2010 Games live forever in B.C. Sports Hall of Fame

The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics opened and closed at B.C. Place Stadium, and that’s where the tangible memories are now housed.

Almost two years after the Games, the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame and Museum doors reopened Jan. 6 at Gate A with its marquee Vancouver 2010 Gallery.

The 2,000 artifacts in the Olympic and Paralympic collection include gold, silver and bronze medals, mascots Miga, Quatchi and Sumi, a podium, torches, the late Jack Poole’s Olympic Order award, athlete uniforms and equipment and gifts brought by national Olympic committees. For Olympic pinheads, the Hall purports to have every single one of the keepsakes made for the 2010 Games.



The treasures were gathered via the tireless efforts of president Sue Griffin, curator Jason Beck, operations director Allison Mailer and trustee Joanie McMaster. Griffin reasonably feared before the Games that cash-strapped VANOC was going to put everything up for auction.

Much of the collection is organized in five display cases resembling each of the Olympic rings and representing the venues where the Games took place. You will find artifacts worn, used or signed by Canada's stars of the Games, like Alexandre Bilodeau, Joannie Rochette, Maelle Ricker, Jon Montgomery, Sidney Crosby and Hayley Wickenheiser. But there is a plethora of other nuggets that might surprise you.

There is a suit, helmet, goggles and practice snowboard that belonged to Johnny Lyall, who flew through the air on a ramp from level 4 and landed on the floor of B.C. Place to greet opening ceremony viewers from around the world. His script on a folded white piece of paper in large Helvetica type is included in the display case: "Welcome to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games! Bienvenue!"



Nancy Greene-Raine’s torch relay uniform and the torch she used to light the ceremonial cauldron was autographed by Wayne Gretzky, Steve Nash, Catriona Le May Doan and Rick Hansen.

Two dozen of the 84 nations of the Games donated a set of ceremonial uniforms.

"Azerbaijan, they've got some good pants, just as good as the Norwegian curling crew,” said the hall’s operations director Allison Mailer during a preview tour.



Hockey superfan Dave Ash, who owns Regina-based Dash Tours, donated his white hockey helmet with the red siren light and his giant Canada flag that Corey Perry borrowed for Team Canada’s victory celebration. Ash paid $3,000 for his front-row seat to the Feb. 28, 2010 gold medal hockey game.

Pakistani alpine skier Muhammad Abbas, who was 79th in the giant slalom, donated the hand-carved, wood plank skis on which he learned as a child.

"Our wish list has been completed, we're just so thrilled,” Mailer said. “The only thing we really want is a Shaun White snowboard. I think we'll still work on it. Maybe we'll send him pictures of the gallery and tell him what's missing."



The provincial sports shrine also reopens with a redesigned Hall of Champions that features a touchscreen multimedia archive of all 325 individuals and 54 teams inducted since its 1966 establishment. Nearby is a display case that include mementoes of Vancouver visits by the 20th century’s greatest athletes -- a Santos jersey worn and signed by Pele and handwraps autographed by Muhammad Ali -- plus the puck used to score the Vancouver Canucks’ first National Hockey League goal and a stopwatch that timed the famed 1954 Miracle Mile between Roger Bannister and John Landy at Empire Stadium.

Elsewhere, the hall includes jerseys, trophies and gear spanning the histories of the B.C. Lions, Canucks, Vancouver Whitecaps and Vancouver Canadians, plus galleries devoted to Hansen, late race car driver Greg Moore and national hero Terry Fox.

The grand reopening is planned for Feb. 10, two days before the second anniversary of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

No way can you see: 2020 U.S. Olympic bid nixed

A bombshell to start the work week on Aug. 22.

United States Olympic Committee chief communications officer Patrick Sandusky Tweeted that there would be no bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics from the United States. That means by 2020 it will have been 24 years since the U.S. hosted the Summer Olympics, at Atlanta 1996.

"I can confirm the U.S. will not be bidding for 2020 Olympic Games," Sandusky wrote.

"With such little time left, we don't believe we could pull together a winning bid that could serve the Olympic and Paralympic movement."

