Patriot Hearts (21 page)

We were going to be making the announcement on a Saturday, live, on national television and in all time zones. I was watching Global
BC
news on the Friday night before the announcement when they led with an item about our new symbol. Apparently, someone told a reporter there he had seen it and described it for him. This was the foundation for a story filed by Ted Chernecki that mocked the design, which someone had sketched out on a piece of paper. The story just completely trashed what we had come up with, even though no one at the station had actually seen it.

I was furious, as mad as I think I had ever been during my entire association with the Olympics. I phoned up the station right after taking a run at Dennis Skulsky, Global’s top executive on the west coast at the time. Dennis shared the view that Global had misbehaved badly and apologized unconditionally. When I got the news director, Ian Haysom, on the phone, I let him have it. I told him I was so angry watching the item I wanted to throw my cellphone against the wall. Not only did the story ridicule the design, but it also got the name of the winning designer wrong and ruined the real winner’s moment in the spotlight. My voice grew so loud and animated that my wife took Molly outside the house so she didn’t have to listen to my rant. If Ian got a word in I did not hear it. That was one of the few times I really lost my cool with the media.

But while the logo was criticized initially, mostly by those expecting to see the Maple Leaf, those opinions quickly faded into the background as its popularity gained momentum across the country. Pretty soon there were school groups from Parker’s Cove, Newfoundland, to Port Coquitlam, B.C., building or designing Inukshuks in the classroom. You could drive down the Sea to Sky Highway or country roads in Quebec and Ontario and come across a stone replica of our logo.

When it came time to unveil our mascots, we hired a local entertainment company, led by Patrick Roberge, to design a show that would be staged in a Surrey school theatre. We brought in a bunch of kids to welcome Sumi, Quatchi and Miga to our Olympic family. Mukmuk, a Vancouver Island marmot, was introduced as a sidekick. The media were placed strategically in the audience of children so they could see their smiles up close. It would be hard to be critical amid the hysteria generated by happy, screaming kids. As hoped, Quatchi and company didn’t attract the kind of criticism some Olympic mascots initially invite—to my great relief. (Unlike the poor folks in London, whose one-eyed mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville, were trashed by everyone but children.)

Quatchi was a sasquatch with boots and earmuffs who had the commanding presence of a hockey goalie. Miga was a mythical sea bear. Sumi, part whale, part bird and part bear, was the official mascot of the Paralympics. We originally thought we’d need a few sets of the mascots to make appearances around the country. The demand for them ended up being so great we had to increase the number tenfold.

Like everything that was important at
VANOC
, the mascots had a champion, a mastermind lurking in the background. His name was Leo Obstbaum.

Before Leo arrived on the scene at
VANOC
, there had been months of loud banter inside the organization about the “look” that we wanted to create, a look that would be evident in everything from backdrops to torches, a trail-blazing design that would separate us from all the other Olympics before us.

In a perfect world, we would have had our own design team working inside the walls of
VANOC
to have greater control over what was produced—provided, of course, we had the horsepower and creative proficiency to deliver the kind of results that were needed. Ali Gardiner was heading up our young, fairly inexperienced brand and creative team. Well aware of our vulnerabilities, she was hunting for senior talent to help get us to the next level. That is when she came across Leo.

Leo was from Buenos Aires and had done some creative work on the Summer Games in Barcelona in 1992. He had quite a bit of experience in designing mascots, specifically. Ali was convinced this was the guy we needed to inspire and build our design team, but English wasn’t his first language, and he also lacked experience working in Canada. An interview was set up with Dave Cobb and me.

Leo was a charming guy, mid-thirties, thin, with a goatee. At first glance, he could easily have passed for a Spanish painter or a matador. I could tell he was nervous but I could also tell he wanted this job desperately, even though his résumé didn’t stop us in our tracks. But over the years, I have found myself in rooms with a lot of guys just like him. When I worked at the Arbutus Club, this 26-year-old Belgian kid, Patrick Marchal, walked in wanting the chef’s job we were advertising. His résumé was thin, but his heart was the size of a mountain.

