Patriot Hearts

by John Furlong

Telus, of course, was just as enthusiastic. The company saw the Olympics as an opportunity to take Canada by storm and come out as the number one telecommunications company. The guy Telus put in charge of its bid was a ferociously competitive fellow named Rob Cruickshank. Rob was a good friend of mine. I had helped train his son, Greg, who would become a nationally ranked squash player. Rob had always been good to me. He was someone I never hesitated to call during difficult times. I wasn’t sure Rob’s appointment to head up Telus’s bid team was coincidental, but it did make the situation awkward at times, especially at the end.

  My goal was to build as much competitive tension between the two companies as possible and elevate the level of public interest around the bids in the process. It was high drama. Financial commitments notwithstanding, either company, we were convinced, would deliver the telecommunications solution for which we were looking. I hoped we would not have to decide the outcome through a type of shootout. I preferred that the winner was a mile in front.

  By the time the deadline had arrived, I was convinced we were heading into uncharted waters as far as sponsorship deals go. I could sense how desperate both companies were to sign on and spend the next five-plus years taking advantage of an association with the Olympics. When it came time to receive the two bids, I contrived a reason to be out of the office so that Terry Wright would be the person who would open the envelope. Devilishly, I wanted to hear his voice when he looked at the numbers. And I also sensed Terry wanted to be the one with the letter opener in his hand.

  The envelope, please!

  The day the bid offers arrived, Terry got me on the phone in Harrison Lake, B.C., where I was doing some business. Out of instinct I told him to open the Telus bid first. The package contained an extremely sophisticated proposal that conveyed the passion the company had toward the Olympics. Then Terry came upon the dollar value of the bid. There were a few seconds of dead air.

  It was valued at about $135 million—an unheard of amount in the history of Canadian corporate sponsorship deals.

  I could tell Terry was stunned. I felt like a child who had just discovered a new bike under the Christmas tree, though I tried not to show it over the phone. I felt Terry was going to be even more dumbfounded in a few minutes.

  He then opened the Bell offer, which also contained a beautifully packaged set of materials that outlined their telecommunications strategy for the Games and articulated the promise the company was making to help sell these Olympics to the country. The Bell proposal screamed commitment. And then Terry told me what the value of the Bell bid was: $200 million. It included $90 million in cash, $60 million in telecommunications services and $50 million in tangible promotional support for the Games, including a $15-million cash investment in Own the Podium (OTP). A new high-performance athlete program that brought science to bear on training and preparation, OTP was just coming out of the gate. We needed a partner to invest big if we were to have a genuine shot at raising enough money to achieve our goal of topping the medals table in Vancouver for the Olympics, and placing third at the Paralympics. The federal government had committed $55 million, and we were on the hook to match. The program was seen by VANOC as vital to achieving our vision of bringing the country together. With Bell’s proposal, we’d hit the jackpot and had a new ceiling.

  Terry chuckled as he read and the significance of the moment was not lost on him. He had in his hand the largest sponsorship deal in the history of the Olympics—Summer or Winter—period. It was an extraordinary moment in the life of the 2010 Games, and the one during which I think Terry realized the power of our vision. We were incredibly excited—this wasn’t just a home run; this was a grand slam early in the game. We agreed it was crucial that the contents of the bids remain confidential until we completed a full analysis and audit of every detail.

  We had former B.C. chief justice Allan McEachern, whom we had hired as a fairness monitor, evaluate the two bids himself. He too concluded the Bell offer was easily the best proposal. It didn’t take long for my executive team to endorse the Bell bid.

  Right after our board approved the deal, I phoned Michael Sabia with the good news. He was, as expected, over the moon. It may well have been the first day he completely trusted VANOC, despite the assurances we had given him that the process would be fair and carried out with integrity. Michael had grand plans to make the announcement to all of the company’s employees via a simulcast in a week’s time.

  Before then, we would have to tell Telus officially that it had been unsuccessful. I made a call in person to the company’s downtown office, along with Dave Cobb, to see Darren Entwistle, the CEO of Telus. Darren, an impeccable dresser, was a legendary figure among the Canadian business establishment. He had done wonders with Telus since taking over the helm. But he had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. He did not like to lose. Everything I had heard about him suggested a person whose veins bulged from his neck when a decision didn’t go his way. Maybe that wasn’t the case, but that was the image I had in my head as we walked into a boardroom to give him the bad news. I was nervous and shaking. Darren was already red-faced. He knew what was coming.

