Patriot Hearts (37 page)

Contrary to what the media were saying, I felt that we were quietly building some momentum. Many of the problems that had plagued us at the start were either solved or being addressed. Even though I refused to believe it, we were being told that good weather was on the way. What a break that would be. No place is as beautiful as Vancouver under sunny skies. And what wouldn’t a little sunshine do to people’s attitudes and dispositions? So, I definitely felt that by Tuesday we had turned a bit of a corner, even if the media, especially the British press, didn’t want to. That was their problem.

I was stunned by the number of people who were e-mailing and texting me. Complete strangers. I had no idea how they even dug up my e-mail address, but somehow they did and they all seemed to want to tell me what a wonderful time they were having. They were people from all over the world. Some came from the United States. There were lots of Irish well-wishers, a few Aussies and even a bunch from England—decent folk angry as hell with their own press.

If I heard it once, I heard it a thousand times: thanks for making us feel so welcome and giving us such a truly wonderful experience, the e-mails said. But the majority of the notes came from Canadians who wanted to tell me that they had never felt more proud of their country. These were rank-and-file Canucks who badly wanted us to succeed, who were in their living rooms, or roaming the streets of Vancouver, who were cheering for us, in some cases loudly, in other cases quietly, but cheering us on and giving us their unqualified support.

Still, it was going to be important now to make sure we stayed on top of any potential issues and addressed them before they became something to write about. That was my message each day to my executive: Maintain a keen focus. Take nothing for granted. Let’s look two and three days down the road and be dead certain we’re not missing anything in terms of potential new land mines. If we felt there was going to be greater pressure on the transportation system on a certain day, we’d put more buses on the road. Cost aside, it would be far better to have too many of them than too few. It didn’t matter how small an issue was, if it had the potential to bite us we had to deal with it. Service levels had to be maintained, so if we heard about some grumbling by volunteers about the lack of food at a particular venue we were all over it. The last thing we wanted was a bunch of Blue Jackets leaving us or losing their spirit.

For me, there were few things as important on my to-do list as getting out to as many venues as possible and thanking as many of our 25,000 volunteers as possible. You could have the best executive team in the world, the finest infrastructure, the most bulletproof plans, but if you didn’t have a happy volunteer force you had problems.

I remember during the planning process having serious discussions about volunteers and exactly how many we were going to need. There were those who believed we were going to need far more than we ended up settling on because we had to factor in an attrition rate of 20 to 30 per cent. I found these predictions annoying. It was felt that a number of people would find the work too taxing, too unpleasant, especially if the weather was lousy, and they would pack it in after a while. After all, some of the jobs were menial and away from the limelight. Probably some would say, no thanks, I’m out of here. And many might not even give notice. They just wouldn’t show up one day and you would be scrambling to find a replacement.

I refused to believe that we’d lose that many. I thought we’d have to be doing a pretty lousy job as an organizing committee to have that many people desert us. But a few of my colleagues insisted that it happened at every Games. It happened in Turin. It happened in Athens and Salt Lake. It happened at Games before those. I would say: we’re not them. Canadians don’t do that sort of thing. When they take on a job they stick with it until it’s finished. It’s not in our
DNA
to leave a task unfinished or to just walk out on somebody for no good reason. That is not the spirit on which this country was built, the spirit that allowed us to persevere and battle an often inhospitable climate. Canadians are better than that.

I was also of the view that to be Canadian was to give—I’d certainly seen enough evidence in my time in Canada to believe that was true. Once or twice in frustration I asked my colleagues how they would feel if we recruited substitutes in the event one of them didn’t show up to work. They’d be insulted. A volunteer is as reliable as anyone else in my book.

I did think, however, that we were going to need to look at volunteers a little differently than others perhaps had in the past and take great care of them. I thought we needed to regard the volunteer who was working in a parkade somewhere as someone who was absolutely crucial to the success of the Games—and we needed to communicate that to him or her. We needed to communicate to them all just how important the work they were doing was. They needed to be treated like family. And we needed to constantly thank them for it and look after them and make sure they were being fed properly. That was our obligation to them.

I was going to try and do my part by hopping out of my car whenever I could to go up to any Blue Jacket I saw, to thank them for the wonderful sacrifice they were making in the name of their country. And it’s with the greatest amount of humility that I say that all the volunteers I talked to seemed delighted when I approached them to say thanks and give them a hug or a pat on the back. They were happy to be so openly respected and appreciated. I remember going up to Cypress Mountain or out to the Callaghan Valley where the cross-country ski races and the ski jumping were taking place, and some days it was pretty darn cold with biting rain coming down, and there would be the Blue Jackets, braving it all, with smiles on their faces. If I have one regret it’s that I missed some people during my rounds.

There was occasional grousing by the odd Blue Jacket about the lack or quality of food at some of the venues. When that happened, it was our problem and we fixed it. We did lose a few when all was said and done, but the numbers were minuscule. They were loyal to the Games and each other.

By late Tuesday, I had talked to enough volunteers to know that while they were doing their jobs and were mostly happy, there was a bit of resentment about the way the Games were being perceived by the international media in particular and about how even though so much was going right, the local media seemed preoccupied with what the foreign media, and especially the British press, was saying about us. I could tell this criticism was threatening to undermine morale.

Although I was not sure what exactly to do about it, I decided that night that I wasn’t going to let it go on any longer without some sort of action. I needed to address what these reporters were saying, to take them on and challenge some of these British organizations to defend the stories they were publishing. I wanted people throughout our organization—all 50,000 of them—to see the optimism that I was feeling about the way the Games were going. They were waiting for us to fight back.

