John Furlong: ‘In Canada, we have never
staged anything this big in our history’
 JOHN FURLONG, the Irish-born CEO of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee is presented with the 2009 Celtic Person of the Year Award by Maura De Freitas, the publisher of The Celtic Connection.
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 JOHN FURLONG the CEO of VANOC speaks to Catholine Butler after being presented with The Celtic Connection 2009 Celtic Person of the Year Award. |
By CATHOLINE BUTLER
VANCOUVER – We’re not counting years anymore....now it’s weeks and days until the start of the 2010 Winter Olympics.
For many of us, seven years seemed a long wait following the announcement back on July 2, 2003 that Vancouver-Whistler will host the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.
But, for John Furlong, chief executive officer for the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), there are never enough hours in the day. His day starts at 4:30 AM, seven days a week, and doesn’t finish until well after dark.
In November, The Celtic Connection recognized his hard work when our publisher Maura De Freitas presented Tipperary-born Furlong with The Celtic Connection 2009 Celtic Person of the Year Award.
Following the presentation, I had an opportunity to speak with Furlong about his thoughts now that the official opening date of February 12, 2010, is just weeks away.
“In Canada, we have never staged anything this big in our history,” said Furlong. “There are well over 150 Olympic sites in Vancouver. Just about all the provinces have a pavilion, the sponsors have their venues, and then there’s transportation depots and so on. It just gets bigger and bigger, and eventually this Olympic look will be draped all over Vancouver.
“The complexity is quite extraordinary. Today at Vancouver 2010, we have 1,400 full-time staff and we are in the process of recruiting our temporary work force, which will be an additional 3,000 to 4,000 employees.
“We will also have 25,000 volunteers for the Games and another 10,000 to 12,000 for the ceremony along with volunteers for our sponsors and partners. On the day we start the Games, we will be 50,000 strong.
“The number of buses needed will be in the thousands. It’s difficult for people to understand just how big the Olympics are unless they have spent time in an Olympic city, when the Olympics are on.
“It could be overwhelming at times, but we have very good people and what you learn is that no rock is so big that you can’t move it, no problem is so big that you can’t solve it, and we simply have to confront our challenges and keep going. We have no choice – the flame arrives on the 12th of February.”
Over the past few years, John Furlong has been through some pretty challenging times – from the quest to secure the Games, to just trying to keep everything on time and on track for 2010.
One of the highlights was standing in the Olympic Stadium in Athens and being handed the flame. He said, “you don’t have many moments like that in your life.”
He recalls the anticipation of arriving home with the Olympic flame. Their flight departure was delayed, resulting in events in Victoria being continuously reorganized.
“Just before landing in Victoria, I remember looking at Mayor Gregor Robertson and I saw that he was shaking because he would be the one carrying the flame off the aircraft to set it on Canadian soil...that was a very big moment.
“When you see someone like the mayor, who deals with significant and hard issues on a daily basis, being nervous about bringing the Olympic flame to Canada, it has a way of getting right inside your soul and it did with him, as it did with all of us. This is when you realize that this is first and foremost a human project.”
Furlong said there is a lot of grand language used about the Olympics but at the end of the day, it’s about touching people and lives, and affecting families, and inspiring young people.
But with all the highs and lows of the past few years, the best moment by far for John Furlong was the one just before Vancouver was awarded the Games in Prague.
He said the exercise to get the Games was enormous and to be able to succeed in a very complex environment, where no one wants you to win except yourself, is just such a sense of elation. For a moment or two, he said that he felt that life had unfolded as it was suppose to.
“The next big moment for me, between Prague and the Games, will be just before the opening,” he said. “It will be the realization that good people prevailed and found a way. The flame will arrive in the stadium exactly at the time that we promised, and people will feel exactly like we thought they would. A lot of people will be wondering what all the fuss was about.
“People will feel great pride and they will reconnect with their country and the pleasure and privilege that it is to be Canadian. Those moments will be life changing.”
At 5 PM Pacific Time on February 12, 2010, John Furlong will be waiting in the stadium for the Olympic flame.
Speaking about the emotions, he laughed and said, “it reminds me a little bit like sitting in the change room in Croke Park in Dublin, waiting to go on the field for a big Gaelic football game. We’ve trained really hard to be there, and there’s a team just down the way in another change room who really wants to beat the pants off us.
“You realize that everything that you’ve worked for is about to take place, and you have this nervous happy tension that exists when you are just about to compete. I’ve never competed for anything in my life that I haven’t felt nervous, and that’s as it should be.”
Many things have changed for Furlong since he started on this journey. One of the biggest is that when he began working on the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, he had no grandchildren, and by the time the Games open in February, he will have 11.
I asked John Furlong about his plans after the Olympics are over, besides a vacation and a rest.
He laughed and said, “Hide! I want to get out of the public domain.”
“Actually, I think that I might like to write a book. There have been lots of books written about the Games but I think that I’d like to write about some of the lessons that we’ve learned.
“We built the Olympic project in the most heated economy ever, and we brought the project home in the worst economy in all of our memories.
“When you work on something as big as the Olympics, there are not many problems that you could invent that come close to this experience.”
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