  I thanked him for Telus’s support throughout the bid phase and for the company’s interest in the sponsorship deal. But I told him that the VANOC executive had recommended the Bell bid to the board and it had been approved, and I gave him all the reasons. Looking into Darren’s eyes at that moment was like looking into the burning fires of hell itself.

  “Is that it?” he said.

  Yes, we said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Thanks for coming and best of luck.”

  And that was it. Dismissed. Short and painful. My friendship with Rob Cruickshank would never be the same, unfortunately. He would be quoted as saying that we had “elected to go with the cash.” That’s not the way I saw it at all. It sounded like sour grapes to me.

  We made the announcement official on the afternoon of October 18, 2004. Bell employees across the country were ecstatic when Michael Sabia and I appeared on their computer screens to deliver the surprise news. It didn’t take long for the news to filter into boardrooms across the country where other sponsorship bids were being prepared for our evaluation. I would later learn that the Bell offer made companies pause and rethink their proposals, jacking them way up in many cases and maybe causing a few to abandon their plans entirely. One thing was certain: It was game on.

  The IOC was astounded at the Bell result. We were already halfway to the number we had targeted in the bid—the one the IOC was skeptical we might not hit. Now we needed a few more big victories on the sponsorship front to really create some momentum and take the financial pressure off the organization.

  Our next target was the banks.

  At the same time that the Bell and Telus battle was unfolding, we were talking to a number of Canadian banks about becoming a premier national sponsor of the Games. Many took a look, but in the end it would become a contest between the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and the RBC Financial Group.

  The Royal had been a supporter of the Canadian Olympic Committee for well over 50 years, the world’s longest uninterrupted Olympic partner. It was determined to secure the sponsorship. CIBC was hoping to dethrone the Royal as the so-called Olympic bank. Both put together excellent presentations, though I will admit that the Royal’s struck me for its passion but even more so for its alignment with our values and vision. It had that irresistible human touch. RBC president and CEO Gord Nixon impressed upon us that his bank was an institution we could trust. He emphasized this many times. He left us with words we would never forget: “Canadians will judge you by the company you keep,” a humble but pointed reference to the fact that RBC was at the time regarded as Canada’s most trusted company.

  After listening to CIBC and Royal’s pitches in Toronto and getting the substance of their offer, Dave Cobb, Andrea Shaw, our vice-president of sponsorship sales and marketing, and I flew back to Vancouver. We worked on the documents throughou
t the flight and continued our work in an airport lounge. It was our view that the Royal was probably the right partner, but it would need to up the value a bit. We sat for hours talking strategy. A little drama was called for, I thought.

  It was decided that I would phone Graham MacLachlan, RBC regional president for B.C., at the crack of dawn the next day. I asked for an immediate meeting so I could outline our concerns. I’m pretty sure Graham was still in his pajamas when I called. I told him we had a few challenges with their proposal, but that we would like to try and work them out. He agreed to turn his morning upside down, and I met him in a room on the thirty-sixth floor of the bank’s downtown offices in Vancouver. I told him that based on the proposal we had it would be difficult to cut a deal. But if RBC could rework the numbers a bit we felt there was an agreement to be had—that day.

  We bantered back and forth and eventually got Dave Cobb on the phone to talk details. To further add to the drama, I asked Dave to jump in his car and come down to where our meeting was taking place. He was standing next to me in 15 minutes. We pitched hard for a recalibration of their proposal. Graham said he would see what he could do and make some calls. We went to a waiting room. Graham got Gord Nixon and the bank’s top marketing executive involved. Soon we were all on a conference call and batting ideas back and forth. Once again, we were banished to the waiting room. Twenty minutes and one more conference call later, the bank agreed to amend its proposal, which improved our cash position by $26 million.

  Dave and I left absolutely delighted with the deal we had managed to strike. We high-fived each other in the elevator, two kids who had just landed an extra scoop of ice cream.

