Secrets of Sydney 2000 Proven organisers share their unique Olympic insights

Sandy Hollway is senior advisor to the Sydney-Beijing Olympic Secretariat, a body of the New South Wales Government's Department of State and Regional Development and has been awarded the Olympic Order and the Order of Australia. He was chief executive of the organizing committee for the Sydney 2000 Olympic& Paralympic Games (SOCOG).

David Churches holds the post of director of the Sydney-Beijing Olympic Secretariat. Was senior director of games planning for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.

 They spoke with Business Beijing's Simon Cousins during their recent visit to Beijing for Stadia China 2004.

BB: It's clear somebody has to pay for an Olympic Games, but it is also equally clear that some Western styles of advertising can be quite offensive to traditional Chinese attitudes and morals. I m interested in your thoughts on the impact of advertising and sponsorship on a host city.

David Churches: Yes, there are some things to be said on this matter. The '96 Games in Atlanta had a totally non-regulatory view of what advertisers could do outside of the venues.

I think Atlanta stands, to date, as the worst example of crass, vulgar commercialism that nobody in the Olympic world liked or approved of. Controlling advertising excesses is a very interesting subject, however.

It needs to be understood that the Olympic sponsors have rights, but that their rights are within the venues, or within the corridors of the venues. They do not have rights right across the length and breadth of the city.

In Sydney, we managed this challenging process to the extent that the IOC considered us to have achieved the leading level of success.

To arrive at this point we did two things: we completely protected the rights of sponsors from ambush marketing.

In fact, for quite an extended period, it was impossible to do any physical advertising without an approval process that involved the Olympic Coordination Authority (OCA), SOCOG and the City of Sydney. This process of approvals was absolutely rigorous so that any instance of advertising larger than 10 square metres went through a very strict screening process, and this process included sponsors as well as non-sponsors. Also, sponsors were permitted only one additional major non-venue advertising site in a location which was negotiated with the City of Sydney-one only- and the entire appearance and style, the extent of the branding, the type of imagery, everything was very carefully controlled to suit our cultural conditions.

We would strongly encourage the authorities here in Beijing to introduce a similar approach to the management of this problem, in the interests of Chinese businesses, in the interest of sponsors, and in the interests of the presentation of the Beijing metropolis to the world.

BB: What makes for a "best-ever" Games ?

Sandy Hollway: I think the absolutely central point is this: if any city simply delivers an effective, efficient sporting event, it will actually have failed at the Olympics. These are not the criteria for success. The criteria for success are that the community sees the event as much more than just another sporting fixture. They should see it as a massive community celebration, not just in the venues, but across the entire city; not just in sport but across the entire culture. The Olympic Games is an event of massive scale. It is not just a sports competition.

David Churches: I have no doubt that Beijing is capable of staging the best-ever Olympic Games, and I would say that the commonalities between Sydney and Beijing revolve around two of the three Beijing 2008 themes  that is, the 'Green Games' and the 'Peoples Games'. There is no doubt that Sydney initiated the concept of environmental responsibility for the summer Olympic Games. It should be noted that our partner in that novel environmental focus was Lillehammer [the host city for the 1994 Winter Olympic Games]. Environmentalism is now a fundamental platform for the Olympic Games, and because it is a matter of such global significance, it is an area where the worlds citizens and media are interested in increasing levels of achievement.

I think Beijing is working very hard to achieve a best-ever result in this wide and important area, as well as in staging a  Peoples Games , which Sandy has just mentioned.

When [former IOC President] Juan Antonio-Samaranch listed the ten reasons why Sydney was, in his view, the best-ever Games, at least three of them were fundamentally to do with People s Games issues: first, the extraordinary success of the Sydney 2000 volunteer program, second, the extraordinary success of the torch relay, and thirdly and most significantly  and this was the thing that Sydney contributed which was truly original   was the crafting of Sydney city as a major festival.

To date in the Olympic movement, the cultural considerations had been seen purely as a minor adjunct to the sporting event. Sydney took a giant step forward and turned the city into a festival.

I think that the atmosphere that was created clearly conveyed itself to the world  that s what added the final sparkle to every other instance of achievement. A similar aspiration is quite clearly identified in the concept of the People s Games here in Beijing.

