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Morgan:News:2010 |Business| #708
ALPINE CANADA, GENERAL MOTORS SWITCH GM CUP TO FOCUS ON TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENTAlpine Canada, the sports federation that represents Canada's national alpine ski team, and one of its major sponsors, General Motors, have agreed that the Pontiac GMC Cup will be used to bolster technical-skills development as the team takes aim at winning medals at the 2010 Winter Games. The Cup, for the past 36 years, has been awarded at the championship level.
"In order to keep up with the evolution of the sport of alpine ski racing, we have decided to focus on the technical development of our athletes," said Max Gartner, the Chief Athletics Officer for Alpine Canada. "It is important to spend more time on technical events during the formative development years. This will allow us to develop our athletes to the desired technical level needed to compete successfully at the World Cup level in all disciplines, including speed events. This is a strategic change that is part of our long-term development plan."
"We are ready for 2010," said Allison Forsyth, member of the Canadian Alpine Ski Team and one of the best technical skiers in the country. "I believe the emphasis on technical skiing is just what we need to put Canadian skiers on the podium."
The Pontiac GMC Cup series will involve 32 races in four provinces leading to the national championships in March. The series starts at Panorama Mountain in Invermere, in British Columbia, on December 15 and will culminate with the 2005 Pontiac GMC Canadian Championships at Mont Ste-Anne and Le Massif, in Quebec, from March 17-22. The best young athletes from Canada compete head-to-head against athletes from the Canadian Alpine Ski Team in speed and technical events.
Gartner says "The implementation of the new strategy at this level is imperative in the development of our young skiers. This year the program will offer sixteen slalom and giant slalom races held in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec."
Tom Laurie, the manager of Sponsorships & Promotions for GM of Canada. says that GM has also extended its support:
- For the past three years, Alpine Canada has used the engineering staff at the GM aerodynamics lab in Warren, Michigan, where the national men's team used a state-of-the-art wind tunnel -- typically used to test the effects of wind on future car and truck designs -- to hone their racing techniques. That will continue.
- It will continue to support athletes by offering a year's free use of a Pontiac or GMC vehicle to any Canadian Alpine Ski team member who achieves a top-ten world ranking, wins a World Cup race or is awarded an Olympic or World Championship medal.
- It will host ski- and snowboard-waxing clinics at Pontiac GMC dealerships across the country to encourage more Canadians to enjoy the sport while raising funds for local ski clubs.
- Pontiac GMC Dealers will continue to support the Provincial Ski Associations in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec.
Alpine Canada is the governing body for ski racing in Canada. About 27,000 Canadians take part in the sport as coaches, officials, and athletes, including the racers of the Canadian Alpine Ski Team and the Canadian Disabled Alpine Ski Team.
Originally published to Morgan:News:2010:Gold subscribers on November 30, 2004
Morgan:News:2010 |Moguls| #707
EBERSOL SON'S BODY FOUND IN JET WRECKAGE; PARALYMPICS AND DEAFLYMPICS LINK UP; BASEBALL ON 2010 CURLING RINK SITE OK'D FOR 2005Three moguls we bumped into today...
- The body of 14-year-old Edward (Teddy) Ebersol has been found crushed beneath the wreckage of the small charter jet in which he, his father and older brother were riding Sunday. Teddy was the youngest son of NBC Sport chairman Dick Ebersol, the man in charge of the NBC broadcast of the 2010 Winter Games. The jet crashed and burned on take-off at Montrose, Colorado, and Ebersol and one of his older sons, Charles, 21, were hospitalized with undisclosed injuries after stumbling out of the wreckage in shock. NBC is reporting that the pair are in stable condition and expected to make a full recovery.
- Phil Craven, the president of the International Paralympic Committee and Donalda Ammons, the interim president and secretary general of the International Committee of Sports for the Deaf, which is also known as the Deaflympics, signed a Memorandum of Understanding in Washington, today. It lets deaf athletes with an additional disability compete in each organization's sanctioned competition events, such as the 2010 Winter Olympics, as long as they meet the usual eligibility criteria for the event. Both organizations will also co-operate in keeping international sports organizations in the loop about what they're doing, and to set up a structure for resolving any disputes between them over criteria.
