The athletes’ village at False Creek: The push to build competition venues — most will start construction in 2006 and 2007 — is to give athletes, particularly Canadians, at least two seasons of practice

It has been 18 months since the International Olympic Committee and a collection of B.C. municipalities, sports organizations and community supporters embarked on one of the most ambitious cooperative sporting exercises in Canadian history.

Much has happened in the young life of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games since IOC president Jacques Rogge and representatives of Vancouver and Whistler fixed their signatures to a contract during a summertime ceremony at the Hilton Hotel in Prague.

The heady euphoria of displacing two equally competent bids from Austria and South Korea in an act that galvanized Canadians around the world has given way to a more pragmatic and hard reality: 78 months is not an awful lot of time in which to organize the Games.

Today, only 60 of those months remain before the parade of nations will march into B.C. Place Stadium to open the 17-day Olympics, which will precede the Paralympics.

There is still so much to do.

Not one drop of concrete needed for any of the massive new venues has been poured. The ground in the pristine Callaghan Valley, site of the Nordic ski jumping and sliding centres, has not been broken. The curling venue dreamed of for Riley Park is still just that. The aging ice hockey arenas at the University of B.C. have yet to be replaced.

The creative plans for how the Games will take place are all on paper, reams and reams of paper, and in binary files of organizers’ and consultants’ computers scattered between Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, Toronto and the seat of the IOC, Lausanne, Switzerland.

They are also lodged in the brains and hearts of people like John Furlong, the de facto soul of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (Vanoc), and a small squadron of senior executives and planners who are slowly and methodically putting together what they hope will be a lasting Canadian legacy.

Almost everything is rolling off according to the plans. And yet the road over the past year and a half has not been wholly smooth. There have been some brilliant achievements, such as the record-breaking $200-million sponsorship deal Vanoc cut with Bell Canada, a deal so rich that it covers twice over what the organizers thought they’d get from all top-tier sponsors combined.

And the small team of senior executives Furlong has surrounded himself with appear to be copies of the Energizer Bunny. They arrive in their West Pender Street offices early in the morning and they keep going until late into the night. The air miles they’ve clocked in trips to Switzerland, Italy, China, Toronto and Montreal as they search out guidance from those who have gone before them, and to implement the contractual demands of the IOC, likely represent the year’s profits of a small airline company.

This week, for example, Furlong was in Victoria on Monday, in Williams Lake and Quesnel on Thursday, and Prince George on Friday. Today he’s in Whistler to officiate at the official five-years-out Vanoc celebrations.

Vanoc is still a small organization, with fewer than 80 people working for it. By Games-time, there will be nearly 1,200, along with as many as 25,000 volunteers. Each of the vice-presidents have multiple responsibilities, and they’re having to make Solomon-like choices every day. It’s not possible to delegate responsibilities to a staff you don’t yet have.

“Every day I have a hundred things I have to do, and I have to pick the 20 that I can accomplish,” said Dave Cobb, the senior vice-president for revenue, marketing and communications. “Having said that, I have loved every day I have been here, and it has been a truly fantastic experience.”

But there have also been some early failures that have reminded Furlong and his crew of the perfidious nature of their ambitious plans.

Almost immediately after the Games were awarded, the organizers encountered the unexpected: a surging local economy, coupled with a massive demand by China for construction steel, sent construction costs shooting up.

A shortage of skilled labour and an unexpected double-digit increase in the price of steel and concrete led Vanoc chairman Jack Poole to suggest the provincial government might have to pay more.

The province, which is contributing $310 million to the construction budget and is on the hook legally for any shortfall once the Games are over, immediately refused, telling Vanoc to find the money elsewhere or cut costs.

Vanoc did both. Its rich deal with Bell will set the bar for other corporations wanting to become top sponsors.

And it embarked on a line-by-line review of its budget, leading to the first of three major changes in venues.

Vanoc broke a promise to build the $60-million Cdn speed-skating oval at Simon Fraser University after the university said costs had likely risen to $80 million.

Vanoc turned the project over to the city of Richmond, which pledged to build the oval at the original cost as part of a $153-million municipal riverside revitalization project.

