Abstract: As integral parts of the Olympic games， the Olympic Ceremonies have turned to be a spotlight. Thus , they are obliged to be studied in a broader context. This study concludes that the role and format of public ceremonies is constantly evolving and they are potentially delivering a greater reward to host nations and having a positive impact on more people across the globe. They’re part of the cycle of our lives. They’re one of the ways by which we log our individual and collective history ，“Beijing 2008” being a prime example of this ‘principle’ in action
Keywords：Olympic Ceremonies
Good afternoon to you all.
I’d like to begin by saying how delighted and honoured I am to be joining you all today and to have been given the opportunity to contribute to this extra-ordinary gathering and the International Forum on the 2008 Olympic Games.
Jack Morton Worldwide
My name is David Zolkwer and I am the Director of Jack Morton Public Events.
Although my home base is in England, Jack Morton is an international company. We are a community of close to 600 professionals located in offices in Australia, the United States, Hong Kong and, in the near future, Beijing. We’ve also been in business for over 60 years.
Every year and all over the world Jack Morton produces hundreds of experiential corporate communication for some of the worlds leading international brands. All the companies we work for – and our corporate client base spans virtually every major industry – look to Jack Morton to provide experiences that communicate strategies and ideas, improve performance, raise profile, increase sales and build brands. The audiences we speak to might be staff or consumers, other businesses, the media or, in the case of our public events work, potentially, the entire watching world.
As I said, I head up our public events team – and in that role I am here to share something of my experience as Jack Morton Worldwide’s Project Director for the Athens 2004 Olympic Ceremonies and other similar projects.
The role of ceremonies
But before I tell you the specific story of my time in Athens I thought I’d take a moment to put my experience and indeed, the Olympic Ceremonies into a broader context. So I’ll begin by briefly talking about the role of Ceremonies in general terms.
So, first of all, why bother with ceremonies?
Well of course, we don’t have to have them – we don’t really need them. We choose to stage them. And our everyday lives are crammed full of them.
Birthdays, graduations, weddings, anniversaries and funerals, the arrival of the seasons, new years, rights of passage, achievements and losses – ceremonies – large or small, religious or secular, state or civilian – mark, celebrate or even mourn many events throughout our lifetimes.
I think Ceremonies are important to all of us because they bring pattern, rhythm and structure to our lives. They’re part of the cycle of our lives. They’re one of the ways by which we log our individual and collective history – maybe that’s why places and dates play an important role in how they are named – “Beijing 2008” being a prime example of this ‘principle’ in action.
Every society weaves ceremony – both profound and frivolous – into its fabric because they represent an opportunity to capture or commemorate a moment in time. Because they allow us to share a moment in time with our friends, our families, our communities and, on occasion - as will be the case for Beijing 2008 - the world.
These days, it’s not unusual for us to celebrate a wide range of significant international public events with formal, highly organised ceremonies. It can be the return or handover of one country to another – as was the case in 1997 when we produced the ceremonies for the Hong Kong Handover and Farewell, it can be the Opening of the G8 leaders summit, an event we staged back in 1998 and will be repeating in Scotland in just a few days. It can be an event to commemorate the Millennium or 100 years of Federal Government in Australia; and of course, it can be the Ceremonies for a Commonwealth or Olympic Games.
All these ceremonies are designed to mark and celebrate a unique moment in time and to differentiate one time from another and one place from another - and nowhere was that principle more apparent than in our work in Athens as Producers of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies.
What Athens and many of the other events and experiences Jack Morton has created over the years demonstrate is that the role and format of large-scale public ceremonies is constantly evolving.
These days Olympic Ceremonies can include moments of pathos and celebration. They can be profound or flippant, abstract and literal, symbolic and explicit. They might be about both national pride and global unity. They are becoming more sophisticated in their conception and execution and in the range of messages they communicate and the objectives they attempt to realise. At the same time, they are potentially delivering a greater reward to host nations and having a greater positive impact on more people across the globe than ever before.
And of course, it’s no coincidence that I think I’ve just described the brief for the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of Beijing 2008.
As I said, one of the reasons I’ve been invited here today is because of the role I and the Jack Morton team played in Athens – a similar role you won’t be surprised to hear that we’re hoping to play once more here in Beijing in the not too distant future.
So let me spend some time providing you with an insight into some of our work in Athens and I’ll then try and relate some of my experience to the challenge being presented to Beijing and China.
To set the scene, here is a short video edit of the Opening Ceremony.