“Give me the job for six months,” he said to me. “You don’t even have to pay me. And if at any point I’m not working out you can kick me out the door.”

Well, he knew I was going to pay him. But I gave him a chance and he worked out brilliantly. He now owns his own winery in France.

There was a bit of that guy in Leo. He was just looking for a chance. We gave it to him, and he turned out to be a stunner who managed to steal the hearts of just about everyone whose path he crossed. He really was a complete genius who saw beauty in the most nondescript things. Everything he touched seemed to win rave reviews. The
IOC
had to sign off on every design we came up with, whether it was the mascots or the medals. And every time Leo put something in front of them, the box was ticked minutes later.

When it came time to design the medals, Leo and Ali spent months consulting with athletes and others. He researched medals through the ages. He came up with the idea of making each medal unique, something that had never been done before. “Imagine,” he said one day. “Imagine an athlete showing his medal to a bunch of kids and telling them there isn’t another one like it anywhere in the world.”

Leo had a bit of child in him, that innocent spirit of wonder. He revelled in the happiness of others. At staff gatherings when we honoured the performance of a teammate, you would always spot Leo standing on the side wearing a huge grin. In meetings, if he was showing us something and it wasn’t working or he wasn’t getting the feedback he was looking for, he’d stop and say, “Okay, we’re not ready. This is not good enough. I’ll come back.” And he would, with something better. But when he felt he was dead right he would pull out all the stops to get you to his point of view.

Then one August morning, Ali asked to see me and Dave Cobb. She started to talk but couldn’t get the words out before breaking down. Leo had passed away the night before in his sleep. It was his heart. The irony was lost on few of us. The guy had one of the biggest ones around.

At his memorial service in the packed atrium of our company headquarters a few days later, I asked those assembled to cast their eyes around the very place we were standing and see how much Leo had touched. The look of the Games was everywhere. He was buried on a lovely warm Vancouver day, and as we stood around his grave taking turns tipping soil on top of his coffin a rapid transit train with one of Leo’s Olympic designs on the side whizzed by. We all smiled.

THANKS TO OUR
merchandising and sponsorship deals, by the fall of 2008, the financial health of our organization was fairly strong. Our construction woes were behind us. We were optimistic about the revenue we would get from ticketing. Every week or two we seemed to be announcing another deal, tacking a new name up on our wall. One week it was beds, another hand sanitizers or chewing gum. Companies everywhere wanted in. The project was humming along, mostly controversy free. Media camping out on our lawn to catch us mucking up were getting frustrated.

Then, on September 15, 2008, New York–based investment house Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Over the next few days, coverage of the collapse was like watching the outbreak of a war. It was wall-to-wall mayhem. People were scared. The headlines in the newspapers were gigantic. The evening news was inevitably filled with images of stock traders burying their faces in their hands. No one was sure where this was all heading, but it didn’t look good.

At first it was unclear how Canada might be affected. But it wasn’t long before the downfall of Lehman’s triggered big problems at other institutions. It became evident that other U.S. investment houses were in trouble, and banks too, mostly because of subprime mortgages. Foreclosure signs began popping up from Pensacola, Florida, to Salinas, California. The daily reports of the widespread damage to the U.S. economy became numbing after a while.

While the carnage certainly caught the attention of those of us at
VANOC
, there was little evidence that the problems down south were seeping into our backyard. Payments from our corporate partners were being made on time. No one was calling to renegotiate the terms of their agreement with us. No one was even phoning to sound the alarm, put us on notice. The levee was holding. A false confidence set in that the financial panic in the U.S. might miss Canada entirely. But there was a growing unease in our boardroom.

The directors began growing worried about the health of Olympic partners such as General Motors. The American automobile industry was on life support, or so it seemed. The
CEO
s were being summoned to Washington to meet with President Barack Obama to figure out a survival plan.

It was ugly.

