The pitch master
> BOB RICHARDSON
House to black, lights go up. That’s how Canada won the Games. In the wings was prominent political organizer Bob Richardson, who had got the bid team to Guadalajara, Mexico, to make its pitch. The longtime Liberal, 53, is credited with paving the way for Canada and Toronto to make the 2009 bid to host the Games.
Ottawa mayor and former Ontario Liberal MPP Jim Watson remembers being invited to Richardson’s Toronto home for a meet-and-greet with local athletes and sport administrators in 2005, after Watson had been appointed provincial minister of health promotion. “He really was the first one that suggested to me that we look into the Pan Am Games,” Watson says.
The thinking was that the only way to draw investment from all levels of government in new sporting facilities was to bring an international, multi-sport competition to home turf. “Without hesitation,” continues Watson, “I can say we wouldn’t be celebrating the Pan Am Games if it wasn’t for a lot of those initial moves that Bob made to get all the parties to the table.”
Richardson is the kind of backroom operator who might not be recognized on the street but is well known and much liked in different political spheres.
Coming off a failed Olympic bid for the 2008 Games as the chief operating officer, he grappled with other ways to bring that investment to Toronto. The politically minded Richardson, who admits he’s not much of a sports guy, is used to getting his way — see his co-chairing of John Tory’s successful 2014 mayoralty campaign.
“It was more a marriage of sport and politics,” he recalls of the Pan Am campaign in an interview at the Bloor St. W. offices of Edelman Canada, where he is executive vice-president of public affairs.
Richardson says it pays to be the nice guy — one who can pitch a Conservative federal government, a Liberal provincial government and David Miller’s Toronto to agree on the same thing.
After a cabinet shuffle and his friend Watson taking on the health promotion beat, Richardson saw his window.
The first step was to meet with those at the top of the Pan American Sports Organization. When he’s trying to win a campaign, Richardson polls the numbers. Can his candidate win? He wanted to know if the bid for the 2015 Games was an open race or whether it was a done deal, with Toronto entering a year after top contenders Bogota and Lima were already in the running. He got the green light.
After then premier Dalton McGuinty gave him a deadline to bring everyone onside at home, Toronto put its name in the ring at Canada House during the Beijing Olympics.
When it came time to make the final push, Richardson says, everyone did their part. Bid leader McGuinty called all Pan Am members with a vote one last time before arriving in Guadalajara in November 2009 for the presentation. “We left no stone unturned,” says Richardson.
Toronto’s rehearsed presentation was, in his words, more “unconventional” than the others, which mostly involved top officials giving speeches. The Toronto pitch was “glitzy,” the Star wrote then, with gymnasts and other athletes bursting into the room and a video meant to tug on the heartstrings.
Later, looking at the piles of ballots being counted, Canada’s backroom team could see one towering over the others. But Richardson already had some idea of what the result would be. He likes to know where he stands. And this one, especially, he was not going to lose.