Athens 2004
Apparently over 4 billion people have seen the Athens 2004 Opening Ceremony. And although it lasted little more than three hours, during that short time the world’s perception of Athens and Greece underwent an incredible transformation.
For the months, even years leading up to the Games, the media had been brutally sceptical of the country’s and ATHOC – the Athens Organizing Committee’s - readiness and capability to play host to the single largest sporting event on the planet.
As far as the media was concerned, Athens 2004 was going to be a disaster. There were rumours of cancellation, almost-serious lobbying for Sydney to play host to the Games once more, and jokes about Beijing being closer to readiness than Athens was.
But immediately after the Opening Ceremony it was clear that the world was now united in its praise of the ambition, imagination, technical brilliance and artistry of an opening ceremony unlike any before.
And more importantly, the world’s perception of Greece as a country - or, to put my corporate communications hat on, - as a ‘brand - dramatically changed for the better – a perception later substantiated by the success of the Games themselves.
(In fact, post Games research1 revealed that for over 60% of the Olympics viewing audience, the Ceremonies represented the most memorable aspect of the Games. And I should add that over 70% of the audience polled said they were sports buffs who watched every day of the Games.
Also, research was carried out about peoples’ impression of Greece both before and after the Games. Take the USA. Prior to the Games, only 53% of the sample felt positive about Greece. After the Games this figure increased to 76%. One year on from the Games, Greek tourism in 2005 is thriving like never before).
Now, whilst it took less than four hours to win over the cynics it took the Jack Morton team– working in partnership with ATHOC and a core Greek creative team led by Dimitris Papaioannou– nineteen months to produce the ceremonies.
Actually, rue nature of both the personalalthough I say that it took us nineteen months, our involvement in the Games really began in the summer of 2002 when, whilst we were in production for the Commonwealth Games ceremonies in Manchester, we were also presenting our credentials to the Athens organizing committee. This was ‘Stage 1’ of what turned out to be a 3-stage and very public tendering process in which a not so short list of12 companies from across the world competed for the privilege of producing the ceremonies.
Finally, on December 16th 2002 - after months of presentations - we received the call from Athens to tell us that ….we‘d lost the bid!
A few seconds later the client informed us that he was only joking, that wehad won the bid really and we needed to quickly get used to the Greek sense of humour.
Just two weeks after that on the 6th January 2003 we opened the door to our temporary office in an anonymous block in downtown Athens just a kilometer or so from the Panothanikos Stadium, the venue for the first Olympic Games of the modern era in 1896.
And a few of kilometers down the road this is what the Olympic stadium looked like at that time.
After we’d been in Athens for about a month or so quite naturally our initial surge of post bid-win euphoria began to wane, leaving behind a very distinct sense of urgency. The truth is, to my mind, we had been appointed at least 6 months late and time was always going to be short.
In an ideal world the race to readiness for the Ceremonies of the 2004 Olympic Games should have been a steady marathon but in reality it was never anything less than a prolonged sprint.
Our appointment as Producers of the ceremonies meant that this was actually the first time a non-indigenous team had been brought in to produce Olympic ceremonies. We were not providing a one or two-man consultancy team or supplementing an Organizing Committee’s existing in-house team. We were creating a complete Ceremonies team from scratch.
On day one there were just 6 of us. But of course, we were well aware would have to grow from the ground up very quickly in order to meet the challenges ahead and we quickly started recruiting locally and pulling in colleagues from all around our worldwide network.
By March 2003 there were 15 of us.
By March 2004 there were nearly 200 of us.
And by the time the Ceremonies actually came around the Jack Morton team comprised nearly 400 people. 70% were Greek nationals. The remainder came from 8 other countries.
There were many wonderful aspects to working in Greece – the warm, hospitable and passionate people, the culture, the sense of history and pride in the knowledge that the Games were coming home. But we were the visitors and along with the honour and sense of pride that we felt to be a part of it all, there came an implicit obligation to adapt, without compromising the job we had been employed to do.
In short, we were not being employed to produce Jack Morton ceremonies. We were employed to create Greek ceremonies and that’s what we did.
In the process, many of us had to learn to live in Greece, not just work there – just as we hope to do here in Beijing albeit with a smaller team because there already so much talent in China. That was one of our challenges, but of course, it was ultimately to prove one of our lasting delights.
To be frank, the first six months of our time in Athens was spent carrying out the relatively mundane tasks many of you will be familiar with related to planning a production.
I spent most of my time working as a creative collaborator and consultant to the Greek creative team – in fact, I was the only non-Greek on the creative team for close to a year.