  The Royal was an enormous force in the country, and Gord Nixon was a universally trusted CEO who we felt confident would help us elevate our standing in the corporate community across the country. When he spoke, people listened. We announced the deal to great fanfare at an RBC annual general meeting in Halifax in late February 2005. The package ended up being worth more than $110 million and gave the bank Canadian marketing rights to the next four Olympic teams.

  The deals started to come fast and furious now. The one that followed the RBC announcement had interesting roots, as it were. In the fall of 2002, I was named Canadian Sports Leader of the Year in Toronto. As it turned out, the person who had been chosen to present the award that night was George Heller, an old friend and president and CEO of the Hudson’s Bay Company. George was a formidable fellow with a solid sports background. He had been CEO of the very successful Commonwealth Games in Victoria in 1994.

  Afterward, we were sharing a few laughs backstage when I just came out and told George there had to be a way for Canada’s oldest company and largest retailer to become partners with Canada’s Games. George agreed and we shook hands, determined to make it happen. A handshake with him I would take over a contract anytime. That little backstage meeting would cement our friendship and become the first of many over the next couple of years that would eventually lead to HBC’s becoming the third big sponsorship deal that we announced in 2005. It was a package worth more than $100 million, which not only gave the company the rights to design, manufacture and provide clothing and luggage for Canada’s Olympic teams over the next eight years, but also make The Bay the official Olympic department store and VANOC’s merchandise retail partner. Also, it was the first deal of its kind in Olympic history.

  Yes, we were doing it our way.

  The Bay announcement wasn’t without controversy. Many people thought we would stick with the popular Canadian clothier Roots, which had made a name for itself with the “poorboy” hats it designed for the Salt Lake City Olympics. Roots founder Michael Budman was not happy about The Bay deal and with no evidence at all cried foul. In financial terms, the Roots offer was empty for us. Zero cash, plus we were not just looking for a clothing retailer. The Bay’s story and our vision for the Games meshed perfectly.

  The Bay began designing outfits for Canadian Olympians in 1936 and continued until 1968, when it was supplanted as the official clothing supplier by other companies. George saw this deal as central to The Bay’s vision for becoming new again. For The Bay, it was also paramount to its emerging business strategy of reconnecting with Canadians. In an instant, the company’s army of employees became 2010 Olympic messengers.

  In the first three deals, totalling in excess of $400 million, we had doubled the amount we anticipated getting from selling 10 top sponsorship packages.

  AMID ALL THE wheeling and dealing and travelling on the sponsorship front, a group from VANOC attended the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy—a last chance to learn before the world’s attention would be on us. Our team took plenty of notes in Turin, noting the many problems that the folks there were experiencing and how they addressed them. From a marketing and fundraising prospective, Turin was our polar opposite.

  The Games were never sold to all of Italy; they were completely local. In some parts of the country the level of awareness bordered on lack of interest. You got the sense at times that even the city of Turin itself wasn’t all that excited about the Games, certainly during the build-up phase.

  There were three big Canadian stories in Turin, two positive, one a little less so. One of the positive stories was the success of our athletes— the men’s hockey result aside. We ended up winning 24 medals, a new Winter Games record for Canada. More importantly, it was a sign that the fledgling Own the Podium program was already paying dividends, even though it was just one year old. The other big moment for us was the closing ceremonies, where the Olympic flag would be handed over to Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan.

  Sam’s presence on the stage became the focus of worldwide media attention because he is paraplegic. He was the first Olympic mayor to receive the Olympic flag, and wave it in front of 60,000 cheering spectators and a massive global television audience, while seated in a wheelchair. It was a wonderful moment that I thought reflected well on Canada and spoke to our values as a country and our sense of fairness and inclusiveness. Sam was beaming.

  As part of any closing ceremonies, about eight to 10 minutes are given over to the organizing committee of the next Games to introduce themselves to the world. We chose a light approach and decided to poke a bit of fun at ourselves, play up some of our stereotypes and then undermine them a bit by showing the young, dynamic face of the country in the image of singer Avril Lavigne.

  The trouble began days before the closing ceremonies arrived. The weather was horrible, which made rehearsing in the open-air stadium absolutely brutal for our performers. And the Italians didn’t treat us all that great either. Our eight minutes was just not important to them. They gave us rehearsal times in the middle of the night. Many of our people were in lousy moods as a result and not exactly motivated to practise long and hard. They just wanted to get on with it.

  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.