But Richmond also lost another venue, the International Broadcast Centre, after the proposed site, a piece of federal land, became bogged down in the middle of a land claim by the Musqueam First Nation. Moving the IBC to the new Vancouver Exhibition and Convention Centre under construction to the west of the current convention centre will also save operating costs.

Last month Vanoc directors also agreed to move the Slalom and Giant Slalom alpine races from Blackcomb Mountain to Whistler Mountain to combine the venue with other scheduled alpine events.

It also also strongly hinted that it will make its two Nordic ski jumps a temporary affair, since it doesn’t believe there is a strong enough post-games skiing community to justify building a more expensive permanent structure.

Those actions, coupled with the Bell deal, helped bring Vanoc’s burgeoning construction budget back into line. But the continuing slide of the U.S. dollar, which has lost a third of its value over the last three years, has presented new problems. Much of the organization’s $1.345 billion Cdn operating budget will be made up from transfers from the IOC in U.S. dollars, and the sliding exchange has not helped Vanoc at all.

There were also dramatic public and personal failures.

Within months of being hired as the vice-president of human resources, Jeff Chan suddenly left Vanoc under a cloud.

Neither side would talk publicly about his departure, but some hinted at an incompatibility between Chan and Furlong, who must put together an entirely new team of people who don’t know each other but who must hit it off right at the start. Former VanCity human resources VP Donna Wilson replaced Chan.

There is a lasting backlash over the way Vanoc handled the tricky issue of protecting the Olympic brand. It was seen as a bully for going after a long-time Vancouver pizza parlour that displays the Olympic rings. It is also being counter-sued by a Squamish family for what they say is a distressing attack on them over the ownership of an Internet website containing the words “Vancouver 2010.”

Even B.C. communities, which formed a core of support for the bid, came under scrutiny by Vanoc’s trademark police after forming “2010 Legacy” committees to try to benefit from the Games. With Premier Gordon Campbell at his side for support, Cobb gently helped municipalities rename the groups “community spirit” committees.

Vanoc’s argument for brand protection was logical; if the marks are watered down, it won’t generate as much revenue as it needs and would be forced to rely more heavily on the taxpayer-backed government guarantee.

But its heavy-handedness in protecting the IOC’s emblems did not win Vanoc many friends.

However, the past 18 months haven’t been all bad news. Vanoc has so far managed to escape the troubles that have beset previous Olympics.

The public too has found increasing favor with the Olympics. A recent Ipsos-Reid poll released in January found 68 per cent of British Columbians support hosting the Olympics. That’s up 10 percentage points over another Ipsos-Reid poll done two years ago during the bid phase.

There has been no great corruption scandal like the one that rocked Salt Lake City and forced a major reform of the IOC. Unlike Athens, Vanoc isn’t behind in its construction or dramatically over budget. And unlike Turin, the site of the 2006 Winter Games, it doesn’t have the kind of vicious national, regional and local political infighting for which the Italians are legendary. It has yet to have a visit from police investigators the way recent Olympic committees have.

And what of the next few years?

Organizing the Games is not the slow, measured, long-term affair of a corporation that will be around for generations. It is more like the life-cycle of an insect; short and frenetic.

This spring, clearing will begin on some of the 300 hectares of land in the Callaghan valley needed for the Nordic and sliding centres. Last week, more than 200 potential contractors turned up at a Vanoc briefing to find out how to bid. Construction of the jumps and the slide will begin in the summer.

Later this month, Vanoc and UBC will announce which of three short-listed design-and-build proponents will get the contract to build a four-ice arena later this year.

Richmond has already rezoned the land for its new speed-skating oval and is now holding open houses. Construction is expected to start in early 2006.

Construction of most other venues will begin in 2006 and 2007, including the two Olympic villages in Whistler and False Creek, the curling venue, and renovations to B.C. Place and GM Place.

As well, there’s a lot of other construction taking place in B.C. not directly related to the Olympics but certainly affecting it: the $600-million upgrade of the Sea-to-Sky Highway, the $1.72-billion high-speed RAV line and the $565-million expansion of the Vancouver Trade and Exhibition Centre.