At the same time we were scoping the project. We were scheduling, budgeting, researching, resourcing, drawing, modeling and doing all the other things many people in the room today do on a regular basis albeit we were doing it on an Olympic scale.
Now, I say this was all ‘mundane’ production activity – but of course, I don’t mean that as flippantly as it sounds. Despite working very hard to look cool, calm and collected, everyone on the Jack Morton team was very well aware that there was nothing mundane about being in Athens producing the Ceremonies of the Olympic Games.
On the contrary, it rarely felt like anything less than a challenge of epic but thrilling proportions. Regardless of how day-to-day production life was treating us, it wasn’t ever anything less than an honour and a privilege to be a part of it.
I can answer any specific questions you might have about the production process
later but for now, let me step through some of the events and activities leading up
to the Ceremonies that standout as milestones to me
As I said, we arrived in Athens in January 2003. This meant that after a little more than 7 months we had already reached ‘one-year to go’ and the local press was desperate for a scoop to mark the occasion. This also coincided with our need to test many creative ideas, production techniques and technical solutions at scale.
So, for reasons of technical logistics and secrecy, for a couple of weeks the project team transferred from one of the hottest cities in the world to one of the coldest fields in the North of England – just outside Harrogate.
An international team in excess of 100 people built full-scale fragments and representations of many aspects of the ceremonies so that we could experiment with lighting, video and various special affects.
You can see from these images that it was a significant production in its own right.
But it proved immensely productive and inspiring.
Working at night and in temperatures barely above freezing, we saw what we had already achieved.
And so could ATHOC.
And so could the broadcasters.
It was pretty much the first time that every key stakeholder had come together as one to take the pulse of the project.
Most importantly, we caught more than a glimpse of what we would be sharing with the world twelve months later and it looked good.
I believe that one of the most important of the many reasons why it is critical to have a clearly defined vision of the creative intent and a robust plan to deliver it is so that when hit by a moment of inspiration or the victim of a happy accident, the project and the project team is secure and confident enough first of all to be able to actually spot the opportunity being presented, and is then able to exploit it.
The test event was an excellent example of this sort of dynamic in action on numerous occasions, one of them being the discovery of the need for a red centaur that was destined to become one of the iconic images of the Opening Ceremony. His presence in the show came about because as we viewed fiberglass representations of the Cycladic head flying around a field in Harrogate we realized that we were struggling to perceive any real sense of scale.
This was precisely why we were conducting tests – of course to test what we knew we wanted to test but also to discover things we didn’t know needed discovering.
We had a brainwave. We went out and bought a red sheet and threw it around a production assistant before asking her to wade through the water beneath the flying fragments.
It was this injection of recognizable human scale and vivid colour that ultimately led to the initiation of an extensive design, research and development process and ultimately, the creation of our wonderful, lyrical red centaur.
Without the test; without the water and the cameras; without the lighting and the crew; without an obsession for detail, not only might we not have discovered the issue of scale and colour until much later in the process, but also more importantly we may not have discovered such a satisfying solution to the concern.
So, the test event was about testing ideas and solutions against both live and broadcast criteria and it gave us a return on investment that exceeded the expectations of many people.
And I should add that of course, this wasn’t the only test event we held. We conducted many other significantly more modest events in Greece and other locations in Europe – and virtually all of them reaped invaluable creative rewards.
Incidentally this is the team as it stood, the day after the test event was concluded, back in Athens, having a drink in the Olympic Stadium to celebrate the one-year to go mark.
And this is what the stadium looked like at that time.
One of the goals we at Jack Morton set ourselves in our public events work is to truly and sincerely engage the local community and leave behind a lasting and meaningful legacy. And one of the more obvious ways to do this is to involve as many of them as possible in the show.
A month after returning from the test event, auditions began.
This was in September 2003. And they concluded in February 2004.
Our casting team did a remarkable job in ensuring that – for the Greek public – their first Olympic experience was a positive one.
We produced and ran a series of adverts in the press and on television and word quickly spread across the community that this was a fantastic experience in its own right – which was important to us because we were relying heavily on positive word of mouth to increase attendances further in order to meet our quota of the thousands of performers and hundreds of technical support staff that we needed to get involved.
It was fascinating and rewarding to see so many applicants not just from Greece but also from further afield too.
We had people fly in from manyother countries including a handful of veterans from our Ceremonies for the Manchester 2002 Commonwealth Games.
In fact, by show time, our cast ranged in age from 7 to 75 and represented 16 countries aside from Greece.
