VANOC: Communication as a virtual-reality experience

Nobody should be surprised that John Furlong is a busy guy.

As the CEO of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Games, he's got a lot on his plate -- especially now, during the home stretch of the race to put on the world's biggest sporting event.

It's complicated, exhausting, and no doubt all-consuming.

In the times I've spoken with him over the years, he's struck me as a good guy -- earnest but not stuffy, dedicated, fairly straightforward, likeable. Very Canadian, in other words.

But to listen to his staff at VANOC, you'd think the guy was Ghandi, not the head of an Olympic organizing committee. In the past six months or so, Furlong has been deemed to be so busy that he often can find not even a few moments to talk to media -- at least certain parts of it.

This fall, when colleague Christine Willmsen and I were reporting a series of Times stories on the business side of the 2010 Games, VANOC officials were initially very cooperative, offering up a series of officials for interviews. A lot of our questions went unanswered, but VANOC officials at least looked us in the eye and smiled politely as they declined to provide information.

But when the questions got tougher, dealing with the integrity of the Games operation, including alarming profits made by ticket and travel monopolists under VANOC's employ -- and concerns about conflicts of interest between VANOC staff members and those companies -- Furlong and his lieutenants were too busy to give us 30 minutes. Or 20. Or 10. Or even one. The affable man who had never hesitated to get back to us when we wanted to talk about VANOC's desire to woo visitors from the U.S. suddenly was completely unavailable.

That's fine. His choice, I figured. Maybe it was just us. Given a choice, I wouldn't talk to me, either.

Guess not. Furlong's lack of face and phone time for media has gone global. This week, with the end of the year approaching, so many media types from around the world apparently are seeking Furlong's sage wisdom that he's finding it impossible to even consider granting interviews, VANOC says. (For the record, it never occurred to us to ask for one.)

"Several days of John's time would have been required to fulfill all of them," VANOC's VP for communications, Renee Smith-Valade, said in a news release.

Smith-Valade genuinely seemed to lament this fact, and offered up an ingenious solution: VANOC, knowing, after all, everything we might possibly want to know, already has interviewed Furlong for us, and is prepared to post the video online -- in HD, no less -- for all the world to see.

This is a really a convenient approach -- one which, if it caught on, would negate the need for messy, unnecessary and overly nosey reporters altogether.

Of course, for that to happen, the spinmeisters at VANOC would have to ask their own boss all the right questions, including the tough ones. But they've already demonstrated they're up to the task. Consider, if you will, the actual list of high and hard ones they've already thrown at Furlong during his 15-minute faux news conference, which we can only assume was taped near a fireplace, with a golden retriever within arm's length:

• What were the biggest challenges of 2009?


• How did you overcome the economic challenges of 2009?


• What were your biggest successes of 2009?


• Are you where you hoped you'd be heading into 2010?


• What key deliverables still remain?


• Do you have any special plans to ring in the New Year on Dec. 31?


• How do you expect you might feel that night?


• Do you have any wishes for Canadians this Olympic year?


• Do you have any wishes for our international visitors?

"We have tried to cover all of the topics we thought you would want to ask John," VANOC said in the release.

Wow. It's uncanny how far inside our heads VANOC already is. How could they possibly have known that most of us have been dying to quiz the head of the 2010 Games on how he plans to ring in the New Year, and how he expects to feel at that moment?

And that "key deliverables" one is gold, people. High time someone laid that question out there. Focus-group research reveals that "key deliverables" are a key concern of most of our readers -- at least the nine or 10 of them who have wasted enough time in made-up-important-sounding-terminology school to know what the hell "key deliverables" are.

We kid VANOC. Again, they have a tough job, and they're waist-deep in it.

And if this was a one-off, it could be produce a chuckle and be dismissed. But the fact that it isn't sets off some alarm bells. The organization seems hellbent on turning its media relations into a virtual-reality experience.

These are the same people, recall, who, the night before the Olympic flame arrived in Victoria in October, put out a time-warping news release detailing the entire next day's series of events, right down to the looks on the faces of the torch bearers, and including fake quotes expected to be uttered, spontaneously, by Furlong and others, at key moments.

That's not information. It's fiction.

To journos, that Mad Libs news release read like great comedy, and would still be laughable today if it wasn't for what it might portend for the Olympic Games themselves.

If VANOC is this flummoxed by an event as pedestrian as the changing of years from 2009 to 2010, can you imagine how it will handle the media crush if, God forbid, something major actually happens during the Olympics?

As the mind reels, and as we eagerly await our spoon-fed version of Furlong's 15-minute fireside chat, allow us to offer off up a few more questions that VANOC's media-mind-melding communications professionals inexplicably forgot to ask Furlong on our behalf:

• Boxers, briefs, or both? If you were a tree, what kind of a tree would you be? What's on your iPod right now?


• What would you rather spend an afternoon doing: Cycling around Stanley Park, shopping on Granville Island, or helping conceal a $1 billion construction guarantee for the Olympic Village from Vancouver taxpayers?


• If one private company, owned and operated by a guy from New Jersey with a checkered past, stood to make $50 million to $100 million in profit on Vancouver's Game by gouging U.S. and Canadian Olympic fans on travel packages, would that be good for the Olympic movement? Why or why not?


• Any reason -- other than indifference -- that some of that money cannot be reclaimed by VANOC to lessen the public cost of the Games?


• What's your favorite ski run at Whistler?


• What will the total security tab for the 2010 Games be?


• Why has VANOC failed to live up to its many guarantees to conduct Olympic business in an open and transparent fashion?


• Do you have a dog? Would you like to have a dog? If you yourself were a dog, what kind of a dog would you be?


• Collar, harness, or both?


• Given Amy Goodman's recent experience, exactly how long should smart-aleck reporters who dare put forth these sorts of questions expect to be unduly detained at the border the next time they enter Canada?


• What sort of message does it send to unauthorized Olympic ticket brokers when VANOC settles a lawsuit against one of them, Roadtrips.com, by agreeing to give them authorized tickets to sell? Is VANOC opposed to ticket-scalping or not?


• Exactly how far in advance should we expect a VANOC news release or pre-taped video telling us exactly how you felt the moment that the Olympic flag is raised in B.C. Place Stadium?


• If you have any "key deliverables" left over after the Games, can they be returned to sender? Failing that, can they be re-keyed?

Someone had to ask.