A shortfall in international sponsorship has meant the budget for next month’s FIS Snowboard World Championships has had to be trimmed.
According to several sources the budget for the "biggest event ever to come to Whistler" had to be reduced because some European agencies that were working on behalf of the FIS failed to find some appropriate international sponsors in time.
The first sign that organizers might not have been able to attract all the sponsorship they wanted happened when it was announced that the events would not be gated because it would "cost too much". More recently there have been some indications that there would be fewer live music performances.
But the good news, according to Mark Taylor of IMG and the organizing committee for the world championships, is that this reduction in the budget happened several months ago and some managerial decisions since have prevented any major changes to the event.
"Ultimately this event is to crown some world champions of snowboarding and that’s our focus," said Taylor. "We lacked some of the international sponsorship that we thought we were going to attain and we made those adjustments four months ago.
"I’m not at liberty to describe numbers but this is the biggest budgeted event that’s ever been run in Whistler. We’ve still got K-Aos as the big headline act and we’re doing the rail jam… extra events are nice but the world championships alone are phenomenal.
"The changes we made are subtle, we changed the big air that was going to be a night time event to a day event because it saves upwards of $75,000 in lighting costs. Instead of the music being staged at Base II we’ve decided to hold the music at the conference centre, where we can insure a more warm, dry venue.
"We were also going to run a gated ticketed event but the costs to run a gated event… are huge, although the Olympics are going to be doing that.
"It’s like any business, our revenues and our expenses have to match up and we’ve made the adjustments."
