Countdown to Vancouver Part II - Fundamental Challenges

If my last post painted a picture of the micro Olympic picture in Canada, I though it would be remiss of me not to try to paint the macro picture as we approached the Games.

As we sat down to breakfast on our first full day in Canada, there were two big stories on the front of the Calgary sports pages. Firstly, Brian McKeever’s extraordinary achievement in qualifying to represent Canada in Cross Country skiing at the Olympic AND Paralympic Games. This was global news at the time – and still features heavily on the BBC website. His home town? Canmore of course (see below if you have not read my last post!)http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympic_games/vancouver_2010/8428841.stm

The second story with the front page picture? Calgary Roughnecks narrowly losing to Washington Stealth 16-15 at indoor lacrosse. That just about sums up my experience of Canadian sport. Passionate about the Olympics, balanced with a taste for certain sports which have escaped the attention of most of the rest of the world.

Brian’s selection is not the only incredible story in Canada’s build-up to hosting the Games. Quite the opposite in fact. There are many other stories I encountered during my trip which verged on the surreal. Last minute challenges seem to be particularly extreme this time. For example, the Whistler skiing venue faces a challenge to create enough snow in time for competition - it has been 11 degrees and raining for much of the winter. Of course those of us in London would not be surprised with those conditions come 2012, but they are more than unusual for Whistler.

Amazingly though, a total lack of snow is not even Whistler’s biggest current challenge. Even more critical is that fact that the venue for the skiing events at the Olympics is actually going to be up for sale by Wall Street Financiers after its owners defaulted on their $1.4bn loan facility. The recession has hit this Games hard. http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2010/01/20/intrawest-whistler-olympics.html

Another key theme while I was in Canada was (of course) ice hockey. Along with the obsessive form checking on Team Canada’s brightest stars plying their trade in the NHL, a more serious debate was emerging as to whether the sport had crossed the line to an illegal level of violence after Calgary’s 19-year-old team captain was banned for the rest of the year for an assault on an opposing player. The question is whether the sport is viable in its current form in any socially mature (and litigious) culture.

Of course the Olympics will also cover an inordinate amount of column inches as we approach London. However hopefully they will be less fundamental issues than the financial collapse of the primary Games venue, the lack of the basic conditions necessary for competition or the unsustainable violence in our nation’s leading sport!

Not every story is a blockbuster of course. Come London I imagine we will be glad to see the following kind of stories on the front page, whereas currently they are hiding in the Olympic supplements and in the sports pages in Canada. This would mean London has escaped any larger issues. These are the kinds of stories I read over a four-day period:


• Which national legend should light the torch?

• How did the local politician put their foot in it at Day 89 of the Torch Relay?

• How are protesters likely to try to impact the Opening Ceremony Games?

• How on earth can a sponsor who signs up for the Games 4 weeks out get any value from the deal at all?

• How will companies cope with employee downtime during the Games?

• Why cannot our country fill all the spots we could have had available for x or y sport?

• Why do we need 3 Olympic mascots – and why do they look Chinese?

• Can the leading childrens clothing licensee stay solvent long enough to deliver on their responsibilities up to the Games?

• How do you put a huge vinyl overlay on a dour Vancouver building to transform it to a fully branded part of the 2010 experience?

• How quickly can the public use each facility when the Games leaves town?

• Which bars have been block booked by Corporates for the evenings in Vancouver?

• When it all boils down to it, how many gold medals will we win?

It’s been fascinating reading.

I hope the last two posts have helped to give you a sense of the kind of sentiments in a host nation just a few weeks from the lighting of the torch. It is genuinely a story of national sporting excitement, with the role of the Games as a social and economic catalyst (or threat) never far below the surface. I have many friends making the trip over for the next few weeks to soak up the lessons from Vancouver. There is much to learn and inspire amidst the challenges of being a host nation.

Countdown to Vancouver Part I – Lessons for London from the Canmore Nordic Centre

Last week I travelled to the Rockies – staying in Banff – for a family wedding. We spent a week there which gave us time to look around and really enjoy a country that is now just weeks away from hosting the Winter Olympic Games. In my next two posts I will try to give some insight into the Host Nation I experienced, recognising that London is next in line!
 In my first post I wanted to share the story of one Canadian town which continues to be touched by the 1988 Alberta Games. Its story challenges us to think about how we ensure the Games really is a catalyst for Britain in 2012.

Banff itself is some 500 miles from Vancouver. As you drive to Banff from Calgary Airport you pass a town called Canmore. It is not a big place – its total population (permanent and non permanent) being around 18,000. Canmore grew up steadily from the late nineteenth century onwards – benefitting from being on the Canadian Pacific Railway route, and critically the discovery of coal in the town. This combination guaranteed success until 1979, when dwindling demand for coal means that Canmore Mines Ltd. ceased operations. Canmore's economic future seemed dismal until the announcement in the early 1980s that Alberta would host the 1988 Winter Olympics and that Canmore would play host to the Nordic events (cross country skiing, biathlon, Nordic combined, and blind cross country skiing).