The International Olympic Committee deadline for applications is Sept. 1, which is two years and two days before the Sept. 7, 2013 host city election at the 125th IOC Session in Buenos Aires. Four cities have applied: Rome, Madrid, Tokyo and Istanbul.

Another reason for the U.S. non-bid is that talks on a new revenue sharing agreement between the USOC and IOC are stalled. The USOC has collected 20 percent of all Games sponsorship revenue and 12.75 percent of TV rights revenue, because of the size and number of American sponsors and broadcasters involved in the Olympic movement. But National Olympic Committees elsewhere want a bigger piece of the pie.

There were varying degrees of interest in a 2020 bid from boosters in Chicago, Dallas, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, New York and Tulsa. IOC president Jacques Rogge emphatically encouraged an American bid after the June 7 announcement of a $4.38 billion deal with NBC to broadcast and webcast the Games through 2020. What else was Rogge to say?

The elephant in the room, however, is the debt crisis plaguing the federal government and various states.

Los Angeles 1984 pioneered the private funding of an organizing committee through sponsorship and broadcast revenue. But scarce public funds would be needed for venues, infrastructure and security. Any politician backing a bid for a multi-billion-dollar mega-event in this climate of economic fear and chaos would be committing political suicide.

One can only wonder about the financial fitness of several of the declared candidates.

Rome hosted 1960. Madrid is a three-time bid loser, most recently to Rio de Janeiro for 2016. Tokyo was the 1964 host and was another 2016 loser. Istanbul, Turkey is trying for a fifth time. It was an unsuccessful candidate in the race for 2000 and 2008. Doha, Qatar may make it a five-city race.

Italy and Spain are suffering their own debt crises and Japan is struggling to rebound from its triple whammy of March 2011 disasters.

South Africa, buoyed by the 2010 FIFA World Cup, was mulling a bid, but said it will be on the sidelines for now. Delhi, India was hoping to use the 2010 Commonwealth Games as a springboard to an Olympic bid for 2020, but that strategy backfired. Suresh Kalmadi, the chairman of the Indian Olympic Committee and Commonwealth Games' chief organizer, was jailed in a corruption investigation. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India slammed Kalmadi and company in a scathing, August-released report.

A group in Toronto lobbied Mayor Rob Ford, but the 2010-elected Ford rejected their overtures. A sensible decision to walk before running. The city, still coming to terms with the G20 riots of 2010, is scheduled to host the 2015 Pan American Games.

* * * * *

By 2020, it will be 18 years since the United States last hosted a winter Olympics. That was Salt Lake 2002.

Reno-Tahoe and Denver are considering bids for winter 2022, but will obviously need the USOC nod to make the IOC application. The 2022 process won't begin until 2013, after summer 2020 is awarded.

"Not considering winter at this point, either," Sandusky said Aug. 22.

By 2022, it will have been a dozen years since the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. "Canada's Games" were the last such mega-event in Canada or the U.S.

Vancouver also has the distinction of being the last city in North America to host a world exposition.

There have been 11 world expositions since Vancouver hosted Expo 86. None of them were held in North America.

Edmonton's bid for 2017 was kiboshed suddenly in November 2010 when Canada's Conservative federal government refused to underwrite $700 million in costs for fear of alienating other parts of Canada, namely Quebec.

Kimchee and soju beats pretzels and weissbier

Only one ballot was needed on July 6 for PyeongChang, South Korea to avoid being a three-time loser in Olympic bidding.

The Winter Olympics are going to the east coast of the Korean peninsula after a landslide win with 63 votes. Munich, Germany -- vying to be the first city to host winter and summer -- received 25 votes. Annecy, France only seven. The third-time lucky South Korean bidders are so elated that they haven't found time to change the logo on their website from "candidate city" to "host city".

PyeongChang famously lost to Sochi, Russia in 2007 for the 2014 Games and was defeated by just three votes four years earlier in the race for 2010 with Vancouver.

The three 2018 bid cities were the only ones who applied, a ripple effect of the Great Recession. It was the smallest race since 1981 when Calgary beat two competitors to host the 1988 Winter Games and Seoul beat Nagoya, Japan for the 1988 Summer Games. (By comparison, eight cities applied for the 2010 Games, four were shortlisted.)

