VANOC chief reveals impact of recession 20/05/2010 |
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Vancouver Olympics organising chief John Furlong has admitted that the global recession affected the Winter Games “in every way you can imagine”.
Furlong, chief executive of the Vancouver organising committee (VANOC), explained that the downturn led to a complete overhaul of how the organisation operated.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) pledged to bail out VANOC if there ended up being a shortfall in the overall budget – a first for the governing body. But Furlong has now revealed how VANOC stripped out unnecessary expenditure to stay within its C$1.76bn budget.
“It affected us in every way you can imagine, except that it did not affect us immediately,” Furlong, who this week was named the new chairman of Canada’s Own the Podium (OTP) Advisory Board, told the Press Association’s The Sport Briefing.
“As the world economy went over a cliff, we saw the impact it was having and saw the behaviour of many of our partners trying to deal with the fall-out. We realised that we were going to start to be affected and something could happen to us. We needed to start rethinking all the ‘what if’ scenarios we could be confronted with.”
The rethink led to cutbacks throughout the organisation. “We took the company, turned it upside down, shook it and everything that didn’t matter and wasn’t vital to the interest of the Games fell out,” Furlong added.
“If it was possible later to put some of the stuff back, we did, but for the most part we tried to make sure that we were not doing anything at all that wasn’t necessary in respect of delivering a great Olympics.
“We did this throughout the company, from the ceiling to the floor. Every single person who came to work at Vancouver 2010 for a period of about 18 months had the added responsibility of trying to do a whole lot more with a whole lot less.”
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