What's it like inside B.C. Place Stadium while it undergoes a $563 million renovation to become more like Commerzbank Arena in Frankfurt, Germany?
Join me for a quick tour of the 2005-renovated home of the Bundesliga's Eintracht Frankfurt here and the past and future home of the B.C. Lions and Vancouver Whitecaps here.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Saturday, August 28, 2010
6 months after Olympics, is Vancouver better?
Where were you six months ago today? Today being Aug. 28, 2010. Six months ago being Feb. 28, 2010.
It was the last day of February and the last day of the the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver and Whistler.
The biggest sporting event on the planet that day was a certain 12:15 p.m. faceoff in downtown Vancouver between Canada and the United States to decide the men’s hockey gold medal in the final event of the Games.
It ended in triumph as Sidney Crosby scored in sudden-death overtime to give Canada the last gold medal of Vancouver 2010 and a record 14 host-team Olympic championships.
International Olympic Committee marketing director Timo Lumme estimated 114 million people around the world were watching the Game. That’s a bigger number than Super Bowl.
Other numbers involving Vancouver 2010 are less impressive. Total estimated viewership was 1.8 billion, which is less than the 3.5 billion Lumme forecast during the Games. VANOC sold 1.49 million of 1.54 million tickets available, despite insisting during the Games that the inventory was 1.6 million. VANOC continues to claim it will balance its $1.76 billion budget. But only after at least $80 million in direct bailouts from taxpayers. Corporate sponsors didn't come to the table or scaled back spending, causing ripple effects and chaos behind-the-scenes.
VANOC is operating under a financial information blackout despite being a signatory to the 2002 Multi-Party Agreement that required quarterly financial reports. Clearly, the task of closing the books is harder than originally envisioned. It still must compensate owners of Whistler Blackcomb and Cypress for use of their slopes, resolve a nasty $10 million contract dispute with charter bus contractor Gameday Management and somehow reclaim $2 million from Visa and an insurer after at least three Latvians used stolen credit cards to buy thousands of tickets on the official VANOC scalping website.
VANOC will be remembered for organizing the Games amid the worst economic climate since the Great Depression. But the Games organizer’s business plan incorrectly assumed there would be no recession of any size before or during the Games.
The debates will rage for many months and years on the impacts of the $6 billion-plus Games and how politicians for the ruling B.C. Liberals downplayed the costs and overstated the benefits.
The Sea-to-Sky Highway is a safer, smoother ride. A tunnel would've been nicer than razing the Eagle Ridge Bluffs forest and swamp, however. The Canada Line is the rapid transit downtown to airport link Vancouver has always needed. The Vancouver Convention Centre is a world-class convention centre that is already bringing big meetings and events downtown that previously would not have fit.
Too bad all three of the above cost more than $3.5 billion combined. Once upon a time, the price tag for all three was estimated to be under $2 billion.
The Vancouver Olympic Centre’s pool is open. Yes, taxpayers built a recreation centre when what the International Olympic Committee ordered was a curling rink. Where the curling rink was will be a hockey rink. Killarney and Trout Lake got a fine new hockey rink each, but not additional ice sheets.
Likewise the Richmond Olympic Oval, where a pair of hockey rinks will open after reconfiguration of the ice plant. The speedskating oval ice surface is hidden for possible future use. The key word is possible.
The Vancouver Olympic Village is a ghost town. The social housing is not open and not enough luxury suites have been bought and occupied by those that can afford them. The community centre is open, the Urban Fare and London Drugs are coming soon. Who knows about the brewpub that was supposed to occupy the Salt Building. The big, red heritage shack is empty. The seawall and man-made island in False Creek are popular with walkers and rollers.
Across the way, B.C. Place Stadium is undergoing a pioneering $563 million post-Games renovation that was supposed to cost $365 million. Let’s hope its retractable roof doesn’t malfunction like the one at Olympic Stadium in Montreal after its post-Games installation.
Robson Square, the biggest free public magnet of the Games, is closed for renovations. Who knows when the GE-sponsored public ice rink will reopen.
The Olympic Streetcar came and went from its False Creek South line between the Canada Line’s Olympic Village Station and Granville Island. Bombardier was willing to leave the two Brussels streetcars there through summer, but city hall had other priorities. Like homes for chickens, more bike lanes and an expensive renovation to Mayor Gregor Robertson and city manager Penny Ballem’s offices.
General Motors Place was Canada Hockey Place for the Games, but is now Rogers Arena. The automaker that drove through bankruptcy last year was under pressure to drive out of its naming rights deal early. The Toronto telecommunications company, a minor partner in the Canadian Olympic Broadcasting Consortium, took over.
The Countdown Clock at the Vancouver Art Gallery still displays zeros, but its days there are numbered. The Olympic half is destined for B.C. Place Stadium's B.C. Sports Hall of Fame. The Paralympic half is going to the Whistler Olympic Park's day lodge. Will there be a permanent memorial to Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, the 21-year-old who died on the Whistler Sliding Centre track on opening day of the 21st Games?
The Downtown Eastside remains Canada’s home for the homeless. An urban ghetto like no other in North America. The Woodward’s complex has breathed new life into the neighbourhood, but the area remains full of people who are ill and addicted, wandering aimlessly, in need of help.
The Games were, essentially, a strategy to improve the real estate and tourism industries.
House sales boomed for a few months after the Games, until hitting the brakes in July with a 20.1 percent drop in Vancouver.
Have you seen all the “for lease” signs outside offices and warehouses in Metro Vancouver? The city’s vacancy rate for the first half of 2010 was officially under 5 percent, but the suburbs are suffering.