Sandy Hollway:  It is implicit in what we re saying that you have to ask yourself very important questions like was the Games successful in financial terms?  was it successful in investment attraction?,  was it successful in trade?,  was it successful in generating economic benefits? and  was it successful in leaving an infrastructure legacy?. But they are all secondary to the attainment of the more intangible achievements of pride, of spirit, of national image, and of success.

These are the questions that business managers ask, and I stress again that they are very, very important, but they are all still secondary to  Peoples Games  outcomes in our view.

David Churches: Indeed. That is also very significant in the discussion about the High-tech Games . I think the attitude of the core stakeholders of the Olympic movement would be quite different to the domestic high-tech needs in Beijing.

I think that staging a High-tech Games  is a truly sensible aspiration for Beijing and China, but I dont think it is an aspiration that has particular interest within the Olympic movement.

The Olympic movement wants the Games to be nice and conventional and to use reliable technology which will sit quietly in the background to achieve the most necessary outcomes.

There is some very disappointing history in the Olympic m ovement of aims to use very high levels of technology  and for them to fail.

There is a significant potential technological risk in any Games, but I think that here in Beijing there is a clear understanding that there is a different approach which needs to be taken to those fundamental technologies for the Olympic Games, and some of the broader needs to support the rapid development of Beijing Municipality.

BB: I d like to understand a little more about the most important learnings which came out of the Sydney 2000 experience, especially in regard to those technologies which will have particular importance here in Beijing. For example: traffic management, the impact on the daily business life of the city, language challenges and food safety.

Sandy Hollway: Firstly, I think it is very important that everybody responsible for these areas understands that these are not primarily technology problems.

The management of public health and food safety, for example, is a challenge as much of planning, regulation, monitoring, implementation and enforcement, as it is of smart technologies.

And in relation to transport challenges during the Games, it is important to recognize that whilst high-quality traffic management technology systems are very important, if anybody thinks that they are a technological magic bullet  to solve all manner of traffic problems, theyre misguided and wrong.

It s also a matter of training, logistics, of regulation, of right-sizing the transport assets, of closing lanes on key roads to everything but mass transit, and so on. There is no pure-and-simple technology fix.

And in relation to language issues, this is a training and education challenge, not a technology one  although technology can help. As long as we understand this general perspective   that it would be a recipe for disaster to think that technology alone in any of these areas will do the job for us  then I think we can say that as part of the mix, use technology by all means.

My key point is to see these matters as an overall planning and management challenge of which technology is a part.

Many Beijingers are worried about traffic, and this is another area where Sydney and Beijing have much in common.

Its an area where the Olympic Games were an opportunity for Sydney s authorities to take quantum leaps forward in traffic management. These systems have become an exceptionally valuable legacy for the people of Sydney.

David Churches: The installation of the improved traffic management system in Sydney is an interesting study: we installed an Intelligent Traffic Management (ITM) system which had been locally developed and refined for some years into a new and considerably more sophisticated command centre which became the heart of the system.

Then we extended the range of the system so that the whole greater metropolitan area of Sydney was fully connected into this very complex network. The key point, as in so many of these challenges, is that its not so much about inventing new technology as it is installing it to appropriate scale.

Today, there isn't a single major intersection in Sydney that cannot be controlled from that central control room. This is a fantastic asset for Sydney. It actually means that the transport systems efficiency has improved enormously, and has reduced the need for some incredibly expensive upgrades of the road system itself.

Sandy Hollway: Sydney s traffic authorities and police authorities now say that from their points of view the greatest legacy from the Sydney 2000 Games is the fact that the event was so big that it demanded the development of cooperation between policing and traffic management.

Before the Games, theyd never been forced or compelled to adopt common coordinating protocols for working together. This is a very interesting example of how the event of an Olympic Games is so big that it spawns legacies and urban improvements in areas which one might never have contemplated.

I'd like to very briefly generalize this example to say that if you had to choose one single imperative for success for this staggeringly complex, big and risky event of an Olympic Games, it would be that you must forge alliances to get the job done.

It would be a very big mistake to think that any organising committee  even one with the very high capabilities of BOCOG (Beijing Organising Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad)   can do it alone. It requires government agencies, community groups and the private sector. Any city that wants to stage a successful Olympics has to get an alliance together.