- The City of Vancouver's Parks Board says the Vancouver Canadians baseball team will allowed to lease Nat Bailey Stadium until the end of 2005 as studies continue on how best to fit the Vancouver 2010 curling rink into the location. During the Bid phase, the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Organizing Committee and the City suggested the aging Stadium, a sentimental favourite facility in Vancouver, be replaced by the new C$43.8 million curling rink, but public pressure prompted the Park Board to see if the rink can be built while keeping the Stadium. The Parks Board's master plan for the area, which requires public hearings scheduled for early next year, is expected to be completed in April. Construction of the rink by VANOC isn't due to start until the summer of 2007.
Originally published to Morgan:News:2010:Gold subscribers on November 30, 2004
Morgan:News:2010 |VANOC| #706
SENIOR VP OF SPORT TALKS ABOUT VANOC'S ROLE IN CANADIAN SPORTS DEVELOPMENT, ANTI-DOPING, AND TIMELINESThe senior vice-president of Sport for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Organizing Committee says her "Own the Podium" approach is changing how winter sport funding and organization works in Canada, and support for its goals will be among VANOC's main sponsorship requirements.
Cathy Priestner - in an in-depth interview with Morgan:News:2010 that delves into Canada's sport-performance plans, anti-doping and her expertise - says that VANOC and the Canadian Olympic Committee have taken a major role in the program. "For the first time in history, we've been able to facilitate bringing together all of the winter sports, and all of the funding partners, sitting in one room with [Stephen Owen, the federal government's] minister of sport and says, 'This is what we've done. We have a plan, and we're going to move forward.'"
Priester says that the plan, which she researched and authored on behalf of the 13 winter Olympic sports earlier this year, completing it just before she was hired by VANOC, is a strategy for how Canada will become the country with the most medals in 2010. That will require winning at least 35 by at the end of the 2010 Winter Games. It involves, she says, corporate Canada, and includes VANOC's first major sponsor, telecommunication giant Bell Canada, "and we've said to the federal government, collectively, 'We need your help on this, too.'" The organized sports have been meeting on a regular basis since last February to complete the strategy and begin its implementation.
Priestner says that this year there are more than a dozen organizations related to winter sports working up sponsorship campaigns, and that donor fatigue, particularly among corporations, starts to become a concern on both sides of the table. Priester says the "Own the Podium" approach is designed to come to grips with the issue. "We've got this plan, and we're saying that for every dollar that comes in, this is how it's going to be allocated, so if you're writing the cheque, or I am, or the feds are, those dollars are going to be maximized because they're going toward the same programs, the same plan, the same vision. That has to happen more."
The COC's goal, stemming from the "Own The Podium" strategy, is to have Canada place among the top three nations at the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Torino, which would mean Canada receiving 25 medals, among the top 16 countries at the 2008 Games in Beijing (18 medals) and first at the 2010 Games in Vancouver/Whistler (35 medals). These goals are part of the COC's strategic plan, which was unanimously endorsed by the organization's Board of Directors at its semi-annual meeting in Toronto this weekend. The COC Board includes representation from all of Canada's summer, winter and Pan American sport federations as well as Olympic coaches and athletes.
Priestner calls VANOC, as a representative of the Olympic movement, "a really odd-ball player in this game, because we come along every 20 or 30 years, and we're considered fairly neutral in the sense that we don't have an affiliation or an alliance, and so we're in a position where people maybe trust us a little bit, and see us as being able to do things like this."
The senior vice-president says VANOC doesn't want or run or control the approach, "but we can help facilitate it, which is what we've been able to do, and that's the role we've taken. We're expecting our sponsors, when they come in, to contribute to this program on the sports side that everyone's agreed they want; we don't want sponsors going six different ways. The more we can do that, the more we will."
