Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

One year later...

Whistler reflects on the Games
65651_l

Defining this "Olympic Legacy" ain't easy. It's as amorphous a concept as "success" or "sustainability," as intangible as that electric feeling flooding the village daily during the Games.

"Legacy." What does that even mean?

Well, for Whistler, it has less to do with new infrastructure and village-bound Olympic memorabilia than with how the town feels about itself one year later. What has always been a fervent, if self-conscious, belief in the community that Whistler is as great a place to live as any - hell, better than any - has been validated by showing the world a great time and showing off the goods in the process.

Whistler folk are as confident about their identity as ever, even if their economic future looks bumpy.

"Here we are a year later and people are still high as kite about the Games," John Furlong says. "I mean, it just doesn't go away and I think people like what they were living, they like how they felt and I think it left people with this confidence that they can do anything."

The former Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC) CEO has just finished one of his Olympics-as-success speeches at the Whistler Four Seasons and now he's nestled up against the arm of a leather couch in the lobby, propped up on one elbow and fidgeting with his Blackberry. He's a far more withdrawn Furlong than with the crowd of 200 people half-an-hour before, and when a female stranger sidles up and says, "I just want to thank you again, and to let you know that my daughter was one of the first relay runners -" he sheepishly thanks her, avoiding eye contact. One gets the impression he's been dealing with this more than he's comfortable with.

"The optimum outcome was achieved," he says after she leaves. "We won the most gold medals. We won the hockey game and it was shown all over the world. All the partners played a starring role," he says. He pauses. "And for me, the country got what it wanted. The country was happy. To me, that was success. It was validation."

Yes, it was a gay ol' time. The village was one pulsing, good-natured throng of red and white. The streets of Vancouver were throbbing with an energy as raw as it has ever seen, may ever see. Every individual, whether in the city or in the mountains, seemed linked to a single heartbeat propelling each body to sway and shout and, by the end of the night, stagger on through the extravagantly lit streets in celebration.

It was never supposed to be about just Whistler or Vancouver. On the final day, when Canada won the gold medal hockey Game against the U.S., the streets of Toronto exploded in howls and screams, as they did in Calgary and Coal Harbour, Nova Scotia. The jubilation was linked to what was happening back in the lower left corner of B.C. by a quivering, vibrating thread that had been woven into the national identity from when Canada was awarded the Games in 2003 until it won that hockey game in February 2010.

That was Furlong's plan all along. This unified national spirit did not exist in the Calgary or Montreal Olympics because those Games were about Calgary and Montreal only. Furlong's vision from Day One was to make it about the country.

"When we presented our credentials in Prague, we talked about an event that could inspire a nation, that could touch every life, affect every family," he says. "It got almost everybody's attention because almost everyone else was presenting a traditional model for the Games. Salzburg and Bern and Harbin, China - the event was only about that city. But we were always about everybody.

"It's a rare thing to be able to say that every province and territory was invested in your project. Newfoundland put money into the Games. They're closer to London than Vancouver. Every province did that."

 

Okay, so then... now what?

The Olympics were a beacon for the town's policy makers since Whistler's earliest days as a ski destination, and now that it's over and done with, people are wondering what the next Big Something will be to unite the community.

"I actually don't agree that there needs to be a new beacon," Mayor Ken Melamed says. "I'm happy to say that it was a defining moment in our history and it's an indication of the community's capacity, it's an indication of our ability to plan and our ability to partner. It's an indication of our capacity to do what we put our minds to, but it's also an indication of the value of the place, and what a successful resort that we've built (here). To me, that's potentially enough. The challenge, the beacon, is to continue to deliver on the promise of the Whistler experience, which is this outstanding place to come and visit."

He's sitting at a table in his office, and behind him are an Olympic and a Paralympic torch, leaning charred and technically useless against the wall, but the pair is doubtlessly a set of keys to a bank of gratifying memories for the mayor. The man speaks about the Olympics the way a father might about his son scoring a winning goal at a championship hockey game.

