Patriot Hearts (20 page)

All things considered, the ceremonies came off pretty well. Our montage began with a scene of a guy ice fishing and included images of igloos and Mounties, a deliberate attempt to poke a little fun at the Canada of the past. Even though our performers seemed to pull it off with few hiccups, we expected some abuse from the media. It seems that throughout Olympic history, these presentations by the cities next hosting the Games are always ripped in the home press. No one is spared. Ours would be no exception. It was a little different in our case, as it wasn’t just the media attacking us; even Premier Gordon Campbell got into the act and let us have it for a performance he thought was cliché-ridden and didn’t speak to the “new Canada.” This was one of the few times I was disappointed in Gordon. Not that he didn’t have the right to his opinion, but I wished he had spoken to me first before taking a stick to us in public.

I mean, did the premier and others really think we were trying to promote ice fishing in Canada? It was simply a way to start our production by saying “This is the Canada that was,” and then move to the Canada we are today—youthful, vibrant, hip, fun. (Although having said that, there are still parts of Canada where ice fishing is important—I have letters from those folks to prove it.) But remember we had only eight minutes. It’s very difficult to tell a full story in eight minutes, even though we had some of the brightest cultural minds in the country helping us.

Others criticized us for portraying Canada as an ice-locked deep freezer. Well, we never did that. But we did want to say that we Canadians love winter, we embrace it and we overcome it every year. The Winter Games are supposed to be about winter. Hockey and curling are not for the beach. I found it interesting that the only place we got royally ripped was at home. “Bravo, Canada!” was
NBC
’s sign-off that night.

If I had to do it over again, I would hire three great performers, put them on the stage and have them sing three great Canadian songs and go home.

AFTER TURIN, OUR
focus continued to be on raising as much money as we could through sponsorships. We knew we needed a landmark deal in the automobile sector, though that proved a greater challenge than we anticipated.

Almost from the day we got the Games, General Motors had indicated a strong willingness to partner with us. That sounded good, but in order for us to make the right deal we needed to create the impression that there were a number of other automakers who also wanted in—which wasn’t exactly the case. The fact is no one we talked to was offering what
GM
could and would put on the table, which made creating the illusion of a major competition that much tougher. In the end, we signed a fairly lucrative deal with
GM
Canada that was valued at about $67 million. The company ended up supplying us with 6,000 vehicles, cash and support for Own the Podium.

General Motors had become our sixth national Tier 1 partner. Besides
GM
, Bell Canada,
RBC
and The Bay, we also managed to put together strong pacts with
RONA
and Petro-Canada. The
RONA
deal was interesting because the company’s
CEO
was trying hard to unseat Home Depot as the top home renovation company in Canada. He saw the Olympics, traditionally an event Home Depot sponsored, as a way to help pull it off. So we created a pretty strong competition between the two companies, and thanks to some last-minute bargaining
RONA
won out with a bid that amounted to $68 million. I will never forget the company’s emotional pitch in Montreal as its French-speaking
CEO
, Robert Dutton, stood atop a Canadian loonie for good luck. A bonus of the deal was that we were now firmly grounded in Quebec and expanding our influence among francophones.

Ultimately, our sponsorship total would amount to more than $750 million, which completely stunned the pundits and especially the
IOC
. We signed nearly 70 partners, and in each case the company had pretty much written the largest cheque it ever had for a sponsorship. It showed how important the association with Vancouver 2010 had become. An added bonus throughout this process was seeing what a company’s involvement in the Olympics meant to its employees. I recall flying to Calgary with Dave and Andrea to meet with the executives of Petro-Canada. The employees came down by the hundreds to the lobby, where they staged an in-house demonstration to let us know how badly they wanted to be Olympic partners. A sea of singing red-shirted employees was there to make an impression that would tug our heartstrings and touch our Canadian pride. And it worked. I had tears in my eyes.

Still, I believe we could have raised tens of millions of dollars more from sponsorships if we had had greater authority over the entire process. But the
IOC
controlled business categories that would have been lucrative for us but were sold internationally by the Olympic committee itself. When the
IOC
sold a category, say to Coca-Cola or McDonald’s, we would get between 15 and 20 per cent of the deal and for that the company would get the same rights as Bell or RBC. We would clearly have done far better operating on our own but had to play by the
IOC
’s rules.

One of our biggest disappointments was not being able to convince the
IOC
to allow us to have a competitive bid process in the beer category. God knows we tried. The
IOC
had signed a one-off deal with Budweiser that gave the company Olympic marketing rights up to 2008. That left us little time to negotiate a deal with Molson’s or anyone else after it expired. We did ultimately sign an agreement with Molson’s for a few million dollars, but it was nowhere near what we could have secured had we done a Tier 1 sponsorship deal with Molson early on. Molson’s still ended up being great partners.

In the end, the
IOC
saw the situation for what it was and realized we had been hurt badly by the deal it signed with Budweiser and that we probably ended up losing tens of millions as a result. It was not one of the
IOC
’s better deals, for sure.

Domestic television broadcast rights to our Games were also the
IOC
’s baby, but we were obviously intensely interested in the outcome. We believed that the more eagerness and passion we stirred up around our project, the more the networks in Canada would want to be involved. This would attract more lucrative bids, which would mean more revenue for us—in theory anyway.

Negotiations had become complicated by the fact that we had signed the massive deal with Bell Canada. Bell was a corporate partner of
CTV
and desperately wanted the network to win the rights—it would make the telecommunication giant’s life simpler on so many levels.