Priestner, like all the senior vice-presidents at VANOC, is responsible for a wide range of specialized departments within the organization, many of which will inflate with staff, coverage and influence over the next few years, slowly at first and then with increasing speed as the Games nears and preparations balloon. She is responsible, as she put it shortly after being hired to the job last June, for "anything that directly touches an athlete" in the 2010 Winter Games.
She works on the development of VANOC's venues to ensure the field of play -- the areas where the Olympic and Paralympic athletes actually compete -- as well as to see that the athlete-support systems are in good shape, from an athlete's point of view, for all of the various types of games. It's her job also to ensure that the legacy aspects of the venues that are being built or renovated for the 2010 Games will work well for the population of Greater Vancouver and Greater Whistler after the Games, but also work well for the Canadian performance-athlete system, which travels to various facilities nationally and internationally for training and competition.
Priestner's responsibilities cover those roles for both the Olympics and Paralympics. Though much of the Games organization and support for both sectors of the Games and their athletes are expected to be fully integrated -- the same services and supplies will be used, for instance -- she'll eventually hire a Director of Paralympics, dedicated to deal with components of the 2010 Games that are specific to those athletes and field of play. "We would like to have all of our key directors for Sport, Medical, Paralympics and NOC services prior to [the start of the 2006 Winter Games in] Torino. That would be the goal so that we can get them to get over there and have a good look [at Torino's operations.]"
Priestner says the "Own the Podium" approach has high-performance athletes and Canada's approach to developing them at its core for purely Canadian reasons. "We have a strong desire [at VANOC] to have our athletes be successful in 2010," she says. "We're not responsible for implementing the Own the Podium program, that's the responsibility of the Canadian Olympic Committee and the sports federations. Our position is to try to help with the funding and other support. The strategy for winter sports in Canada has changed from six months ago; it's based on the Report and the information that came out of it. And the plan proposed by it has changed, almost systematically, almost 100% of the sports organizations, with perhaps the exception of only one or two, how they thought they were going to move forward to 2010. On the VANOC side, our success will be judged in two ways -- that we put on an extraordinary Games, and how well Canada did on the podium. So we have a vested interest in ensuring that our Canadian athletes are getting, and have, everything they need to prepare, and be at their best in 2010. We've committed to building the facilities early, if we can, although that's obviously an expensive process, because the sooner you build them, the sooner you have to operate and maintain them. At VANOC, we'll ensure we provide every opportunity, within the constraints of international rules, to ensure they have as much as they can get from us to perform."
Priestner says, however, those constraints, imposed by the IOC, force VANOC to ensure the field of play and the venues are offered fairly to all the nations attending, not just Canada. "Leading up to the Games, we have international obligations to providing access to the rest of the world to our facilities. It's normal, though, if you have Games in your country, that your athletes, just by the default of them living here and being here, will have better and easier access to venues than the rest of the world. I don't know of an Olympics organizing committee, in the last 15 years, that didn't focus, as well, on their country performing well. The IOC says 'Get your athletes where they need to be. We want to see them on the podium.' And they're telling us that, as an Organizing Committee, it's not our job to produce the athletes, but certainly there's little criticism from the IOC if the country puts more resources into its own sports, such as allowing athletes to get on the facilities more, or whether it's extending ice seasons."
By that, Priestner means that setting up funding so that athletes and their organizations have the ability to practice and test equipment on either side of a major event, when tracks or ice are readied to a professional level for the event. Using the sport of bobsleigh as an example, she notes that a typical winter-event season is usually too short for doing much testing and measurements of new equipment, in addition to normal practicing. "If you can add a couple of weeks of ice at the beginning, and a couple of weeks of ice at the end of a season, they can do more testing, for research and development. Every host country does that, but Canada hasn't been able to do it because it can't afford to keep the track open an extra month or so."
