Olympic Spirit centre shuts doors

[divingbrit]

Selling the Olympic sizzle turned out to be a fizzle.

The $42-million Olympic Spirit Toronto building closed its doors to the public last night, amid complaints from Olympic Spirit executives that they could not get a lifeline from the Vancouver Olympic Games organizers, who were expected to help market the project.

"VANOC ignored us, and I wish there was a more polite, less inflammatory way of saying it," said Jay Whiteside, the president and chief executive officer of the two-year-old Olympic Spirit centre.

When the project was undertaken, in the days after Toronto's bid for the Summer Olympics of 2008 was overwhelmed by the Beijing juggernaut, there were plans for it to function as a gallery for the Olympic message, its history and symbolic rings and flame.

The business model and marketing were conceived as a collaborative effort between the International Olympic Committee and the old Canadian Olympic Association. IOC marketers had deemed Toronto an international and multicultural city in which the project could succeed.

But when Vancouver won the right to host the Winter Olympics in 2010, the renamed Canadian Olympic Committee collapsed its marketing arm into the VANOC organization. Despite a number of meetings with Vancouver Games executives, Olympic Spirit Toronto was never much of a factor in Vancouver's plans, Whiteside said. It became an Olympic orphan.

Renée Smith-Valade, VANOC's vice-president of communications, said last night that the organizing committee made an effort to share corporate contacts with Olympic Spirit, but the idea of being a financial saviour for the project "was well beyond our mandate."

"Obviously, we shared with them our support for the Canadian team and the Olympics in Canada. We're sorry their business model did not succeed," she said.

"We realized as Games organizers we were a catalyst for Olympic sponsorships and made sure they had a chance to meet with sponsors. We encouraged General Motors to announce their sponsorship there. [VANOC chief] John Furlong made a speech there."

But Whiteside said Vancouver-based marketers failed to make sufficient use of the Olympic Spirit facility as a billboard for the Olympic movement in Canada's largest city.

"How can you not use a $50-million investment in the middle of Canada's business capital," Whiteside said. "There was a commitment to work together in developing a theme of the Vancouver Olympics as Canada's Games."

Marnie McBean, Canada's three-time Olympic gold medalist in rowing, said she was not bitter about the demise of the interactive Olympic hall, "but very, very frustrated and disappointed. I learned about my sport from a chocolate bar commercial. This was a much better opportunity to light a flame among kids."

McBean was among dozens of Olympians who appeared and worked at the hall, talking with schoolchildren and playing host to media conferences and corporate events in the 52,000-square-foot, six-storey building off Dundas Square in Toronto.

"We were patient [about VANOC's lack of action] and figured we'd work with them and everything would come around," McBean said. "We kept waiting for backup and it never showed up.

"There were so many opportunities for Olympic Spirit to reach out to one-third of the Canadian population within a two-hour drive. We could get people excited about the Olympic Games.

"For people who came through before and during the Turin Olympics, it gave them some scale to what was going on. Where else do you get a chance to push a bobsleigh?"

Whiteside said Olympic Spirit suffered from a "fundamental lack of awareness," although it was a hit with those who did come through the hall. He said exit surveys found that 87 per cent of visitors gave the Olympic Spirit experience a rating of 5 out of 5. But turnstile receipts were not great. Two-thirds of the revenue came from about 30 groups who came on multiple occasions.

"I think it was a wise decision to collapse the marketing and development responsibilities into the group responsible for running the 2010 Games," Whiteside said. "We were pleased with them and they we were well aware of our pain. They understood what we had to do together. We weren't looking for a handout, but where you control the Olympic rights and a licensee is bound to use the Olympic theme, you have to work together. It didn't happen.

"We've come to this point because our efforts at restructuring the business and attracting corporate capital have fallen through."

Smith-Valade said VANOC still intends to make the Vancouver Olympics Canada's Games. "We saw Olympic Spirit as the physical embodiment of the Olympic movement in Canada, and a storefront in corporate Canada."

But as of today, the store window is bare.