PyeongChang was last to deliver the hour-long presentation to the International Olympic Committee members gathered in Durban, South Africa for the 123rd session. The presentation relied on Vancouver 2010 women's figure skating champion Kim Yu-na and Toby Dawson, the Korean-born, American downhill skier with Turin 2006 bronze.

The New Horizons slogan for PyeongChang reminded the IOC of recent trends in mega-event hosting. It's a new market for winter sports. The only two previous Asian Winter Olympics were both in Japan (Sapporo 1972 and Nagano 1998).

The fact that 19 of 21 Winter Olympics were held outside Asia was included in the presentation, much the way that IOC members were reminded that no Summer Olympics had been held in South America before they chose Rio de Janeiro's 2016 bid two years ago.

The man behind the scenes for both Rio and PyeongChang was Vero Campaigning Communications executive Mike Lee. Lee was also the key strategist behind London 2012 and the controversial 2022 World Cup in Qatar and he advised the International Rugby Board on its successful campaign to add rugby sevens to the 2016 Olympics.

During Vancouver 2010, Lee was busily connecting the PyeongChang bidders with IOC members at Korea House in a Hyatt Regency Hotel ballroom. Since the Salt Lake 2002 bribery scandal, IOC members have been banned from visiting host cities.

Ultimately, the influence of Korean conglomerate Samsung was key. The company renewed its global sponsorship in the mobile phone category before the 2007 vote through the 2016 Games and hosted the 2009 Olympic day celebration in Vancouver when cash-strapped VANOC could not afford to.

Vancouver was also where disgraced South Korean IOC member Lee Kun-hee was reinstated by the IOC just before the 2010 Games. Lee gave up his membership after a 2008 tax evasion conviction, but the Seoul government agreed to pardon him in December 2009. Less than a month after the Vancouver Games closed, Lee returned to the chairmanship of Samsung.

There may have also been some quiet diplomacy in back-channels by Ban Ki-moon, the former Korean foreign minister who is the United Nations secretary general. The UN granted the IOC observer status the same day in October 2009 that VANOC CEO John Furlong appeared for the approval of the Vancouver Olympic Truce resolution.

Canada has been involved in on-again, off-again talks with South Korea about a free trade agreement since 2004.

The Games will open Feb. 9, 2018 and close outdoors on Feb. 25, 2018 at the 15,000-capacity Alpensia Ski Jumping Stadium, one of several venues already built. The biggest construction project will be a 110-mile high-speed train line to connect PyeongChang with Incheon International Airport in Seoul in just over an hour. PyeongChang's Yangyang Airport is incapable of handling the Games international air traffic and will instead receive charter flights.

The biggest wildcard on the road to 2018? Look no further than North Korea. Will Kim Jong-il, the dictator of the "Hermit Kingdom," interfere in any way? Every year the "Dear Leader" seems to create headlines with an international incident on the volatile peninsula, where the war between North and South ceased in 1953 but never truly ended. China props up North Korea, while the United States maintains a heavy military presence in South Korea.

Of course, those in the Olympic movement would love nothing more than to witness the two Koreas be unified by sport and march into the opening ceremony under one flag and compete together.

Easier said than done. But it is a peninsula known for perseverance.

Rogge rolls out the results

During his July 7 presentation to the 123rd International Olympic Committee session in Durban, South Africa, President Jacques Rogge modestly described the IOC's financial standing as “sound.”

Rogge, making his first major update since Vancouver hosted the previous annual general meeting, said the last fiscal year ended with a $113.4 million surplus. The Olympic Foundation reserves were a healthy $592 million at the end of May.

Revenue from global Olympic sponsors for the 2009 to 2012 period is, so far, $957 million. Already $921 million is committed for the 2013-2016 round and $632 million for 2017-2020. The record $3.9 billion in gross TV rights for 2010-2012 could still be matched. Broadcasters have committed $3.2 billion for 2014-2016.