Priestner was managing director of Sport for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002, before moving to a similar position as director of Games for a short time for the organization getting the 2006 Winter Games ready in Torino, Italy. Then, for what she calls cultural and personal reasons, she resigned from Torino and became involved in a Calgary car dealership, but then took on the task of writing the "Own the Podium" report.
She says, "That's one of the things we did in Salt Lake; we got another month of ice on the track, and it made huge differences in the results. It's all within the rules of fairness; it's just practical stuff, but it's more money, in many cases, coming into the system, that will allow the access."
The VANOC executive says also that the major benefit of her experience in Utah and Italy is, as she puts it, that, she knows a lot more, right from the beginning of her tenure in Vancouver. "Each Olympic Games is unique, regardless of what your expertise is, and what you've been hired to do. Having done a Games is a huge asset to what you bring to another organizing committee. There are few people at a senior level who do more than one Games. When I went to Italy, I was told I was the first senior person to go from one Games to another. So most people don't bring a lot of Games experience into Olympic Games, which is too bad, because you spend four or five years learning while you help them grow, and then you take it to some job that's completely different, and you aren't able to apply it. What I learned was how to do it, and what we need to do. And that's something I have brought here, and I'm starting with that. I know the relationships, who's important and what's important. I know what this looks like at the end. If you haven't done it before, it's really hard to know what that last six months is like before you put the Games on."
For example, Priestner points to a soon-to-be created VANOC department called Stadium Production, which deals with the ambiance and the look-and-feel of the venues. "At Salt Lake, we devoted ourselves to making the venues really feel special [for spectators] and make the facilities comfortable for the athlete, not just the comfort of the locker rooms. But you had a much different environment when you went to the snowboard venue, than when you went to the figure-skating venue. The figure skating was soft music; it was rock 'n' roll when you stepped onto the snowboard venue. It's way to early to deal with that in detail for the 2010 Games, but I think we can improve on that here, and I can be thinking of that now, instead of thinking about it only two or two-and-half years before the Salt Lake Games. We want our venues to rock, and we want the athletes, the spectators and the communities that are hosting them to be a blend, so that it fits together, to be something that is going to be second to none. We'll take it to another level from what I've done before."
Priestner is also concerned with handling the possibility of what are known, somewhat euphemistically, as "program additions." That is, whether there will be more sports added to the 2010 Winter Games than was envisioned at the time Vancouver won the bid.
The IOC has to approve each additional event, and each addition has a range of ripple effects on the presentation of the Games. Besides the potential of additional revenue through souvenir and ticket sales, a new sport also comes with additional costs.
Even though the IOC may approve an additional sport, the 2010 Organizing Committee has the option of accepting or rejecting inclusion of the sport into their Games. Lobbying is underway at the moment at the IOC level to approve Paralympic snowboarding, natural luge and women's ski-jumping at least. "We'll deal with those after Torino," says Priestner. "If we were going to add something, either Olympic or Paralympic, we would like to add a sport that we feel Canadians could do well in, like Paralympic snowboarding. We haven't got the request yet, and I've been hearing lots of different sports proposed. We don't want to build more venues, because we're trying to minimize the cost, and we don't want to add a lot of new athletes to the program, because that increases the size of the Athletes Village, transportation increases, food, constraints on the number of days on the venues -- it's not simple to just add a sport. There's a lot of impact."
Priestner says, however, that it's par for the course for each organizing committee to face the possibility there will be additions to its program, so it's not that it's too late yet for more sports in 2010. But, as she puts it, we'd be interested in looking at additions if they have minimal impact on our operations."
VANOC's Sport director says she's not worried yet by the amount of time it's taking for finalizing the alignment of some of the trails to be used by the Whistler Nordic Centre. Geological testing for some of them is still underway, and that's work that, from original plans, was to have been completed late last spring, and a second deadline of October, has now come and gone. "It's a normal problem," she says. "When you build something like the Nordic venue, where you're defining a lot of kilometres of trail systems, there are lots of considerations. If you could just design the perfect course, and cut it, that would be the easiest, but it's not environmentally friendly -- our staff is working very, very hard to ensure there is minimal impact, environmentally, on these venues; it's critically important, and it's definitely a challenge to do it. So if you respect that, and work with the technical requirements, the elevations, and the angle of the climbs that are needed, then it's going to take some time, and you have glitches. You're trying to minimize the impact and maximize what we get out of it in the end."
