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Five-ring circuit for Olympic organisers
THEY are Australia's Olympic gypsies - highly flexible, go anywhere executives who have leveraged their Sydney 2000 Games experience into a globe trotting career advising the Olympic cities of tomorrow.
After running 'the greatest Games ever', Australian experts are in great demand in the Olympic host cities of the future, John Lehmann and Natasha Bita report:
On September 15, it will be five years since Australia surprised the world with what Interna tional Olympic Committee pres ident Juan Antonio Samaranch described as "the greatest Games ever". The peerless logistical performance - even Sydney's trains virtually ran on time for those magical 17 days - estab lished Australia's "big event" credentials and left the next generation of Olympic city hopefuls clamouring for the talent that made it happen.
"We didn't advertise or specif ically go looking for work - it came to us," says one of the "gypsies", Sydney Olympics executive Richard Palfreyman, who was snapped up to run the 2006 Winter Olympics press centre at Turin, in Italy's north. Scores of Australian executives and companies that worked on the 2000 Games now find themselves at the centre of the international sports event management business.
Expertise developed in Sydney is transforming how cities win and stage events ranging from rugby World Cups and rugby league sevens tournaments to Pan American and Asian Games. This is one of the greatest legacies of Australia's Olympic experience and has translated into lucrative contracts in indus tries such as architecture and construction, corporate hospitality, communications technology, security, transport logistics and media management.
"People who are staging these huge events are now realising you buy in the skills - rather than starting from scratch -and because of Sydney's Games, Aus tralians are at the forefront," says Sydney lawyer and leading sports business consultant Rod McGeoch , who led the winning Games bid in 1993.
Look behind London's recent 2012 Olympic victory and you'll find a team of street-smart Aus tralians, including former Lend Lease senior executive Jim Slo man, who was the 2000 Games chief operating officer, and Sydney Olympic transport specialist Paul Willoughby.
Go to Beijing and you'll see Australian companies, such as Macquarie Bank, Telstra and architects Bligh Voller Nield hard at work as China undertakes a colossal $US35 billion ($45.4 billion) infrastructure program in preparation for the 2008 Games. With former Sydney Olympic chief Sandy Hollway opening doors through his work with the NSW Government's Sydney Beijing Olympic Secretariat, Sydney-based PTW Architects is designing Beijing's $144 million national swimming centre and the $600 million Olympic Athletes Village, while Bligh Voller Nield is planning the Beijing Olympic Green precinct and the Beijing Aquatic Park. Macquarie Bank is advising on structural finance for Beijing's Olympic Stadium.
In Turin, Winter Games organisers have installed 20 Austral ians in top jobs, including former NSW top cop Peter Ryan, who was picked up as a consultant to the IOC after overseeing Syd ney's Olympic security, and Syd ney Games' opening and closing ceremonies maestro Ric Birch.
"There's a circuit of Olympic specialists," says Evelina Chris tillin, deputy president of the Turin Games organising commit tee. "They are the elite of the elite - super-professionals who move from one Olympics to the next. They are more flexible, open to big changes and more used to moving around."
Take. 34-year-old hospitality graduate Paul Foster.
He was working as an assis tant manager at Darling Har bour's Accor Hotel in Sydney when he was seconded to supervise accommodation for Olympic officials in 2000. So impressed was the IOC with his work, it tapped him to become protocol chief for the Salt Lake City, Athens and Turin Games. In Turin, he'll manage 3000 VIPs, including dozens of presi dents, prime ministers and prin cesses. His duties include liais g with embassies, organisingimterpreters, preparing flags flowers and national anthems' choosing VIP wardrobes and even measuring the height of lecterns for official speeches.
"You pinch yourself when you're meeting ambassadors, heads of state, and proposimg where their president will sit," he says.
Staging an Olympics must be on othe world's most complex , logistical exercises.
The organising committee must build up quickly to the size of a Fortune 500 company, raise and manage a $2.5 billion budget, undertake massive infrastructure programs -which usually include a housing estate capable of accommodating 10,000 athletes and officials - market 6 million tickets and ensure its city can transport and accommodate 100,000 tourists and handle 17,000 journalists .
And that's not even mentioning the core task - the staging of world championships in 28 sports over 17 days.
But until the 2000 Olympic Games host city would find itself starting its planning from the ground up, receiving virtually no assistance from previous Olympic committees and only arm's-length supervision from the IOC. The old joke was that the only amateurs left in the Olympics were the organisers.
Former SOCOG board member and Australian Olympic Committee secretary-general Craig McLatchey remembers the frustrations of SOCOG's
early planning.
"You had a situation where every two years, a $2-$4 billion Olympic event would be staged somewhere, and every time the organisers would start all over again - no historical data, no corporate knowledge," he says. "You would see SOCOG staff literally sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper, trying to work things out."
"Sitting down with General Motors-Holden for example, and not even knowing how many cars we actually needed -it just wasn't right."
In a bid to improve such an inefficient system - and to make a few extra dollars for the cash-strapped SOCOG budget -SOCOG executives started a "transfer of knowledge" program, drafting a set of "how to" documents and selling them to the IOC for $4.5 million.
McLatchey , a Harvard busi ness school graduate, took the strategy further after the Olympics when he was headhunted to run a new IOC-backed enterprise, Olympic Games Knowledge Services, which was set up to provide detailed advice to Olympic organising committees.
That enterprise has now been spun off into the privately held Event Knowledge Services, of which McLatchey is chief executive officer.
Not only is McLatchey's group advising cities hoping to bid for an Olympics as well as those that have won Olympic events, but it has leveraged its . "big event" expertise into other sporting codes.
Event Knowledge Services' clients include the International Rugby Board, FIFA, the Commonwealth Games Federation and the Olympic Council of Asia , which is holding its 2006 Asian Games in Doha, Qatar. Based in Lausanne, Switzer land, McLatchey relies on the expertise of seven key staff and 40 advisers, some of whom cut their teeth in Sydney.
Sydney based M1 Associates, a company Jim Sloman formed with two SOCOG general managers, John Quayle and Peter Morris, has also established itself as an influential player on the international scene.
Before deciding to take a "career risk" and sign up to work on Sydney's Olympic team, Sloman, now 60, had worked for Lend Lease for more than 23 years.
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Now, his work takes him.from London to Beijing, to Ri0 de Janerio -which hopes to hold South America's first Olympics.
"It's been a terrific chapter and you do think to yourse!f sometimes, gee, how did this happen?" Sloman says.