Olympic Solidarity, which subsidizes national Olympic committees, has a $311 million budget for 2009-2012. Winter sports federations received $209 million for Vancouver 2010.

The positive finances of the IOC suggest it withstood the Great Recession. Vancouver 2010, the last major IOC event, required heavy government subsidies to balance a $1.884 billion budget. PyeongChang, South Korea won the right to host the 2018 Winter Games on July 6, but only two other cities applied. It was the smallest race since 1981 when Seoul won the 1988 Summer Games and Calgary won the 1988 Winter Games.

In 1992, the IOC finished the practice of holding the winter and summer Games in the same year, though Vancouver held the Winter Games in 2010, the same year that Singapore hosted the first Youth Olympic Games.

English and French are the IOC’s official languages, but the when talking money, it speaks in U.S. dollars.

Bottom to TOP

The economic recovery may best be described as "fragile," but yet another sign of progress will become apparent on Wednesday. That's when Procter and Gamble is expected to become the newest member of the International Olympic Committee's TOP sponsor roster in London, site of the 2012 Summer Games.

VANOC could have used such an alliance. It had to buy a heckuva lot of toilet paper, shampoo and soap for the Olympic Village. Ivory Soap and Colgate toothpaste, and Hain Celestial's Jason and Avalon Organics products were on the shelves of the general stores at the athletes' villages.

Meanwhile, Cinncinati-based P&G was already in Vancouver as a U.S. Olympic Committee sponsor. It took over the Simon Fraser University Wosk Centre for Dialogue and transformed it into the P&G Family Home for athletes and relatives from the Excited States. It included a Pringles Room, Tide Laundry Centre and Pampers Village kids play area.

The IOC doesn't release details of the TOP program, but it's believed to be in the neighbourhood of $100 million per Games. The IOC paid VANOC $22 million in compensation after it failed to add two sponsors to the list of nine. The decrease in global activation hit VANOC hard. When the IOC made its bailout offer, the governments of Canada ($30.7 million) and British Columbia ($50 million) also bucked up with bailout funds.

On July 16, Dow became a sponsor through 2020. Dow was a VANOC sponsor and would have become a global sponsor sooner had the recession not happened. Environmental sustainability is the IOC's third pillar, after sport and culture. Dow walks a fine line. Many environmentalists are quick to remind those who listen that Dow bought Union Carbide. A December 1984 leak at the company's Bhopal, India pesticide factory killed almost 3,800 people, according to a government estimate. More than half-a-million people were injured. Dow claims no responsibility because it had no stake in Union Carbide at the time. It was a disaster waiting to happen, according to investigators.

Another disaster waiting to happen, according to the New York Times, was that British Petroleum oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The biggest waterborne environmental catastrophe in United States history involves a company that became a U.S. Olympic Committee sponsor before Vancouver 2010. BP is also an official sponsor of London 2012. Rogge said that it would be welcome to remain, so long as there is no proof that the oil rig disaster was caused by negligence.

Vancouver 2010: more modest than believed

The snow is almost all gone from Cypress Mountain. Yeah, the snowboarding and freestyle skiing venue that needed truckloads of snow from almost 200 kilometres away in February had a March and April dump that kept the slopes white in May.

Something else is melting. The superficial political sloganeering that Vancouver 2010 was the most successful Winter Olympics ever.

Do you believe? I don't and you shouldn't.

Let's be realistic. A recession happened on the way to the Games. VANOC assumed no recession, big or small, would happen before the Games. Oops. The fact that Vancouver 2010 happened, had few empty seats at ice events and filled the streets of Vancouver with revellers should be celebrated. IOC president Jacques Rogge couldn't have chosen better words to describe the Games than "excellent" and "friendly."

But they weren't as excellent as IOC marketing director Timo Lumme speculated at a Feb. 23 news conference in the main press centre. Lumme grandly estimated that 3.5 billion people -- half the population of the planet -- would watch Vancouver 2010 by the time it was over.

That 3.5 billion figure was taken for gospel by the world media and became the rallying cry for politicians like Premier Gordon Campbell.