As you’d expect, we worked hard to give everyone who turned up to audition a role in at least one of the ceremonies and on Friday May 28th we began rehearsals at our off-site facility located on the outskirts of Athens around 25 kilometers from the Olympic stadium.
This was 85 days out from the Opening Ceremony.
Here we had a huge warehouse space in which we stored costumes and props tested make-up, rigged a training flying system and registered and briefed arriving cast members for rehearsals.
Outside, there was a massive expanse of concrete onto which we painted kilometers of lines to describe the full-scale footprint of the stadium.
Again, we also simulated as much of the experience and technology as possible that the cast would encounter when they eventually transferred over to the stadium – including the wheat field we created for the Closing Ceremony
On weekday evenings and weekends buses and buses of volunteers would arrive at this isolated site to rehearse for four hours at a time whilst the production team would be efficiently scurrying around transferring and setting people, props and costumes and thousands of bottles of drinking water and sun protection.
During breaks everyone would rush back indoors to hide from the sun as trucks quickly criss-crossed the acres of concrete rehearsal stage spraying water in all directions in order to cool the tarmac that got so hot baking in the Greek sun.
The level of commitment and passion for the task at hand from both the seen-it-all professionals and the first time volunteers was quite overwhelming and it wasn’t unusual to see individuals quietly shedding a tear simply because of the emotion they felt as a result of being a part of something so extraordinary.
In fact, so powerful were these rehearsal experiences that I would have to say that one of the most memorable moments of my entire time in Athens occurred on the Friday night before the Sunday Closing Ceremony.
We had just completed a rehearsal featuring the Beijing Handover segment so, in addition to the thousands of local volunteer cast members and our headline talent we were also had the company of the troupe of performers and creative personnel from China.
As we were wrapping up, the entire cast and crew assembled in front of the production tower.
We were standing there looking down at a sea of some 2500 faces from countries all over the world.
They stood perspiring and intermingled; their multicolored ethnic costumes washed in the warm orange of a gorgeous early evening Greek sun.
As they looked up to us on the tower our choreographer announced that we had all just concluded the final rehearsal of the 2004 Olympics.
The spontaneous reaction to this announcement that followed is impossible to fully describe. For over ten minutes there were cheers and hugs and tears. After literally months of volunteering hundreds of hours of their time - aside from the small matter of the actual performance - it was nearly over.
But it was also clear that the experience was never going to be forgotten by anyone privileged enough to be a part of it.
(I think there’s something significant in the fact that despite spending months working to produce a world class theatrical experience to be shared with billions of people, it’s actually these sort of relatively small human moments that remain in one’s heart. I certainly believe that the quality of the journey we as a team took from our arrival in Greece to the curtain falling on the Closing Ceremony had a palpable impact on the quality of the end result).
Aside from our production offices, warehouse facilities, the rehearsal site and the actual Olympic Stadium, the Jack Morton team also occupied an abandoned terminal at the old Helenikon airport.
This became our costume and props workshop and home, or commune, to artists, sculptors, milliners, shoemakers, jewellery makers and many many other creative talents.
This is where we made all the costumes for the show’s central classical parade along with the props required for both ceremonies and we used up 6.5 miles of fabric, 9 miles of thread, 528 gallons of glue and 150 gallons of paint in the process.
Now, I mentioned earlier that the media was always on our case. And there really wasn’t much good news coming out of Athens. And the question on everyone’s lips was “will Athens be ready?”
Personally I didn’t find the negative coverage too distressing. Ironically this was partly because, being in the eye of the storm, we were to some extent shielded from some of the harsher stories being run overseas.
Also, to be honest, much of what was being said was actually more fact than fiction. The city was behind schedule. So why get annoyed? In fact, global recognition of the delay to the stadium became so strong that Smith’s crisps were able to run this advert safe in the knowledge that their audience would get the joke.
(SMITHS CRISPS VIDEO)
Somehow, I suspect that the sorry picture of Athens conveyed in this advert is not going to apply here in China.
Although all of us, including our Greek teammates thought it was kind of funny at the time, the truth is that the image of the stadium presented in the ad was a little closer to home than anyone would have liked.
Indeed, whilst we were rehearsing and making costumes and props offsite, in the stadium our technical and operations teams were battling against all odds to transform the stadium into a theatrical performance space.
As I’ve said, an ongoing issue during our time in Athens was the readiness of the stadium – or rather, the lack of it.