By this point, the
Guardian
had published a story suggesting our Games were a candidate to be “the worst ever held in Olympic history.” Another British paper called them the “Calamity Games.” The
Daily Mail
said we could now put our “Maple Leaf stamp on something more instantly tangible: the nondescript little box carrying the lifeless body of Nodar Kumaritashvili back to his home in Bakuriani, Georgia.” People were writing this stuff, and other news organizations were printing it and validating it and shipping it all over the world, and the entire planet was talking about it.

It was suggested that some of these writers were taking vicarious shots at London 2012—a form of early target practice. The head of the London Olympic bid, Sebastian Coe, incensed at the British press, waded in more than once with rave reviews about the Vancouver experience, noting how London organizers would have their work cut out trying to match the celebratory atmosphere that had taken over the city. He said he was reading stories that bore no resemblance to what was actually happening. I obviously couldn’t have agreed more.

The daily news conference was scheduled for 11:00
AM
each morning in the imposing Gabriola conference room on the second floor of the Main Press Centre, a room decked out in the beautiful west coast look of the Games. I think that first Tuesday morning was the worst for Renee Smith-Valade, as reporters were still all over us for the cauldron-viewing situation, for which we were trying to secure a remedy. Unfortunately, Renee was not in a position at that point to announce the solution we were closing in on. So she had to sit there and absorb the punishment. I even had reporters who were there come up to me later and say they felt badly for her because of the abuse she took. It wasn’t that reporters were being rude or personal. It was just that the questions were unrelenting, like being in a boxing ring and trying to bob and weave and duck the incoming blows knowing you were going to get tagged a few times.

So between the Tuesday news conference and the feeling I was picking up from my own executive team and the volunteers that somebody needed to stick up for the organization, I decided to make a surprise appearance at the regularly scheduled session on Wednesday morning.

Renee was aware that I was going to depart from our established protocol and was going to take the British media head-on. Normally, I was careful about what I said and what I didn’t say. I hate the term “message box” but I was fairly good at staying within the parameters of whatever it was I was supposed to be talking about on any given day. I never took a reporter for granted and let my guard down much.

Renee knew she could count on me not to blurt out something that was going to create more problems for us. She also knew that I was going to speak the truth, or at least what I saw as the truth. If I didn’t stand up for our organization who would? And I knew that there were members of the local media who also felt we weren’t being treated fairly by the Brits. They shrugged it off as the way the British media worked: they yellowed things up, torqued up the most mundane events, to sell newspapers. It was a tried and true formula that British media had been using for years. Bottom-feeding, gutter talk, as my dad would say. Why would anyone expect them to make an exception with us?

I was aware that I had to be careful not to come across as arrogant or defensive. I wasn’t going to try and absolve ourselves of blame in some of the problems that had occurred. There was criticism that was valid, the viewing area around the cauldron being one. We should have seen that coming. And then there was criticism that was not: the conditions on Cypress. Like we had any control over that. Okay, so only three legs of the cauldron came up during the opening ceremonies instead of four. This is a reason to smear a country internationally?

When we strode into the news conference room Wednesday morning, the media were surprised to see me. I think reporters were now anticipating some kind of announcement. I began by talking about how well I thought things were going. Yes, we had experienced some of the same teething problems that most Games endure at the beginning—transportation being one—but we had addressed them. What I wanted to impress upon the journalists in the room was the chasm that seemed to exist between some of the reporting and what was going on in the streets, at many of the pavilions that the provinces had set up and, most importantly, at the venues. I didn’t make specific mention of the scathing reviews we were receiving from abroad. But to no one’s surprise, I didn’t have to wait long for a journalist to ask me about the British media’s take on how the Games were going.

“I’ve read some things that I admit I didn’t like reading and I don’t believe are true or fair,” I answered. “But having said that, when we make mistakes or when things don’t go well, you have to fix them.” I cited the cauldron as an example. But then I rhymed off a list of things that I thought were going well and perhaps were being overlooked by some of the media. The venues were sold out. The television audience numbers were astronomical. The athletes were raving about the experience. The downtown core was jammed. There had been none of the traffic chaos that had been predicted. In fact, the reverse was true. The city was operating beautifully.

“When I look at the first four or five days,” I said, “I don’t think there’s anybody here and anyone in the city that would have been prepared to say ‘I could have predicted this.’ Today and yesterday were pretty darn good days and we’re trying to build on that and show that we have the resilience and the thoughtfulness and the humility to manage the unexpected stuff that comes our way that is not welcome but that we have to deal with and will deal with. For me, one of the most pleasurable things that I’ve seen since we started is the quality of the sportsmanship in the crowd. People are embracing these young men and women who have come here from around the world.” Canadian fans were rising to the occasion.

I said that I thought some of the criticism, especially from some of the British papers, had been manufactured nonsense that bore little resemblance to what was happening. Bad enough they were saying these things and that they were not true. Some of the writers were not even in the province but were blasting the way we were conducting business as if they were sitting in the bleachers. That was a bit much to stomach. As I talked, I could sense the mood shifting. Reporters wanted to cover my challenge of the British press. Even while I was talking, a request for an interview with me was coming in to Renee on her BlackBerry from the
BBC
.

I felt good about that news conference. I thought I had put the first four or five days in perspective. A month or so later, after the Games were long over, I received a lovely e-mail from a woman named Mary Conibear. Mary had a senior management role in the Main Operations Centre, which was based at
VANOC
headquarters on the east side of the city. It was our nerve centre, the place from which we kept an eye, literally, on everything going on at the Games. In her e-mail, Mary admitted to being quite down during the first four days of the Olympics. The criticism we faced was withering and morale destroying. Mary said that when she was at her lowest, I had come to a meeting at the
MOC
and told them that enough was enough, the media were ready to get on our side, we just needed them to report what was going on out there and show our stuff.