Well, the July 6-published IOC Marketing Report for Vancouver 2010 tells a different, more modest story. The potential audience for the Games was 3.8 billion. That's the number of people with access to televisions with channels containing coverage of the Games.

But the real number that Mr. Campbell should start using is 1.8 billion. That's the actual viewership globally.

Of course, Premier "Red-Ink" Mittens is used to reality checks and smaller numbers. He is, after all, plummeting in popularity on the strength (weakness?) of the HST, which is being used to pay the debt for being host of the 2010 Games.

By comparison, 3.5 billion was the IOC estimate for actual viewership of the Beijing Games in 2008.

The wildcard, however, is Internet viewership. The IOC doesn't count that because there is no similar means of measuring ratings scientifically. In North America and Europe, we know that TV viewers often surf the web simultaneously on their laptops or mobile phones. One person is one viewer, even if they're looking at two screens.

While the IOC revised downward its estimate of how many watched the Games, it finally disclosed how many tickets were used at the Games. I call this liberating information from the dreaded VANOC virtual waiting room.

VANOC has held onto such numbers so tightly. After a May 19 news conference, I approached both deputy CEO Dave Cobb -- whose portfolio included ticketing -- and chief financial officer John McLaughlin. They both played the "I don't know, ask him" game. Not very convincing. They knew the number, but didn't want it to be public until late fall when VANOC's audited final report is expected.

The IOC offered the real numbers and they're not record breaking. Vancouver 2010 claimed a 1.6 million-ticket inventory on the closing day of the Games. Meanwhile, the actual sales were 1.49 million out of 1.54 million, according to the IOC.

General admission tickets had been cancelled and refunded for Cypress Mountain events. Thousands of tickets were unsold for skiing and sliding events in Whistler.

In November 2009, the third Canadian phase was delayed because of the embarrassing programming malfunction of the hated virtual waiting room on the Tickets.com website.

The IOC reported $257 million revenue, which is just $3.4 million shy of the target.

At Salt Lake 2002, organizers reported in June of that year sales of 1,525,118 of 1,605,524 available tickets for US$183 million. At the time, the U.S. dollar was so strong that the Canadian equivalent was more than $290 million.

McLaughlin reluctantly admitted on July 20 that the IOC numbers are accurate. He also said efforts to resolve the $2 million loss from a Latvian Visa card fraud scam with an insurer and Visa itself were "slow" and likely to take months.

Remember when VANOC said in September 2008 that the public would get 70% of tickets and the Olympic family 30%? The scales tipped further to the public as a result of reduced activation by sponsors. The IOC report shows 71% of sales in Canada, 16% of sales internationally (including the U.S.), 11% to sponsors and broadcasters and 2% to the IOC and international sports federations.

No Vancouver 2014

There will not be a Vancouver 2014.

Who would organize it and who would pay for it? VANOC is dismantling itself and, well, you know all about the British Columbia government's budget problems and the HST in the former Host-province.

Rumors swirled during Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics that the Russians wouldn’t be ready to host the 2014 Winter Games because work had barely begun in Sochi.

Sochi 2014 president Dmitry Chernyshenko tried to thwart the rumors at a Vancouver news conference at the end of February by calling his hometown the “world’s biggest construction site.”

It wasn’t spin folks, it’s the truth. I was there last week and saw the massive amount of work to build venues, hotels, tunnels, bridges, port facilities and power plants. Some $30 billion of public and private money is being spent. It’s nothing like we saw in Vancouver because the Russians are building from scratch. It’s actually the winter version of Beijing. Chernyshenko wants the sporting venues to be finished two winters before his Games.

Work hasn’t begun on the 40,000-seat Olympic stadium near the shores of the Black Sea, but the Bolshoi Ice Palace hockey rink (below) is on-track to be finished by the end of next year. Sochi, like Vancouver, has a year-round, construction-friendly climate.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin didn’t come to Vancouver, but he hosted a dinner in Sochi for International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge on June 7. These are Putin’s Games. He is on a mission to make Russia a super-power again and not just in the realm of sports. This is also a second chance at hosting the five-ring circus. Thirty years ago, the Soviet Union hosted the 1980 Summer Olympics which were boycotted by 65 countries in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan.