The stadium refurbishment programme – which had nothing to do with Jack Morton - moved very slowly indeed. It was very frustrating to live with these delays knowing that the only thing in the schedule that could give were our rehearsals – and therefore potentially the quality and security of our show.
All we could do was watch, adapt our plans on what felt like a daily basis, and wait.
And Adam Wildi,our Technical Director was perhaps most acutely aware of the impact any delay large or small was going to have on the project.
In addition to the installation of one of the most ambitious temporary flying rigs ever installed, the creative plan also called for massive engineering works to be carried out in the stadium.
We required a thirty metre deep pit to be excavated in the centre of the field. That’s five hundred thousand cubic feet of earth or the equivalent of five hundred dump trucks full of dirt. By anyone’s standards, it was a big hole.
And it was in here that we stored much of our scenery and special affects before they were introduced into the performance space up above either via the cable net, or via a lift capabable of carrying over 100,000 pounds of weight.
And a service tunnel buried beneath the running track and field of play allowed cast and crew to travel from behind the stands too and from the pit.
The pit was surrounded by a subterranean ‘doughnut’ reservoir that stored, purified and pumped nearly 2 million litres of water. It took around five hours to fill the performance space with water and – miraculously - less than three minutes to drain it.
All this to ‘simply’ but beautifully and spectacularly symbolize the Greek love of and affinity with the sea.
But perhaps the most ambitious and innovative part of the show involved the reveal, breaking and flying of the Cycladic head and the other two figures contained within it like babushka dolls.
From the start this was always going to be a huge challenge – to put it mildly.
The plan had always been to spend a couple of weeks commissioning the head before we transferred the cast into the stadium for rehearsals.
For the technical team “commissioning,” meant trying it, identifying failures, learning from them, making some subtle adjustments and trying again.
In addition to detailed visualization, design, modeling, computer simulation, and various tests and experiments, a period of old fashioned ‘trial and error’ was an important, expected and scheduled part of the process.
And a disciplined adherence to the schedule was important because it took the best part of 24 hours to reassemble the structure every time it was flown and broken.
However, the delays to the completion of the stadium meant that we were forced to rehearse with cast, broadcasters and ATHOC representatives in attendance and commission the structure simultaneously.
This meant that when the break went wrong as – I stress - it was initially expected to do, it did so in front of an audience.
And of course when it went wrong, to an outsider it seemed to go very wrong indeed. In fact, it was always clear that this sequence was going to be a showstopper whether it worked on the night or not.
The pressure on all of us but especially the technical team was immense. With just days to go before our first dress rehearsal the break had still not been executed to our satisfaction.
Reluctantly, I called for a meeting to discuss options for simplification.
The client was sympathetic to our challenge and recognized that we were victims of circumstances beyond our control or remit. I felt I had to give the technical team the opportunity to simplify the break – perhaps by cutting one of the figures. This was the technical team’s opportunity to remove at least one layer of risk and maybe make their lives a little easier. It wasn’t our fault we were where we were – and everybody new it. We could compromise with no loss of face.
Though we would have all been very disappointed, everyone would have respected the technical teams’ decision to take an easier route and perhaps also indulged in a secret sigh of relie
In delivering a show of this magnitude and sophistication under so much duress, there’s no doubt that everyone closely involved had on too many occasions to find the courage to make some really tough decisions.
Well, the Jack Morton technical team certainly showed its courage.
To my relief, they rejected the option of an easier route.
They were committed to delivering what they had promised to deliver; - regardless of what fate had throw in their way - and they were not going to falter now even though there were just days to go and we’d never seen the reveal work in its entirety.
As far as we were concerned, we were still on plan. The technical and production team nodded their heads whilst many other people were shaking theirs and I remain in awe of their courage and professionalism.
And of course, on the night the risk proved well worth taking.
The courage, spirit and determination demonstrated by our technical team also lived in every other department as well. Production, Operations, Logistics, Casting, Wardrobe, Props, HR and Commercial – every department was fighting the fight and proving their talents, tenacity and ingenuity on a daily basis. From day one, every member of the team was committed to delivering their piece of the jigsaw and to ensuring that the odds of success were stacked in our favour.
Before I conclude, I’d like to share a piece of video with you. I think it’s interesting because it shows the entire Opening Ceremony and the transformation of our ‘theatre’ back into a sports stadium over a period of just four days.
It then cuts to the 16 hours we had between the end of sports and the run up to the Closing Ceremony.
And it all takes just 2 minutes and 57 seconds…
(TIMELAPSE VIDEO)
Lessons and conclusions
I feel as though the conclusion to my presentation should share some definitive lessons and messages about how Beijing might approach its Olympic Ceremonies. But I’m also very mindful that that would be presumptuous of me when talking to so many industry professionals as I am today.
