a different set of rules – and we have to do this by trying to make money from a much larger visitor number than those smaller towns. At what point is it our job to maximize profits? I guess it greasing palms after your product is bought, trumps any support the Olympic movement owes us for soldiering on through a huge global economic explosion to continue to present their product, and make less money from it. While paying more for it after these members of the sporting royal family have left for pastures and troughs anew.

The Olympics: Follow the Money

When I mentioned last week that $2 Billion was going to be the final price tag, those that preferred the figure $8 Billion as the final cost immediately harangued me.

Why two prices, and why is one 4 times bigger than the first? The reason is infrastructure prices, and how it is being spent.

 

When your city hosts the Olympics, it’s going to be too small to handle the influx of so many people, and you won’t have the facilities to handle it. This doesn’t necessarily mean sporting venues, either. In our case, it means roads, rapid transit, and a conference centre. ROADS: We have a tiny road system that doesn’t even have dedicated right hand turns at most downtown junctions, because the land is so expensive, we cannot dedicate space to anything but buildings. Of course this has led to too many cars downtown, not enough parking, and a crappy public transit system by comparison.

The journey from Vancouver to Whistler is a fantastic 3 hour drive along Howe Sound and up into the Mountains to Whistler. Unfortunately, three hours is just too long to spend on the road these days, so people speed and get killed making it a dangerous trip.

RAPID TRANSIT: Like most North American cities, we don’t have a direct transit route from our airport to the city – because cab companies ‘rule’ that area of transport with an iron fist. Unfortunately, we also have to cross at least two bridges across water to get to anywhere downtown, which adds huge traffic problems to the usual crawl. Our mid week rush hours are now 6am to 8pm, with a slow hour between 2 and 3 – which is when most International flights arrive.

CONFERENCE CENTRE: Once you get downtown, the ability of the city to fill hotel rooms with the size of our current Conference centre is, sadly, too small to make enough money. We have a fabulous design for one (that would be built into the water to save on infrastructure.), but can’t afford to build it – pity, because if it had a large-scale launch event for it, it would have an incredible impact on would be visitors.

 

What? Like the Olympics? Canada has always been a popular Olympic destination, we are on the US West coast time zone, Whistler was designed as an Olympic venue in the 60’s, and is the best ski resort in North America – why not?

 

Six years after we got the bid, we have a rail rapid transit link directly to the city from the airport, the highway to Whistler is flatter, wider, and has cut the journey time down to two hours, and we have our Conference centre that will be the 21^st century looking home to the media centre. Together with the $1 Billion security costs that weren’t envisioned prior to September 2001, there is your additional $6 Billion. Worth it? Worth it for the Canadian tax payer to pay for it? Well, from this city’s point of view – YES!