Burnaby’s 13.08 percent vacancy rate is 6 percent worse than 2009. Richmond’s 17.58 percent is 5 percent worse than the previous year. Yes, there is new supply on the market that has yet to be absorbed, but there many companies big and small companies downsizing or disappearing.
The Microsoft Canada Development Centre in Richmond is shutting down this fall and remaining employees are moving to downtown Vancouver. That's a 73,000 square foot space for lease and it's not the only one in the Knight Street corridor in Richmond, which is rapidly becoming a lonely place to locate.
Metro Vancouver Commerce, an economic development campaign drive by Vancouver, Richmond and Surrey, claims it created $60 million to $70 million of new business to the region because of the Olympics. But the MVC publicity bumph is easily dissected. Two of the deals announced were worth $52 million combined and involved existing partnerships. The promotion
took credit for the six-and-a-half-year, $27 million contract extension between Lockheed Martin of Maryland and Abbotsford-based Cascade Aerospace, even though Abbotsford was not an MVC participant.
Organizers won't disclose the names of the 100 businesspeople they wined and dined during the Olympics. In fact, MVC appears to have been a sly strategy for staff of the city-funded Vancouver Economic Development Commission to get free Olympic tickets while helping VANOC boost its slumping sales after sponsors cut back.
Tourism Vancouver says overnight stays are up 4.8 percent through June, but that’s in comparison to 2009 which was not a banner year. The February figure of 547,357 was the best February ever, breaking the 2008 mark of 507,199. January showed a year-over-year drop, but March, April, May and June showed improvements over 2009. Except February, all months measured were below the annual averages since 2005.
July and August are the bread-and-butter, million-plus visitor months for Vancouver tourism. Those numbers, when tabulated, will tell us whether the $38.6 million taxpayer-funded You Gotta Be Here tourism ad campaign was worth it.
Federal and British Columbia politicians spending billions of your dollars on economic stimulus projects want you to believe in an economic rebound and a post-Olympic boom. Could the opposite have happened: A minor, post-Games recession, perhaps?
It will take more months than just six to fully assess the legacies of the biggest event in British Columbia history. In some cases, it will take years.
Nobody can deny that it was the city's greatest party. But was the hangover worth it?
Friday, July 23, 2010
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Soul on ice
Could Dustin Byfuglien save hockey in Atlanta?
While Vancouver Canuck Henrik Sedin was celebrating a Hart Trophy, Byfuglien was quietly enjoying his Stanley Cup summer in Phoenix until he found out he was traded.
The Fugly One was a Chicago Blackhawk until June 23 when he was dealt to the Atlanta Thrashers. The 25-year-old from Minneapolis had 11 goals and five assists in the Hawks’ Stanley Cup run. He certainly got some votes for the Conn Smythe Trophy and was unpopular in Vancouver for getting in the way of Roberto Luongo so often.
Atlanta is the eighth-largest media marketplace in the United States and it is rich with sports, where the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Falcons dominate the pro sports scene and the Georgia Bulldogs are the college mainstay. Basketball’s Atlanta Hawks are a bigger wintertime draw than the Thrashers, who averaged only 13,607 fans last season. That’s the third-worst attendance in the league.
Atlantans never did relate to Russian Ilya Kovalchuk, but they might just come to know and love The Fugly One.
While much was made of the Blackhawks marketing to African-American fans in Chicago, it’s a demographic that the Thrashers need for their survival. More than half of Atlantans are African-American.
Byfuglien, whose father was African-American Ricky Spencer, could end up playing on the same line in Atlanta with Vancouver Giants’ product Evander Kane. Kane was picked fourth overall last year by the Thrashers and is named after Atlanta heavyweight boxing superstar Evander Holyfield.
Atlanta is also the birthplace of Martin Luther King, who led the civil rights movement.
It's a long climb to the hilltop that is the Stanley Cup, but 2010-2011 could be the year Atlanta is spared from becoming the first city to lose two National Hockey League franchises. Thanks to Evander Kane and Dustin Byfuglien.
While Vancouver Canuck Henrik Sedin was celebrating a Hart Trophy, Byfuglien was quietly enjoying his Stanley Cup summer in Phoenix until he found out he was traded.
The Fugly One was a Chicago Blackhawk until June 23 when he was dealt to the Atlanta Thrashers. The 25-year-old from Minneapolis had 11 goals and five assists in the Hawks’ Stanley Cup run. He certainly got some votes for the Conn Smythe Trophy and was unpopular in Vancouver for getting in the way of Roberto Luongo so often.
Atlanta is the eighth-largest media marketplace in the United States and it is rich with sports, where the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Falcons dominate the pro sports scene and the Georgia Bulldogs are the college mainstay. Basketball’s Atlanta Hawks are a bigger wintertime draw than the Thrashers, who averaged only 13,607 fans last season. That’s the third-worst attendance in the league.
Atlantans never did relate to Russian Ilya Kovalchuk, but they might just come to know and love The Fugly One.
While much was made of the Blackhawks marketing to African-American fans in Chicago, it’s a demographic that the Thrashers need for their survival. More than half of Atlantans are African-American.
Byfuglien, whose father was African-American Ricky Spencer, could end up playing on the same line in Atlanta with Vancouver Giants’ product Evander Kane. Kane was picked fourth overall last year by the Thrashers and is named after Atlanta heavyweight boxing superstar Evander Holyfield.
Atlanta is also the birthplace of Martin Luther King, who led the civil rights movement.
It's a long climb to the hilltop that is the Stanley Cup, but 2010-2011 could be the year Atlanta is spared from becoming the first city to lose two National Hockey League franchises. Thanks to Evander Kane and Dustin Byfuglien.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
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.
Friday, May 21, 2010
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?
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?
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