A lot of the push behind the construction is so Vanoc can open the venues by 2008 to give athletes — particularly Canadians — at least two seasons of practice.

“So far, we’re on track with all our planned start dates, and we’re in pretty good shape that way,” said Steve Matheson, the vice-president of venue construction. “We want to make sure that we’ve got two full seasons for training for our Canadian athletes on these new venues so that we can be as competitive as possible for the Games.”

Security has also ramped up; a team of RCMP officers is now permanently attached to the Vanoc office as it coordinates security and anti-terrorism strategies.

Sport development is also at a crucial crossroads. Cathy Priestner-Allinger, Vanoc’s VP of sport, says many of the governing sport bodies will be examining venue plans this year to make sure they comply with international standards.

On a national level, Vanoc is also a major partner in an ambitious $110-million COC-Sports Canada dream to have Canada place first in the medal count by winning at least 35 medals in 2010. It’s a long way off from that mark, having placed 19th in the Athens Summer Games, tied with Bulgaria.

The success of the program hangs on whether the federal government will pay for half the program. Earlier this month, the IOC’s Rogge encouraged Ottawa to join the so-called “Own The Podium” program. But so far the feds have not anted up.

The provincial government, which will bring in its own budget Tuesday, is considering joining the program.

Vanoc this year will also embark on a massive cross-Canada effort to make the Vancouver Games relevant to the rest of the country.

“This really is Canada‘s Games. When you look at what the Olympics stands for, which is fair play, peace and unifying people around the world, those Olympic values are very closely aligned with the values of Canadians,” Cobb said.

At the end of April, Vanoc will unveil its logo, which Cobb believes will be another unifying mark for the Games.

Money, or the lack of it, is a main driver here, because Vanoc has been operating on a $25-million line of credit with the Royal Bank of Canada. There are strings attached to the $620 million the provincial and federal governments are contributing to the construction budget. The IOC’s operating budget contribution — which has yet to be negotiated — is a long way off.

So this year the pressure is on Vanoc to negotiate most of the top-tier sponsorship categories it is contemplating, including banking, automotive, airline, brewery, lotteries, petroleum and energy. It is already negotiating with the banking sector and could make an announcement within weeks. Several banks are interested, including CIBC and RBC, which has been the Canadian Olympic Committee’s sponsor for more than half a century.

One looming battle is just how much the IOC will give Vanoc. In the last year it has negotiated an unprecedented $4 billion Cdn in television marketing deals with NBC, the European Broadcasting Union and a Bell Globe-media-Rogers Communications consortium for broadcasting the 2010 Winter and 2012 Summer Games.

It was far more than the IOC had expected, thanks largely to the fact the Winter Games will be in Vancouver. But it also said last year it would no longer share broadcast revenues with its Olympic organizing committees on a percentage basis, but rather on a fixed sum plus inflation.

Tightly financed Vanoc, however, has its eye fixed firmly on getting a larger piece of the pie. “Our position is that we will be sitting down with the IOC later this year to determine what the fair share of the TV rights to Vanoc should be,” Cobb said recently.

It’s not all about money, though. Furlong, whose passion and eloquence are credited with tipping the balance in favour of Vancouver during the IOC deliberations, said the Olympics are about eliciting the best in people. Over the last 18 months, he’s seen that happen time and time again. The recent Ipsos-Reid poll validated his view, he said, that people have begun to see the Vancouver Games as a unique event in Canadian history.

Corporate support — and not just for the purposes of promotion — has also been remarkable, he said.

“We’ve met with dozens of corporations over the last year, and there is a huge desire in the corporate community to become engaged in staging the Games,” he said. “It’s not about them wanting to be sponsors as much as it is them wanting to do what they can to help it be a success.”

On his road trip to Williams Lake, Quesnel and Prince George, Furlong was struck by how much inspiration the Olympics has created.

“The people up here get what we’re doing. The rest of Canada gets what we’re doing. It’s a remarkable discovery to see people who live outside Vancouver and Whistler excited about these Games.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2005