Victoria photographer Mike Byrne had his choice of the Sochi Winter Olympics or Glasgow Commonwealth Games this year. He picked Glasgow. In this men’s gold-medal hockey final, Canada didn’t beat Sweden on ice; it was Australia that defeated India on turf. Byrne, the photo manager for the field hockey venue at the recently completed Glasgow Games, says he made the right decision.
“Glasgow was excellent … top-notch,” he said.
Byrne was also deputy photo manager for five venues during the 2012 London Summer Olympics and worked in press operations for cross-country skiing, biathlon and ski-jumping at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, and is among a number of Islanders who work Games around the globe.
“I have a very understanding family,” quipped Byrne, who also plans to work the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games and 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.
The previous article in this series on the 20th-anniversary reunion celebrations of the 1994 Victoria Commonwealth Games, to be held Aug. 23 at the Pacific Institute for Sports Excellence, focused on the nearly 15,000 volunteers who gave of their time to make the Games happen.
There is another army, a professional and smaller one but no less potent, that came out of the Games. The Island has become a hub for Games know-how with its expertise in demand around the world. Not all, but many of these people came out of the 1994 Games.
The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics were largely organized by Islanders with five of the 10 VANOC vice-presidents from the Island — Guy Lodge of Victoria, vice-president for venue infrastructure, Terry Wright of Victoria, VP for Games operations, Dan Doyle of Saanich, VP for venue construction, Caley Denton of Comox, VP for ticketing and marketing, and Dena Coward of Victoria, director of the 2010 Winter Paralympics.
Not only that, but John Furlong rose from being Nanaimo’s director of parks and recreation for seven years from 1979 to 1986 to becoming head of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games.
They are still at it. Wright is strategic sports adviser with the 2015 Toronto Pan American Games while Lodge was in Glasgow advising the venue fit-out team for the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Both were key members of the 1994 Victoria Commonwealth Games organizational team.
Cedar Hill-area resident Lodge has been a busy man, which has really cut into his golfing time at Uplands, where he is a member. Being head of overlay for the 2012 London Summer Olympics and IOC overlay technical adviser for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, with the quick turnaround to Glasgow, will do that to you. Now it’s off to Rio for the 2016 Summer Olympics.
We caught up with Lodge in Glasgow one day while he was advising crews at Hampden Park, the 2014 Commonwealth Games’ track-and-field venue.
There is a wealth of Games technical knowledge based on the Island, Lodge observed.
And every Games offers up its own challenges, he added.
“In Glasgow, a lot of the venues were already built [Hampden, Ibrox, Celtic Park, the Hydro, Armadillo and Scottish Exhibition and Convention Centre] and it [went] well,” said Lodge.
“Rio is a different ball game and a different dynamic.”
It sure is, with many of the venues being built from scratch in a culture much different than that of Britain. Despite Brazil having recently pulled off the 2014 soccer World Cup, Rio has been heavily criticized with great concern expressed by several international sporting federations and others in world sport about the slow pace of progress on some 2016 Summer Games venues.
But Lodge will be on the job, which should ease many of those concerns among people who know the business of Games fit-outs.
“It will all come together in Rio,” said Lodge. “You always get the beforehand [anxiety], but in the end everybody [who hosts a Games] pulls it off.”
In the rosy glow of a successful outcome, people tend to forget the pre-Games angst and skepticism over the 1994 Victoria Games and the brutal media coverage the organizing committee endured. So too with Vancouver 2010. And about the only buzz the 2015 Toronto Pan Am Games seems to be creating concerns the six-figure compensation packages being paid to top executives of the organizing committee.
So it goes in the run-up to the Games. But on closing-ceremonies night earlier this month in Glasgow, even hardened journalists were moved by the heartfelt embrace given the 2014 Commonwealth Games by the people of Scotland.
So, too, 20 years ago.
“There was negativism and nay-saying right up to the summer of the 1994 Commonwealth Games. But the moment Her Majesty arrived in the Inner Harbour just before the Games, it was sheer, shimmering electricity for two weeks,” Susan Brice, the former Saanich South MLA and now Saanich councillor, recalled in the Times Colonist’s 10-year anniversary look-back at the Victoria Games in 2004.
Of course, that is what will be fondly remembered during the 20th reunion celebrations at PISE on Aug. 23, not the acrimony and sniping that went on before the Games.
All’s well that ends well, a famous playwright once wrote. And Victoria ’94 ended very well. That’s all that counts.
As a by-product, it left the Island with Games expertise that has been exported around the world.
