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Business community goes to school on Games

Park City, VANOC, Whistler officials share perspectives on Olympics

There was toilet town and tinsel town.

Along with strong sporting venues both were absolutely essential to the success of the Winter Olympic Games in Utah in 2002.

"You need to plan for everything you can think of and then you need to be flexible," Bill Malone, executive director of the Park City Chamber of Commerce, told over 200 people at a conference in Whistler on preparing to host the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

Since Whistler and Vancouver were chosen last summer to host the 2010 Olympics, tourism experts, business owners, athletes, trainers, governments, and communities have been working out what the Games will mean to them.

Last Thursday, April 29 Tourism Whistler brought together some of the people on the front lines of the Salt Lake 2002 Games, leaders in tourism and members of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) to try and offer some answers.

"We can’t just rush out without a plan," said Whistler Mayor Hugh O’Reilly.

"This is information about what’s going on, the steps that are being taken, and we are learning a lot from people who have hosted Games previously."

While the Games have not been in the news much recently plans have been moving ahead at a fever pitch.

The sliding centre site on Blackcomb Mountain was under review this week by one of only two men in the world who engineer the curves on bobsleigh/luge tracks.

VANOC expects to go to final design stage this year with the site complete and ready for Canadian teams to practice on by October 2007 said Terry Wright, a consultant to VANOC and former VP of bid development and operations.

Plans for the Nordic centre in the Callaghan Valley, 22 kilometres from Whistler, are facing some changes as the sport of cross country skiing moves to mass-start events.

"There has been a very dramatic change in the sport," said Wright.

"So now the skier who crosses the line first actually comes first."

The Whistler Nordic Centre, at $102 million the most expensive venue, is also the venue which will cause the most disruption to the environment, since it is being built in an undeveloped area.

For that reason even more environmental studies are now being undertaken.

It was also revealed that the municipality is considering building an addition to the current sports and recreation centre in Meadow Park for the Paralympic sledge hockey arena. That would be a considerably less expensive option than building the proposed multi-plex centre in the village which has a price tag of $40 million.

Only $20 million is available from VANOC for the sledge hockey facility, which must seat at least 3,500 people. A facility built at Meadow Park would be more community oriented, while a facility in the village could have additional uses and might present more opportunities for corporate partnerships.

It’s not just the venues which are being worked on. Marketing plans and strategies are underway by VANOC, Vancouver, Whistler and the province.

A new logo will be unveiled by February of 2005 following a design competition which will start later this year said Linda Harmon, marketing consultant to VANOC.

A mascot won’t be chosen until after the 2006 Torino Winter Games are over.

By then the province will already be into its second year of a ten year tourism strategy rolled out at the conference by Rod Harris, president and CEO of Tourism B.C.

"We are very, very serious about this," he said.

"When you step back and look at British Columbia on a global scale we represent less than one per cent of global tourism revenue. We are a micro-dot on the world of tourism opportunity."

To capitalize on the opportunity the Games present to grow tourism, Harris said more money has to be spent getting out the message that B.C. is a great place to come to.

If the province continues on its current rate of growth tourism will expand from a $10 billion dollar industry to a $12.7 billion one in 2015. The provincial government has already said it wants tourism to double in the next 10 years.

But according to Harris, if current levels of spending on tourism are maintained it will take 34 years to double tourism.

"We believe with the proper investment spent we can grow from the status quo rate of growth of $12.7 billion in the year 2015 to $17.1 billion," said Harris.

Wright also took the opportunity to point fingers at the federal government for investing so little in athletes in its last budget.

"(Athlete funding) did not get the support that we had hoped in the last federal budget and so we are going to continue to push in every way we can to try and be a catalyst to address that," said Wright.

For Brad Sills, who owns and operates Callaghan Country, a luxury backcountry winter retreat just a few kilometres up the road from the proposed Nordic Centre, the conference offered a chance to understand better where the opportunities for the Games lie.

"It has always been touted as an economic engine," said Sills.

"But it’s still a bit of a quandary for me whether it represents an economic plus or a detraction form my normal business course.

"The bonus is the exposure we will get, the global advertising and to me anyway that is the true advantage."