News and Features
How the Olympics Came to Vancouver
By Frances Bula published Dec 1, 2009
Fifty years after a group of dreamers hatched an improbable plan to bring the Olympics to B.C., the 2010 Winter Games are about to begin. Here’s how fantasy turned into reality
Christmas eve, 1997. Gordon Campbell had suffered a humiliating defeat by the NDP that made people question if he should be the Liberal leader. Mayor Philip Owen of the Non-Partisan Association (rulers of Vancouver for over a decade) was mainly concerned with clamping down on crime. Gregor Robertson was working on a farm in Langley. Olympic Village developers Shahram and Peter Malek were building towers in Burnaby. No one had heard of John Furlong, and Jack Poole was in semi-retirement.
At the Park Royal Hotel in West Van, Arthur Griffiths—the just-departed owner of the Grizzlies and GM Place—sat down for brunch with Tourism Vancouver’s top executives, Rick Antonson and Bruce MacMillan. Were they going to plunge ahead with an official bid for the 2010 Winter Games? MacMillan had first suggested the idea to Antonson in 1996, soon after Vancouver won the right to stage the 2001 World Figure Skating Championships. Ever since, Antonson and MacMillan had been convening groups of business leaders, holding informal talks with Mayor Owen, doing a preliminary feasibility study, and, in the fall of ’97, convincing Griffiths to be their corporate champion. And now, in late December, it was decision time: abort mission, or full speed ahead? The application had to be in by February.
“We were the latecomers,” remembers MacMillan. “It would be a major effort to get it all together.” There was less than a year until the Canadian Olympic Committee would announce its choice for bid city. Calgary had a successful Olympics behind it, and Quebec City had been planning and fundraising for months. Vancouver hadn’t raised a cent yet, and some people thought the whole thing was a bad idea.
MacMillan now works in Dallas as the CEO of Meeting Planners International; he’s an expert in the science of large events. Looking back, he thinks the city had all the right elements. Vancouver was full of people who loved sports: ex-Olympians like skier Steve Podborski, runners Doug and Diane Clement, and wrestler Greg Edgelow. And it had a sports-crazy volunteer by the name of John Furlong, who’d been CEO of the Arbutus Club and had a long history of involvement in amateur sports around the province. MacMillan had never met Furlong, but he was impressed with him even then: “He just had this passion that was unstoppable.” The city’s team also had cheery self-confidence. Some cities go into the bid process wanting to validate their sense of self, says MacMillan. It never works. Instead, the winners are cities that are self-assured. “We didn’t need someone else to tell us how great we are.” Plus, the Vancouver team had the sense that they were underdogs. “That makes you hungrier.”
The most important factor, though, is that the bid boosters had either learned from the mistakes of past bids or managed to avoid them. Enthusiastic as they were about the Olympics, the 2010 dreamers squashed any thoughts about bidding for the 2008 Summer Games, an idea floated by an earlier group that had aimed at making it a joint bid between Vancouver and Seattle, something the International Olympics Committee nixed because of border issues. The whiff of that failed effort was still hanging in the air, and Antonson and the others didn’t want any part of it. “We just felt it would be too onerous financially,” he says. “There would be community backlash and it would overwhelm the city.”
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