Bell
CEO
Michael Sabia phoned me up one day to ask if there was anything I could do to help
CTV
. I told him the best I could do was meet with the network’s
CEO
, Ivan Fecan, and talk to him about what we were trying to achieve and how they might best fashion the company’s presentation to the
IOC
. In fact, I met with representatives from
CTV
and
CBC
to talk about our goals and dreams. The reception I received from the two networks couldn’t have been more different.

The
CBC
didn’t seem at all interested in what we were trying to achieve. Its president presented
CBC
as a company that had done this many times, knew the drill, and frankly, thought Canadians
expected
them to cover these Games. The company was happy to talk partnerships but left little doubt about who would be calling the shots. Its executives didn’t seem to be moved by the fact that we were looking for a more collaborative approach. We wanted to work with a company that shared our values and was interested in helping us make our vision a reality. We also wanted to introduce every athlete on the Olympic team to every person in the country.

CTV
, in contrast, was widely enthusiastic about what we were trying to accomplish and completely open-minded. We quickly concluded that
CTV
would be the best broadcast partner for us, whatever the financial commitment it was prepared to make. The network would assure the Games received the saturation we had hoped for and saw the business advantage that went along with it. Still, we were extremely worried that the
IOC
might still favour the
CBC
, even if the bids were a distance apart in value. The
IOC
knew the
CBC
and felt comfortable doing business with the highly regarded, award-winning broadcaster.

As the two companies gathered in Lausanne to pitch the
IOC
, I received an eleventh-hour call from Michael Sabia, who was sweating buckets and was especially worried about mobile-rights issues if
CTV
lost. He asked me to help. So I called Ivan Fecan, who was in Lausanne getting ready to give his final pitch. He too was biting his nails. Michael had asked me to give Ivan some frank advice about the company’s presentation the next morning. I told him it needed to be like the one we presented the
IOC
in Prague, as much about heart and soul as business. It needed to be respectful of the
IOC
and embrace the broad spirit of the Games. It had to be filled with emotion and energy, had to make people believe they desperately wanted the opportunity to make these Games special. Mostly, it needed to stress partnership. It was important that the company impress upon the
IOC
that it shared our values and ideals.

As it turned out, Ivan and his group completely nailed it. I think it would have made a difference had the gap between
CTV
’s and the
CBC
’s financial offers been close. But it wasn’t. The
CBC
was outplayed by the new kids on the block, ones who radically altered their approach so that no Canadian would miss a minute of the action. It was good for us and good for business.

CTV
bid $151 million for Olympic rights from 2008 through to 2012. Of that, $90 million was for the rights to 2010. It was the first time ever that a Winter Games bid had topped a Summer Games bid. The entire package was a record for Canada. It seemed as if almost every day of the Games the network set new records for viewership.

We at
VANOC
were operating all along under the mistaken belief that a bigger television deal in Canada would mean more money for us. Otherwise, why would we be working so hard to drum up such intense interest in the bids, to create a competitive dynamic in order to drive up the price, if there was nothing in it for us? In fact, when you added
CTV
’s offer to what the
IOC
got from
NBC
and others around the globe it added up to almost $4 billion, a new record. In our original bid, we expected the
IOC
to contribute roughly
US
$348 million toward our Games, money that mostly came from television revenues. Our number was based on what the
IOC
had shared with previous Winter Games. But now, the
IOC
had decided to put us and London on fixed amounts based on what it gave to Turin 2006 and Beijing 2008, plus inflation. We didn’t think this was fair and bluntly told the
IOC
so.

We weren’t able to convince the Olympic committee to give us a greater percentage of television revenues. It didn’t want to set a precedent, which would mean London would be asking for the same thing a few years down the road. But the
IOC
did give us more money overall than it originally said it would and continued to help us when we were in very stormy seas.

ONE THING THE
sponsorship phase made clear was just how important our vision of uniting the country was in enticing national companies to join us in our mission. I sat in on dozens and dozens of meetings with
CEO
s who spoke passionately about wanting to be part of this great Canadian story. If the 2010 Olympics had been marketed as Vancouver’s or B.C.’s Games, we wouldn’t have received nearly the same level of interest from corporations across the country. In fact, I believe the Games would have been a financial disaster. A lesser vision and many of our friends would likely have sat out the experience.

I think the radical approach we took will be one of the legacies from our Games—how it changed big-event marketing to some extent. We were able to prove to the country that marketing doesn’t have to be just about selling the rights to use a logo, but rather selling the rights to have a complete engagement, a complete affiliation. Ultimately, the companies that signed on helped us stage the Olympic Games. Yes, they put our logo on their products, but their men and women were involved in every way with the staging of the Games. They were in the trenches with us and worked hard for our success. Many loaned employees to
VANOC
for a period of time. They were our everyday ambassadors and were everywhere—just as we had hoped.

Our licensed products, in the meantime, also became runaway favourites. Our executive was stunned by the ever-growing numbers we were getting from sales, whether it was replicas of our mascots, pens, watches, water bottles or the famous Red Mittens.

We unveiled our logo first. We called it Ilanaaq, the Inuit word for friend or buddy. The logo was based on the Inukshuk, the stone landmark figure the Inuit people have relied on for centuries as a signal. It was chosen by a panel of nine judges and picked from more than 1,600 entries. I was thrilled with it. I thought it represented the entire country, but particularly the North, and it was rooted in a profound and caring spirit. It was a stone beacon that visitors looking for the Games could rely on to guide them. A new Canadian icon, and it was ours.