David Churches: It bears noting that there is one area of technology which we failed at  integrated ticketing. I have no doubt that if we had achieved a successful integrated ticketing system, then this would have been a very great asset during the Sydney 2000 Games.

The key challenge is to integrate the temporary arrangements for people who have a special access ticket for a day, or some other special accreditation into the broader ticketing and venue access system.

These people avoid the normal ticketing regime and therefore introduce special challenges. Happily, this is one area where there have been significant technological improvements, and I have no doubt that Beijing will far exceed Sydney s performance.

Sandy Hollway: As to the Olympic Games impact on business, we can share several insights. In Sydney, a very intensive project, led by the New South Wales Chamber of Commerce, was undertaken from 1998.

So two years out from the Games we had a project to try to understand what the impact on business would be during Games-time, and to help business get ready to handle what was going to be an extraordinary situation.

I should emphasize that it wasn t simply a matter of finding some formula to compel businesses to behave in different ways.

Rather, the intention was to give business a very accurate understanding of what they were likely to face, and secondly what their options would be  and suggestions for managing that   so they could make intelligent decisions themselves. It was recognized very early on that the impacts would be quite diverse, depending on the business nature and location.

For some businesses the Olympics are a tremendous boost to their commercial success, while to others, there is minimal Games-time commercial opportunity.

Therefore, the behaviour of businesses can range from ramping-up significantly to generate revenue and sales during the Olympics through to deciding to work fewer hours to just ride out the main impacts for those few weeks.

Anybody seriously interested in this subject must talk to the New South Wales Chamber of Commerce in Sydney, who have a more profound understanding and articulated management approach to this challenge than anybody else in the world.

David Churches: The impact of the Olympic Games on local business is profound because of many different factors. There is no single fix-it. The approaches and opportunities are different for each individual business.

Our approach was to undertake to provide business with the clearest and most honest understanding we had of the history of former host cities and what we anticipated would be the impact of the operation of the Games on Sydney.

It was basically a process of counseling businesses to prepare their own business plans. It is interesting that post-Games, the only negative comments that I heard were from those businesses which chose not to accept our advice and thought that life would just go on as normal.

BB: Would you share a few comments about how business generally has benefited from Sydney s Olympic legacy?

David Churches: Today, I think it would be very hard to find a single business in Australia which thought the Sydney Olympic Games was inappropriate or unwelcome. There have been positive benefits right across the board.

I spoke at a major business conference in Jakarta in 2001, alongside representatives of the Australian business community, at which we presented a body of research to analyse the business impacts a year after the Games. We couldnt find a down-side.

Sandy Hollway: We've been talking about general business impacts around the city itself, but there are also some very important points to be made about the broader suppliers of goods and services to the Games.

One of the key points is, just as in an industry like automobile manufacture, there is a cascading-down from manufacturer through to component suppliers and others for high quality and excellent performance. Every supplier in the chain must achieve these high standards.

It is just so for the Olympic Games: all suppliers simply must achieve the highest standards of quality and performance. The prime companies involved in delivering goods and services to the Olympic Games require all of their sub-suppliers to achieve extremely high levels of performance, quality and service. The experience for Sydney is that the Olympics turned out to be a quantum leap for an extraordinarily large number of Australian Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs). If I can put it into a management sense, scores of SMEs were suddenly playing in the big league.

BB: Are you saying that these SMEs suddenly had a global platform, or that they had the ability to ramp-up production levels?

Sandy Hollway: The point to understand is that nothing less than perfect performance is acceptable. The Olympic Games presents businesses involved with it with an imperative to achieve world-class performance.

It is therefore a fascinating outcome of an Olympic Games  and one of the most important legacies in my view   that literally hundreds of SMEs which were formally very capable enterprises, but essentially focused on domestic markets, had come to the psychological conclusion that they could compete in world markets.

Secondly, actual product and service delivery dramatically improved to world standards. Additionally, we saw some larger enterprises such as Telstra, Bovis Lend Lease, PTW Architects, and so on reinforce what they were already doing in world markets and really confirm their sector expertise.

These phenomena have been terrifically good for Australian business in ways which were not simply making money during the Games.