She's not overly concerned yet about the timeline, though, because VANOC has deliberately designed venues to be finished early.
But finishing a venue early has its own costs, besides advantages, because they have to be operated once they're ready. And that, in turn, requires advance planning and some salesmanship to entice organize sports onto those facilities -- and that, in turn, assumes they'll be ready for those events.
VANOC has already begun setting up a preliminary schedule for using the Whistler Sliding Centre and Nordic Centre during the winters of 2007/8, 2008/9 and 2009/10, as part of the Centres' business plans. "We have to run one major test event for every discipline," says Priestner, "so with Paralympic and Olympic events, there are about 18 or 19 official test events, and they have to be at a World Cup, or world championship level. We have those reserved right now, but they're not yet a done deal, because we're quite far out for some of those years and the sports federations won't confirm until a little further on. We will also run, in the newer venues, where we don't have the development, the volunteers and the technical expertise, what we call 'training events.' You can't run a world championship in speed-skating, for example, or sliding, or Nordic, until you've started with a local event, then a provincial and then a national. We need to have that full compliment in some venues, and we don't have a lot of history for them."
That start-small-and-get-bigger process ensures the venues work properly, from staffing to equipment, but also that they are safe for the athletes and spectators alike. "The better the athletes," she notes, "the more you have to ensure safety. But the ice venues, such as skating, you don't need to test quite as much as the outdoor venues." By the time the 2010 Games arrives, Priestner says, VANOC will have run more than 50 events spread out over the venues.
Priestner points out that the design has been completed for Vancouver 2010's bobsleigh-luge-skeleton track "and it's going to be spectacular. It really satisfies the technical aspect of the sport and the speed. It's bringing everything together, and we have good terrain for it." The track, designed by international expert Udo Gurgel of IGB, has a running length of about 1,400 metres, with 16 bends. The races will last about 52 seconds, with speeds of more than 130 km/h expected.
Another major component of her venue responsibilities is called National Olympic Committee Services (NOC), which also includes the Paralympics. "We'll have up to 90 countries coming here and competing," she points out, "and we need to work over the next five years with each of those nations -- to help them make all of their arrangements, to confirm their allocations in the athlete villages, food, beverage, transpiration, security -- to make sure they are, hopefully, getting most of what they want, and definitely what they need. We're the liaison to the rest of the Organizing Committee for them."
Priestner is also in charge of the full gamut of medical services for the Games, and not just at the venues. That includes planning, building and outfitting the full-service medical clinics, called "polyclinics, at each of the two Athletes Villages. She's also responsible for providing emergency medical care at each of the venues, along with oversight of the Olympics' increasingly sophisticated system of anti-doping controls, hearings and even the anti-doping laboratories that will be built as part of the Games venue construction. There will be designated Olympic medical stations even at the hotels housing members of the so-called "Olympic Family", such as employees and managers of the Games sponsors, suppliers and dignitaries. "All of those medical services have to be organized according to Olympic Committee standards, and the sampling [for anti-doping tests] occurs at each of the venues; the lab itself will be centralized."
At first glance, it might seem that these types of medical facilities, particularly the anti-doping lab, might be provided as part of a package of services that moves from Olympics to Olympics, Priestner says that's not the case and the facilities need to be new for each Games. "Ideally, it would be nice to go to an existing lab, because building an anti-doping lab is very, very complicated. It has to be homologated [certified] to ensure the apparatus, the testing and the protocols are accurate, and it can take up to three or four months to certify a lab once it's built. But sometimes they become permanent labs. If a host country needs an anti-doping lab, they'll build it for that purpose -- Calgary did that during the 1988 Winter Games. Recently, they've been more temporary. The challenge in moving something like that from place to place is the change in technology and the drugs you're testing for; it changes immensely between Games. The changes require a different set of protocols, equipment and expertise, and I suspect in the area of anti-doping that will always be the case. We never used to do blood-testing, and now we do, and it could evolve to genetic testing or almost anything, depending on how the requirements change."