Jack Poole was sweating too and wanted me to get a more ironclad assurance from General Motors that it wouldn’t renege on our deal. I honestly didn’t know what more
GM
could do or say that would make our deal with them any safer. I thought it would be almost insulting to ask, that we were best served by standing by the shoulder of a good partner, while others were trashing them. I remember heading east to see Arturo Elias, their president and
CEO
of Canadian operations, and asking if there was anything we could do to help. I suggested at one point that the company use the Games to show off their next generation of vehicles and that we were ready to do pretty much anything we could to give
GM
a hand—for free. He appreciated our loyalty and support and assured me everything would be fine, that we needn’t worry. And
GM
was true to its word, despite the fact the company was fighting for its life.

The growing worldwide gloom began to cast a shadow over our programs, and the optimism that had filled the organization for years disappeared. Companies and governments everywhere were now being affected. This, in turn, meant that some of our own directors were fighting fires of their own.

Prompted by instinct and a growing nervousness in the boardroom, we decided to behave as if this tornado was going to hit us soon. It was time to prepare for something quite dire: the failure of one of our major partners. Chasing replacement revenue 18 months before the start of the Games would be like chasing needles in a haystack. What-if scenarios were being sketched out almost daily in our executive meetings. To prepare for what was to come, I tagged on the title of Deputy
CEO
to Dave Cobb and asked him to lead an aggressive internal review of just about everything, a task he would take on with ferocity, supported by his executive colleagues. This move was a sign to all that it was time to hunker down.

We decided to take the organization and essentially turn it upside down and shake it in the hopes enough dimes and nickels would fall out to make a difference. Everything that wasn’t absolutely essential to our survival would be cast off. This may sound simple. In truth, it was a migraine of a process that included hundreds of painful choices. Rather than cut people we froze hiring. Huge savings were realized when we stalled new hires for even a month. We did that as often as we felt we could sustain the punishment that followed: fewer people meant that those already working had longer days, but it was better than a pink slip.

Over the years, we had built our budgets fairly logically. Reasoned estimates of cost and revenues were refined as data hardened. So budgets were always moving to some extent but generally in the direction of more certainty, not less. But not in times like this. Every meeting we had, every discussion, was about money. Those with room in their budgets had to surrender their surplus, every penny of it. Contingency funds were disappearing faster than beer in an Irish pub. We went after new revenue sources—although there were precious few—and trimmed big-ticket programs to the bone. We advised our government partners that we might need their help if we were going to survive this and still put on a spectacular Games.

We appealed to our staff for creative ideas to get around our funding dilemma. We were not going to run a deficit under any circumstances. A culture of survival took hold. We reduced all travel and hunkered down, hoping the economic storm would blow over soon. I decided not to attend a SportAccord conference in Denver, where I was supposed to give a progress report to the
IOC
. The
IOC
was not impressed and told me so. I didn’t care. I had to lead by example.

Scheduled pay increases for members of the executive were cancelled voluntarily, other contracts curtailed or shortened. We looked at our ticketing program, and if there was any way to jam another seat into a venue we did it. That’s how desperate we were to find an extra $20 of revenue. We set aggressive new revenue targets for licensed products and found new suppliers to help us reach them. If you could put an Olympic logo on something and sell it, we did. We even looked at how we could make money when it was time to wrap up everything after the Games were over. We had to get top dollar for every item we had acquired.

Against all odds, but in line with our most daring predictions, there was one major win coming for us—ticket sales. Tickets were put on sale to staggering global and national demand, and it became clear that we were heading for a virtual sellout. Caley Denton, our vice-president of ticketing, whom Dave Cobb had lured away from the Vancouver Canucks organization, had judged the market perfectly. He did two things that were exceptionally smart: he decided to release the tickets in three stages and he created the fan-to-fan marketplace. In the first stage, he only put a limited number of tickets on the market, which were gobbled up quickly, creating a demand frenzy. This led to an even greater appetite for tickets during the second and third releases.