"We generally believe that we're better off for having had the Olympics. It has been a benefit," he says.

"Is it producing the results, the direct results in the timeframe that people would like? Obviously not."

Occupancy rates are down throughout the village and destination travelers have not returned in numbers that Whistler has seen in previous years, though this likely has more to do with the recession than anything else. Tourism Whistler has stated from the beginning that host cities typically see the positive impacts of the Olympics 18 to 24 months after the fact, so by the 2011-2012 winter season, the village should -  should - be a whole lot busier.

"People who are well-grounded in what it means to actually convert from the marketing to the actual visit, know that it takes time," Melamed says. "If it hadn't been for the Olympics, it's hard to imagine where we would be today. The Olympics was the thing that kept the economy alive, essentially, in probably the hardest economic year of our history."

The trouble is maintaining the potency of the Olympics to draw tourists year after year - to grow Whistler's recognition not as an Olympic host city, but as vibey mountain town that just happened to have hosted the Olympics.

Tourism Whistler President and CEO Barrett Fisher says that Whistler has had the advantage of already being a recognized destination on a year-round basis, something that Lillehammer or Squaw Valley did not enjoy. Tourism Whistler made the decision before and during the Games to wean the focus away from the Olympics and onto Whistler as a celebration destination - a marketing strategy it will continue to use moving forward - showing that Whistler is not a one trick pony.

"The Games did not define Whistler. Whistler defined the Games," she says. "Whistler has a long way to go but we have a known brand. We had that before the Games, and what the Games did ultimately is take that brand, leverage that and grow that awareness, rather than define it and create it."

She adds, "If we could go back and do it all over again, we would. When you think of the mass proportion of planning and organizing and execution, and when you think of what our initial objectives were, which was really for Tourism Whistler to grow awareness in our international markets and maximize the opportunities around the legacies of the Games, were we successful? Yes, we absolutely were."

According to Tourism Whistler's 2010/2011 winter survey, 55 per cent of visitors participated in an Olympic activity, meaning they took photos of themselves with the Olympic rings or took a drive to Whistler Olympic Park. According to the 2009/2010 winter survey, one in 10 visitors said that the Games were a top reason for visiting, and one in three said that Whistler's role as a host resort for the Games encouraged them to visit.

Fisher says that no other vehicle could have given Whistler the opportunity for 3.5 billion people to view Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains through the television screen. Tourism Whistler did pre- and post-Games awareness surveys in key markets of Australia, the U.K. and Germany and awareness was up in all these markets, even doubling in the German markets. None of the other Olympic host cities have done a pre- and post-Games awareness survey before, so Tourism Whistler had no benchmark to measure their own success against, but the results are still quite positive when measured against a traditional branding campaign.

"If you're a brand like a Nike or a Coca-Cola, you're doing a massive brand campaign, you might move the dial in the range of five points after the campaign. To move the dial between 13 and 25 points is huge," she says.

 

The cynics say...

"This idea that VANOC broke even is ludicrous," says Van Powel, Whistler's preeminent cynic and Olympic watchdog since the very beginning. "It doesn't take into account that there was an injection of $100 million of taxpayers' cash into VANOC, and it doesn't take into account that VANOC didn't have any of the venues on the books. We paid for those. But most people will read the headlines and go, 'It didn't cost us anything! We broke even!' Well, it's just not true."

He's looking over the valley perched in a chair by the living room window of his home in Whistler Cay Heights. He rented it out to a foreign TV crew for the duration of the Games and took a two-week vacation, watching the competitions from a TV screen.

"I'm a big fan of the athletes," he says. "I really admire what they do. I like watching some of the competitions but I understand also that there are implications. My values are taking care of people who are least fortunate first, and then splurging. It's like the buddy who buys a snowmobile and sticks it in the back of his new truck and bitches at his wife for spending too much money on food and clothes for the kids. That's kind of where we're at now."