Priestner says she hopes that the anti-doping system that will be built for 2010 will be sophisticated enough to catch any athlete cheating. "That would be the goal, to keep ahead of, or up with, what's happening. Anti-doping's tough in [the high-performance sport] world because the protocols are always some years behind the actual sophistication of doping, so that gap has to somehow get filled if you're going to have a really strong program."
Most of the industrialized countries now subscribe to the anti-doping policies of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), headquartered in Montreal. It's an international organization set up to combat doping in sport, and its current president is also a member of VANOC's Board of Directors, Dick Pound, one of the Board's International Olympic Committee members.
WADA is governed and funded by the Olympic movement and most of the world's governments. Canada, the United States and the rest of countries of Central and South America, including those in the Caribbean, are responsible for 29% of the US$10 million in funding WADA receives each year from world governments. The Americas portion comes to US$2.9 million. Canada's contribution this year is 25%, US$725,000; surprisingly, the United States will pay only 50% or US$1.45 million, even though it has about 10 times the population of Canada.
"The international sports federations are slowly getting on board with WADA's directions, and it's important that the federations and WADA connect when it comes to anti-doping. You don't want the federations to establish their own protocols and testing independently of WADA; you want them to be consistent with WADA, because at the end of the day, WADA will be doing the testing [at the 2010 Games]. The federations' role, and this is where they are getting more proactive, is to fill the gaps of WADA and make sure the federations are spot- or random-testing at competitions -- because WADA doesn't come in and do that -- and that they are consistent in enhancing what is being done, in the global sense. I don't think we're 100% there with the international federations. On the winter side, we're actually very, very strong, and doing a pretty good job." The Canadian Olympic Committee, which deals with national sports federations, is a signatory to WADA.
BACKGROUND The Canadian Olympic Committee's works on various levels with what it calls its "partners": VANOC, Canada's federal, provincial and territorial governments, athletes, coaches, national sport federations, Canadian Sport Centres, the Calgary Olympic Development Association and business and private supporters. The COC also says it needs to do a more effective job with all three levels of government "to generate the additional funding required to properly fund high performance sport in Canada."
As part of its strategic plan that complements the "Own the Podium" program, the Canadian Olympic Committee said this weekend it is restructuring itself to focus more on:
- Getting athletes and coaches more involved in its activities;
- Advocating for increased funding and changes to the current sport system;
- Setting up fundraising, international training and preparation programs for athletes;
- Creating "holistic" athlete-support and educational programs.
Specific initiatives include, it says:
- Organize high-quality team-preparation and training programs as part of the COC's newly established "Excellence Series", that it hopes will better prepare Olympic hopefuls, coaches and sports for upcoming Olympic Games;
- Conduct a pre-Games, on-location training camp for athletes and coaches prior to the Olympic Games in Beijing;
- Involve the COC's newly restructured athlete advisory body, the Athletes Council, into all high-performance planning initiatives and set up a similar initiative with winter sports;
- Work collectively with Canada's summer sports to set future performance targets and plans to achieve them, with the assistance of international sport experts;
- Expand the COC's athletic and community-relations programs so that they are geared to increasing awareness of the Olympic movement in Canada, ultimately leading to increased funding for high-performance sport;
- Create a new Canadian Olympic Excellence Foundation to raise funds to support high-performance sport.
--
Why does Canada pay more, proportionately, than the United States for WADA? Because that's what it agreed to do in negotiations with the U.S.
Here's the official answer, from Frédéric Donzé, a spokesman for WADA in Montreal: "Basically, the International Inter-Governmental Consultative Group on Anti-Doping in Sport, a caucus of the world's governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) active in the fight against doping, committed in 2001 to fund half of WADA's operating budget. The governments involved in the Consultative Group also determined and agreed to the formula by which they will fund half of WADA's budget through to at least 2005 -- that is, the percentage that every continent will pay. Within each region, governments agree internally to each of their individual share."