The peaks around Sochi, 2 kilometres high, still have snow from last winter. Despite the subtropical Black Sea coastal climate that gives Sochi-proper bananas and tea plantations, the mountains are snow magnets. Several resort villages are being built to accompany the alpine and nordic venues. There are 19,000 workers at 58 sites. They live in portables stacked three-deep in villages dotted along the banks of the Mzymta River. Mzymta means “crazy” and the level of work done to divert the river would probably not pass a Canadian environmental assessment.

With almost three-and-a-half years to go, the Games should also be built on-time, unless the doomsday predictions of Sergei Volkov come true. The consultant to Sochi 2014 quit and fled to Ukraine. He said a lack of engineering assessment has taken place and works are being conducted in a seismically active area with unstable slopes.

Ultimately, Sochi’s greatest weakness could be its lack of international sporting events and lack of English and French speakers. Organizers are scrambling to create a Russian volunteer culture. They already have a few quality people -- some 70 who participated in the June 7-10 Vancouver 2010 Debrief at the Krasnaya Polyana resort. But they will need more than 20,000 by Games-time.

The organizing committee has people with competent English language skills, but the same can’t be said for restaurateurs and cabbies. The frontline of the tourism industry.

While Sochi readies itself, June 22-23 in Lausanne, Switzerland will be the next chapter in bidding for the 2018 Winter Games. Representatives of Annecy, France, Munich, Germany and PyeongChang, South Korea will submit their applications. The IOC executive board could rubber stamp all three or make a short-list of two. The 2018 host will be decided next year at the IOC congress in Durban, South Africa.

There are already whispers of a Canadian bid for the 2022 Winter Games from Quebec City and a group in Calgary is preparing a challenge.

Are you tired of the IIHF?

International Ice Hockey Federation public relations czar Szymon Szemberg says he’s tired of Sidney Crosby and various, twentysomething hockey players claiming they’re too tired to play at the World Hockey Championship.

Well, I’m tired, too. Tired of Europeans who govern the Great Canadian Game holding a world championship that clashes with the Stanley Cup playoffs and calling it a world championship. It really is the “annual European springtime invitational.”

I’m tired of the IIHF forgetting that the NHL, whose fans pay players like Crosby, compressed its schedule in 2009-2010 to accommodate the Vancouver Olympics. Surely the IIHF must’ve noticed an increase in its Swiss bank account after the most-watched hockey tournament of all-time.

I’m tired of the IIHF neglecting opportunities to develop the game outside North America and Europe. Dear IIHF: did you hear about the economic boom in China and the construction of ice rinks all over Asia in the past decade?

I’m tired of the IIHF spending little time or money to develop women’s hockey and sledge hockey.

Most of all, I’m tired of the IIHF running its affairs like a secret society with a rule-breaking ex-referee as its president.

Rene Fasel was outed by a Swiss newspaper last year for alleged kickbacks. A Deloitte probe paid for by the IIHF was never published. Finally, after the Olympics, the International Olympic Committee said “tsk-tsk” to Fasel for favouring a friend, but it didn’t send Fasel to the penalty box.

Tiresome, isn’t it?

Mulling marketing with IOC's Lumme

International Olympic Committee marketing and TV services director Timo Lumme spoke to media at the Main Press Centre in Vancouver on Feb. 23 about economic conditions now and in the future for the five-ring circus.

On The Olympic Partner sponsor program:

“We have nine at the moment and the level of financial contribution is higher than it was for the previous quadrennial (US$883 million vs. US$866 million). We have the opportunity now that some of the partners for varying reasons their industries have changed or their structures have changed or they’ve been taken over by other companies, they’ve moved away...

"We have the opportunity to look to have an internal scorecard, just like you’re choosing your friends, we want to be in a position to choose the best. We want them to understand the Olympic brand and fundamental values.”

On the cost of IOC rights fees and whether broadcasters may decide to pay less in the future:

"The IOC has never forced any broadcaster to pay any money. At the end of the day, through a bidding process the broadcaster who wishes to pay the most gets the deal. And that's the way it's been, and that's the way it's going to be in the future.