He believes many of the cuts that the municipality is facing are a result of the spending spree leading up to the Olympics. The local economy, said Powel, had been buoyed during the start of the recession by a "false economy" where all levels of government gave "a lot of public funds and injected it into the local economy" of Whistler.

"We have miles of new fibre optic cables buried under acres of expensive masonry stone with fields of paved parking and fancy lighting systems that turn blue and green, and we can't find $54,000 for the library. So we're going to close it for 52 days a year," he says.

He can't foresee where this will lead the community, because it's going to depend on what cuts are going to have to be made and what the tolerance for further tax increases will be locally, which he says will affect everything that happens in this community.

"We're going to spend $2.7 million a year to turn Whistler into a cultural tourist destination. Well, I thought the Olympics were going to do all the marketing for us; it was going to be such a big boon. $2.7 million to turn us into a cultural tourist destination and we're going to close our library for two months of the year. But we're a cultural tourist destination." He laughs, amused by the irony.

He draws a link provincially between Olympic spending and cuts to children's services, as revealed in a recent report, Fragile Lives, Fragmented Systems; Strengthening Supports for Vulnerable Infants , that between 2007 and 2009, 21 children died as a result to these services. This is an implication of spending $1 billion on a convention centre in Vancouver.

"Those kinds of things concerned me and reflect our values as a society. I value taking care of children over having a $100 million sliding centre," he says.

"If we were in a surplus situation, (I'd say) have a party. Go for it, by all means. But we weren't. We're in a deficit situation. So we borrowed the money to pay for it," he says.

 

But it was a good party...

...and most people who experienced it will testify to it. People who know how to party will tell you that the financial cost the next morning hardly matters as long as it was a good time. Nursing the hangover, you look at your wallet - the stack of bills converted to a crumpled fiver in the corner of the cash pouch or a handful of loonies weighing down your trousers - and you shrug it off and think, "At least it was fun."

But beyond proving that Whistler and Canada can host one hell of a celebration, Maureen Douglas, former director of community relations for VANOC, says the success of the Games proved that the regular dysfunction that characterizes day-to-day operations between different levels of government is not inherent in the system and the kinks can be ironed out when necessary. All levels of governments worked together as a unit, partnering with corporations with varied vested interests in regular circumstances to make the 2010 Olympics work.

"Most people don't wake up every day with such a defined mandate," she says. "If you can create the shared vision, the next goal that everyone is moving towards, you can maintain those types of relationships. When not everyone is on the same agenda, even if they're off by a couple of degrees in a meeting, you're going to get conflict."

Douglas says the Games have elevated Canada's status on the world stage. Sure, we bungled the 2010 G20 summit but the Olympics sure were fun, right?

"Now we need to walk more side by side (with the U.S.)," she says. "There are some issues of economy of scale and world economies and world issues that won't necessarily let that happen, but I think when it counts at critical meetings and negotiations, Canada shows up at the table with more confidence and an awareness around the world that we may be a small nation but we are extremely capable, tenacious and we will get it done."

Both Douglas and Furlong referred to the Games as a fairy tale ending, one rife with conflict, tension, love and humanity that couldn't have had a cheesier ending. But it was exactly what fate handed us in the end and it felt good for most people who were living through it.

"Success is tough," Furlong says. "Nobody wins easy, in anything, and we're that story. I think we're a story that people can relate to because they all had something to do with it."

A year later, Furlong's schedule has not loosened up one iota since the Games ended, condensing the scope of his new book, Patriot Hearts , into a series of hour-long speeches in cities and towns across the continent. He admits that he's tired but has never been happier. And why not? He gets to share his greatest success every day, with crowds of people who actually want to hear about it.

"(The story) is something that is very human, very engaging and people are able to look at it," he says. "It is a metaphor for so many things. Sport is. It's about winning and losing and overcoming adversity and about effort and trying hard and playing fair. The rules of life are all embedded in sport, so it's fun to be able to tell that story, especially when it worked out exactly that way. I always thought it would."

 

 



Comments