RESOURCES A summary of the "Own The Podium" planning meeting last February, which outlines the program's goals and the people, including those from VANOC, involved:
http://www.biathloncanada.ca/main.asp?cmd=doc&ID=1797&lan=0 World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)
http://www.wada-ama.org/en/t2.asp?p=41650&pp=41648
Originally published to Morgan:News:2010:Gold subscribers on November 29, 2004
Morgan:News:2010 |General| #705
NBC'S EBERSOL AND SON HOSPITALIZED, YOUNGER SON KILLED, IN COLORADO CHARTER-JET CRASHNBC's Dick Ebersol, the most important man in television for Vancouver's 2010 Winter Games, has been hospitalized following a chartered-jet crash in Colorado, along with his college-age son, Charles, but his 14-year-old son Edward is missing and presumed dead after the cockpit was ripped from the fuselage and the plane burst into flames seconds after take-off.
Ebersol is chairman of NBC Sports, and is an avid supporter of Olympic Games. General Electric, NBC's parent company, paid nearly C$1 billion on Ebersol's recommendation for the American broadcast rights to the 2010 Winter Games, half of which goes to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Organizing Committee. It's the 11th Olympic Games Ebersol has been involved in covering. Europe paid only about half as much, per capita, for the rights to cover the 2010 Games, and the negotiations over Canada's broadcasting rights are not expected to be completed until February.
Ebersol, when the crash occurred, was in the process of making his way back to the eastern seaboard of the United States -- he lives in Connecticut with his wife, TV actress Susan St. James -- after reviewing NBC's progress and facilities for the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, and the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. Ebersol was in Vancouver for two days last week, meeting with VANOC CEO John Furlong and dining with him and some of his executive at an expensive restaurant in Vancouver. St. James was not aboard, but has flown to the hospital to be with her family.
Neither NBC nor Montrose hospital have yet revealed the extent of the injuries suffered by either Dick or Charles Ebersol. The younger son's seat is missing from fuselage, and there is no sign of the boy or his body in the vicinity of the crash; investigators currently believe the boy may have perished in the fire.
The pilot and the cabin attendant for the jet, which carried only six, but could hold 18, were also killed, and the co-pilot critically injured, as the plane attempted to lift off from Montrose Regional Airport, near the Telluride ski resort, on its way to South Bend, Indiana, where Charles is a senior at the University of Notre Dame. Charles reportedly helped his father through a hole in the side of the burning jet; both were standing on the snowy ground in their socks, having lost their shoes during the accident, when rescuers arrived.
The weather was cold and overcast, with light snow, mist and lots of slush and water on the runway, when the CL-601 Challenger jet lifted briefly, then hit the ground at the end of the runway. It skidded sideways through a fence and broke apart as it slid across a road. There is no word yet on the likely cause of the crash.
NBC will import about 1,900 personnel to cover the 2010 Games and will escort, in three waves, about 2,000 advertisers and their representatives to Vancouver and Whistler for events leading up to and during the games. That's a total of about 4,000 people hosted by NBC for various reasons connected with 2010. And Ebersol estimates, NBC's production budget for the 2010 Games will be in the neighbourhood of US$100 million.
"The Olympics are not to us a sporting event, they're not about sports rights," Ebersol told Associated Press in June. "The Olympics are something really, really special. They are the only great family viewing experience left in all of American television. They're the only thing that puts Mom, Pop and the kids in front of the television set at the same time." Ebersol, 56, has often said he dropped out of Yale University at 19 to work as an ABC-TV researcher at the Grenoble Olympics in 1968, and the experience affected his love of the Games greatly. His theme is to tell the Olympics through an emphasis on stories about the Games and its athletes, with less focus on sports results.