And of course, every event, every location, every context brings with it it’s own unique challenges and idiosyncrasies.
All I can do is share some of the lessons I either learnt or had reaffirmed in Athens:
1.
First, the Ceremonies matter. They set the stage for sport. They create differentiation between one recurring event and another; between one host city and another.
Ceremonies afford the host city or nation a chance to introduce, reintroduce or even reinvent itself in front of the world.
They are an opportunity to throw out stereotypical perceptions based on history rather than current reality.
Ceremonies embody the message that a nation wants to share with the rest of the world:
‘This is who we are’
‘This is what we stand for’
‘This is how we see the world’
‘This is how we relate to you - wherever you are’
‘This is how we hope you will relate to us’
Ceremonies are the ultimate brand experiences; they are a massive advert for a place and a people. As you all know, this means that the Beijing Ceremonies are a fantastic, once in a lifetime opportunity for China.
2.
Secondly, although Olympic Ceremonies must convey the enduring values of the event it represents – I believe that they must also be deeply individual if they are to be distinctive.
My personal view is that China needs to present itself in a way that first and foremost represents and engages the people of China in a way that is true to itself. (This is what we did in Athens).
Then it needs to engage the rest of the world. It needs to tell a story, drawing on all that China has to offer in terms of art, culture and experience. It should celebrate it’s past and present but it can also include a glimpse of it’s hoped for future.
At the same time, the story told should resonate with the rest of the world. It should engage and inspire. The world may comprise wildly contrasting cultural experiences, but we are all nevertheless united in our ability to love, to fear, to hope, to dream, to learn, to be inspired; we are united by our humanity and our common human aspirations. We don’t need homogenization to create understanding and empathy. China need not try to emulate any other place or create a potentially false picture of itself that it thinks the world wants to see. It just needs to be true to itself. If it tries to do otherwise, the world will spot it.
In this way China can offer the world an artistic, cultural respite from the ongoing trend for global corporate homogenization.
3.
Thirdly, of course scale, theatricality and spectacle are key ingredients of an Olympic Ceremony and technology plays a vital role in delivering such elements to the world. But spectacle and technology are simply a means to an end. They will not compensate for a poor quality storyline, or a story without message, passion or resonance for your audience. Which is why, when the world tunes in to hear what you have to say, make sure you have something sincere to say.
4.
Four. Despite the fact that there is clearly a huge amount of indigenous production capability within China, I believe it will nevertheless need the support of external Olympic and large-scale event talent and experience in order to deliver the Olympic Ceremonies to a global audience. (Here I’m talking about production know-how, not the creative).
I believe that China must judiciously draw on external, international expertise to ‘bridge the gap’ between the talents, skills and experience that already reside in China and those required to deliver inspiring, spectacular Olympic Ceremonies to over four billion people across the world.
And when building teams and appointing partners don’t be blinded by CVs crammed with experience. Experience is important of course. And talent must also be a given. But the most valuable people to me in Athens proved to be those that could adapt to their environment; who were prepared and committed to learn from the local community as well as contribute and teach; who had tenacity and sensitivity; endurance and passion and enthusiasm; people for whom working on the Olympics was personal commitment; a vocation.
So, choose your international partners carefully. If you don’t trust them, don’t employ them. If you can’t see yourself working with them openly, happily and productively for the next three years, don’t employ them. And once they have been appointed, embrace them, trust them, respect their expertise and listen to their advice. Actively help them deliver on their promises so that China can deliver on its promise.
5.
Five. Time is your most valuable resource. Exploit it to the full. If you fail to do so, mistakes will be made, budget will be wasted and you will not reach your full potential. I say this because, despite appearances, time is actually already in short supply for Beijing.
6.
And finally, respect, co-operate and communicate with each other. Every Olympic Games - wherever they have been staged – has been plagued with politics, bureaucracy and clashes of ego. Time and energy spent overcoming these ‘internal’ issues is time spent not thinking about your audience – which in this case, happens to be pretty much the entire world.
Once again, I’d like to thank the organisers of the Forum on the 2008 Olympic Games for inviting me to speak to you today and for allowing me to join such an auspicious group of fellow speakers and delegates – it really is an honour and a privilege.
Thank you.
1 Research was conducted in the USA, UK, Spain, Germany and France on behalf of ATHENS 2004 by a consortium consisting of MRB,
VPRC and Research International
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