"We are very confident that the Olympic Games will retain a premium status as a world event and I think it will command a premium price."

On whether the IOC might consider changing the clean-venue policy that prohibits advertising in venues:

"We speak to our partners regularly about that. They have always consistently said, 'No, keep the same, we want a clean venue policy, that's what makes the Olympic Games special.' There's no plan whatsoever to change that policy."

On the impact of social media and its potential economic benefits and drawbacks:

“That allows people to engage more with the Olympic brand, what we’re seeing is really a phenomenon where people are able to have more touch points. That’s a huge boost to us. Then if you put the video coverage aspect in the middle that for us carries a greater value.

“It’s a symbiotic, complementary relationship. What we want to achieve is not just the great experience for 17 days but we’d like Olympic fans to feel that they’re connected 365 days of the year even outside the Games period.

“Generally we’ve done gatekeeper deals where we do all means and media, then it’s up to the rights holder in that territory and they decide how to partition and create the coverage across different platforms.

“In Brazil, new media rights were sold first with Terry by Telefonica, then we did pay TV, satellite and standard. This just reflects that it’s a fast-evolving marketplace.”

On Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, two sponsors whose flagship products are seen as unhealthy by critics:

“Both are longtime Olympic sponsors. On the one hand they’re completely committed to the Olympic values, they will promote our brand and make sure that they are reaching young people trying to aspire to better themselves through sport.

“The financial assistance they provide to us, 92 cents of every dollar we get goes towards various programs we have to put on the Olympic Games and help athletes at the grassroots and elite level train. We feel very comfortable with those partnerships, we know that they have the best interest of the Olympic movement at heart,

“They’re very aware in their own sectors how they have to position themselves, obviously to an extent they use the positive values of the Olympics to position themselves, we’re more than convinced they will continue to provide through their sectors the best products and services to their constituents.”

Here it is

Where were you 345 weeks ago?

General Motors Place and Whistler Village were abuzz bright and early on a spectacular day after Canada Day when the International Olympic Committee chose Vancouver to host the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Now it’s almost here.

For 17 days Vancouver will be the world’s sport and media capital. It will be memorable and it will be costly. The Vancouver Games will be the least-successful since Montreal 1976 once the Games are over and the bills tallied.

It will be a Games of contrasts.

The world will find out how rich and poor the city is, with peaks of opulent wealth and valleys of poverty just blocks apart in downtown. Many First Nations people will feel a sense of pride and belonging like never before; others will feel greatly disenfranchised.

Locals will wonder where their Olympic payday is. The security overkill and transportation tie-ups will deter visits to downtown and some businesses will struggle to stay open.

The most-anticipated non-sporting event of the Games won’t be the parties at Holland Heineken House, Club Bud at the Commodore or Molson Canadian Hockey House, but the Feb. 19 auction of Whistler Blackcomb-owner Intrawest.

The VANOC transportation plan will become apparent as the weakest link of its planning. Order will come from the chaos in the second week.

The Wall Street media will be watching with an eagle-eye to make sure sponsors spend responsibly amid the continuing economic malaise that has greatly curtailed sponsor spending and caused governments to buck up even more than anticipated.

There will be no Barack Obama or “London Liz” on stolen native land. Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean will become the world’s most famous native of Haiti and John Furlong will trump Bono as the most famous Irishman with a microphone.

The Olympics are a decade of politics and economics and 17 days of sport. The agony of defeat and thrill of victory will make new stars.

American skier Lindsay Vonn is driving for five gold medals. The headline is already written: Vonn-couver. Canadian cross-country skier Brian McKeever is aiming to be the first to compete in both the Winter Olympics and Paralympics. Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, the Snow Leopard from Ghana via Scotland, will be the Vancouver equivalent of Eddie the Eagle. He won’t win gold, but the broadcaster who can pronounce his name flawlessly more than once could.

The success and failure of the $110 million Own the Podium program will be gauged daily when Canadians analyze the medals standings.

Canada could win every gold medal available but if one of them isn’t men’s hockey, then the Games could be deemed a puckin’ failure.