Ultimately this provided the impetus for the regeneration of Canmore to the tourism and recreation destination it is today. However, if one looks more closely at Canmore’s story, the journey has not been linear and successful transformation of the town is still not guaranteed. There seem to have been three mistakes in Canmore’s regeneration which offer us some lessons for London:

 • Lesson 1 – Sporting Investment does not finish with the Olympic Games

The Canmore Nordic Centre was built with the specific purpose of hosting the Olympic Games in 1988. This it did very successfully, however by its own admission the investment stopped the moment the Games left town. Over time elite events stopped coming – and with them the quality of the facilities dwindled. It was only in 2005 that the authorities reinvested in the facilities to bring them up to the standard required to host World Cup events. The venue now hosts Canadian teams in these disciplines….and as a result remains a magnate for enthusiastic amateurs like myself.

• Lesson 2 – The Books Need to Keep Balancing

Given the reality of Lesson 1, there is an ongoing need to balance the books after the Games. While ongoing World Cup events help, they do not do this on their own. Even in Canada, Nordic skiing is a minority sport. During the summer months the Centre converts to include mountain biking facilities and plays host to several national and international mountain bike events annually as well as orienteering and disk golf. It even hosts an 18 "hole" disc golf course during the summer months. The Nordic Centre offers services full time such as a cafeteria, meeting rooms, equipment rentals and lessons.

We spent a good amount of time making use of these facilities during our break. We took a lesson, went out on the trails, took Conor our son on his first pair of skis at the age of 2 1/2, and then had a big, and mercifully warm lunch in the cafe. Conor ate them out of tomatoes after ransacking the lost property for some sunglasses. We watched people from 8-80 out on the slopes, and saw hundreds of schoolchildren arrive for lessons after school.
 The most incredible thing about the Centre, however, was the extent to which it now manages to balance its elite and public facility responsibilities. As Dad and I were learning to hill climb, the Russian and Kazakhstan squads pulled out to pass us on their training run for the World Cup Nordic Event this coming weekend. Our lesson was given by a member of the Australian national team. His parting words were ‘the Olympic course is up there – it’ll be hard graft, but give it a crack it you want’. It felt a tremendous privilege to be out there with the elite as well as my family.

• Lesson 3 – Sport alone is not enough…

Sadly, despite learning lessons 2 and 3, Canmore has one further lesson to overcome. The town itself has yet to move into becoming a fully viable concern for the twenty-first century, and sustainability remains elusive. Concerns over urban growth adjacent to Banff National Park has led to a limit on future development. The town is expected to reach its maximum "build out" following the completion of the SilverTip and Three Sisters Mountain Village developments sometime around 2015–2020. Recession has hit Canmore hard, however. Three Sisters went into receivership and burnt down during later stages of completion in the spring of 2009.
Ongoing salvation remains frustratingly at a distance for Canmore, but it continues to try very hard indeed. Witness the efforts made for next weekend to convince the International Ski Federation to make Canmore a full-time stop on the Nordic World Cup tour. I am sure Eurosport will be showing the action this weekend if you want to see the fruits of their labours. Those hills are steeper than they look!

A Dangerous Follow-Up Post - Obama and Bankers Bonuses

When I started this blog, I was advised that being occasionally controversial was a good idea.
So here's the thing. Today Barack Obama has launched a stinging attack on the US banking system. By the time you read this, you are bound to have heard all about it. You might not quite have managed to wade through the headlines to hear about Goldman Sachs results.

Goldman anounced it will pay $16.19bn in compensation and benefits for the whole year, up 48% from 2008. But its compensation as a percentage of net revenues was 35.8%, the lowest since it went public in 1999.

As I mentioned below, there are very few people intensive businesses which manage a salary bill which equates to that percentage of total income. Certainly not football clubs, and also not quality HR consultancies which offer value for money.

Therein lies the rub for me. I have no issue at all with bankers bonuses. In my mind they are no more controversial than Richard Branson or Anita Roddick using their intellect to build and then sell their businesses for equivalent fortunes. The days of a City job inheritance are long gone - most of our City's bankers are intelligent people with immense talent who have grafted hard to get where they are.

The issue for me is not the P&L of the investment banks, but the balance sheets. If these annual profits are generated via excessive balance sheet risk, the man in the street gets hurt. I imagine less than 1% of this country's bankers have willingly endangered the health of their organisation's balance sheet.

In my view investment bankers should be able to pay their people as much as they like as long as they can manage the downside risk. Obama is absolutely right to push for stronger regulation of the banking sector, but politicians who petition for smaller bankers' bonuses are simply pandering for cheap votes and big headlines.