‘A POWERFUL HOMECOMING FOR THE WORLD OF SPORT’
Vancouver 2010 chief thinks Tokyo can be transformative in post-pandemic world
As he pondered, prepared and ultimately pitched a bid to welcome the world, Vancouver 2010 organizer John Furlong read basically every book he could find on the Olympics.
There’s never been a chapter like this.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced an unprecedented postponement of the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo, now delayed until 2021.
“I feel really, really bad for Japan,” said Furlong, who served as president and CEO of the Vancouver organizing committee. “But I do think, out of this, Japan may get an opportunity that was far greater than the one they had, because they will get to play a different role. Up until a few months ago, we were looking forward to Tokyo 2020. Well, you can replace that ‘Tokyo 2020’ with ‘The World 2020.’
“They have an opportunity now to do something profound, far beyond the mandate they were given. And I suspect that they will seize that, and that the world will cheer them on.”
With some countries in lockdown mode and most others banning large-scale gatherings in an effort to stop the spread of novel coronavirus, it’s difficult right now to envision 68,000 spectators packed into Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium for the opening ceremony or to imagine competitors from around the globe dripping sweat on a basketball court or a wrestling mat and sharing space in an athlete village.
Eventually, though, the world will be ready for its ‘We’re Back!’ moment.
Furlong figures that could come from July 23-Aug. 8, 2021, in Japan’s capital city.
“Over the last 10 years, much of what has been written about the Olympic Games has not been flattering. There’s been a lot of questions and issues and so on,” Furlong said. “We’ve now been given the microphone to change the narrative and to talk about the value of this … This is an opportunity that we have to seize. I mean, I can’t imagine the argument against making this a powerful homecoming for the world of sport in Tokyo next year, and I think it’s on everybody to be part of that.
“To me, these Games will be pivotal in hopefully bringing people back to the values behind the Games, and hopefully they will have this unifying power that they’re supposed to have and that part won’t get lost in other stories.
“I just don’t think that’s ever been needed more than it’s needed now.”
The 2010 Winter Olympics were such a success that there is now talk of Vancouver bidding to play host again in 2030.
There were certainly challenges — an economic recession in 2008-09, panic over the lack of snow at Cypress Mountain and the tragic death of a luge athlete during a training run — but Canadians now fondly reminisce about Jon Montgomery’s unlikely victory on the skeleton track and his sudsy stomp through Whistler, about the goosebumps-worthy performance by bronze medallist figure-skater Joannie Rochette just days after the death of her mother and, of course, about Sidney Crosby’s golden goal.
Along the way, organizers executed what some thought was a far-fetched game plan. As Furlong puts it now, “We set out to try to stage an Olympic Games in a way that, effectively, we would be nation-builders.”
“The phrase ‘Gold-medal Sunday’ is used very often to talk about the last Sunday of the Olympics,” Furlong said. “And when I think about the last Sunday of the Games and what happened … I mean, it was just a hockey game and it was just a goal. But the fact of the matter is that people woke up the next day after that hockey game and they wanted to be Sidney Crosby. They wanted to be Joannie
Rochette or Kevin Martin. It had this effect of actually lifting people up. It went so far beyond even our own wildest expectations. And this is the power of the Olympics.
“So when I think back about all of this, I’m just grateful that when we did the Vancouver Games, that we were really trying for something bigger than two weeks of sport. We were. At the time, we were trying to advance this idea of a stronger Canada — ‘To touch the soul of the nation’ was the opening of the mission statement for the Games. This was part of what we felt the Games could do for individual Canadians, wherever they lived. I’m very grateful today that’s what the goal was.
“There were many leaders in the community, politicians and others, who found that as a goal and as a vision too far — like,
‘You can’t possibly achieve that,’ and ‘It should be more of a local story.’ But the Games have that kind of power.”
Furlong turns his focus to Tokyo, to the first post-pandemic Olympics.
“I think people will come out of this period and very badly need this injection of humanity and spirit that has been missing,” he said. “If I was the leader of the organizing committee, I would be thinking very much about, ‘Do I have a new responsibility now over the one that I had?’
“Before, it was going to probably be just a Japanese story. I do think now we’ve seen what something like this can do the world and maybe Japan and all of the players in the Olympic family can come together and this can be a much more unifying story and we can come out of Tokyo feeling renewed and that the Olympic spirit has been somehow reignited.”