Originally published to Morgan:News:2010:Gold subscribers on November 29, 2004
Morgan:News:2010 |VANOC| #704
ANDREA SHAW RETURNS TO 2010 FOLD FOR SPONSORSHIP MARKETINGThe Vancouver 2010 Olympic Organizing Committee has hired Andrea Shaw, a Vancouver marketing consultant, who was the vice-president of Communications for the 2010 Bid Corporation, for sponsorship sales and marketing.
Shaw, who will part of the Revenue, Marketing and Communications group run by senior vice-president Dave Cobb, starts next week. VANOC will be legally allowed to begin signing sponsorship deals in January, once its marketing plan is finalized with the International Olympic Committee.
Shaw first joined the Bid Corporation in 2001, and worked with John Furlong, now CEO of VANOC, and Terry Wright, now senior vice-president of Planning for VANOC, when they held similar positions at the Bid Corporation. She also worked with Linda Oglov, the Bid Corp's vice-president of Marketing, who is now president of Altius Sport Marketing, a division of Cossette Communications, and who recently worked on Bell Canada's successful telecommunications sponsorship bid for the 2010 Games, and both Garnet Nelson, marketing manager of the Bid Corporation, who is also now with Altius and another marketing manager for Bid Corp, Neeta Soni.
Shaw spoke to dozens of organizations across Canada, helped the Corporation work with dozens of municipalities in British Columbia during the Bid phase to alleviate their concerns, particularly in Whistler, as well as work on presentation of the Bid itself to the International Olympic Committee, a particularly tough job during the run-up, when strict rules for candidate cities meant that often quite a bit of the concepts that needed to be communicated had to go through third parties.
She and the Bid Corporation's marketing team of 18 managers, employees and contractors also had to deal with the considerable international media attention that arose when the City of Vancouver decided to hold a plebiscite on whether to host the Games; the interest only intensified when Vancouver became the first city to win such a plebiscite.
Shaw told a reporter after the IOC awarded the Games, in July, 2003, that positioning Vancouver was key: "We decided to differentiate Canada from the competition by being exactly what we are: a very young, very forward-looking country with incredible geography, cultural diversity and fair-play values, a sophisticated urban centre right on the Pacific Ocean and a world-class alpine resort nearby. Then we never wavered from that theme."
Meanwhile, the competition portion for the key job of Communications director at VANOC closes today.
Originally published to Morgan:News:2010:Gold subscribers on November 26, 2004
Morgan:News:2010 |VANOC| #703
TEEPEE HANDICRAFTS SECOND FIRM TO BE HIT WITH BRAND-PROTECTION LAWSUITThe Vancouver 2010 Olympic Organizing Committee and the Canadian Olympic Committee are jointly going after an East Vancouver merchandise company in the courts as part of their brand-protection program.
VANOC spokesman Sam Corea says legal proceedings are beginning against Teepee Handicrafts Ltd. "to prevent the unauthorized manufacture, sale and distribution of merchandise bearing the Olympic Brand. Teepee has sold and distributed merchandise bearing marks such as VANCOUVER 2010 and 2010 VANCOUVER WHISTLER without the permission of VANOC or the COC."
John Furlong, chief executive officer of VANOC, says, "The lawsuit is another in a series of steps being taken by VANOC to protect the Olympic Brand. Official merchandise will be an important part of our efforts to finance the 2010 Winter Games."
VANOC says its lawyer had been in discussions with Teepee since September 2003 in an effort to stop the sale of merchandise allegedly relating to the 2010 Games. The lawsuit was launched after Teepee, says Corea, "refused to confirm in writing that it would not in the future manufacture, sell or distribute merchandise bearing VANCOUVER 2010, 2010 VANCOUVER WHISTLER or other aspects of the Olympic Brand."
RESOURCES Teepee Handicrafts Ltd.
1623 E. Pender St.
Vancouver, BC V5L 1W2
Phone: 604.254.7313
Fax: 604.251.5696
Originally published to Morgan:News:2010:Gold subscribers on November 25, 2004