As Katarina Witt glided from my memories of the 1988 Calgary Olympics to a podium not thirty feet away, the 1,500 SportAccord delegates drew quiet in anticipation, awe and admiration. (And no, it was not because she was announcing a sequel to her 1998 Playboy appearance!)
Witt is currently heading the Munich 2018 bid team for the Winter Olympics, and was at SportAccord in London, England, this week to conduct a public presentation of their bid, along with key members of her bid team. Munich is up against Annecy (France) and Pyeongchang (Korea). Pyeongchang is bidding for a third time and were defeated by Vancouver for the 2010 games.
The SportAccord International Convention is the most important gathering in the world for sports federations. It’s a grueling six-day affair featuring 104 annual meetings of Olympic and non-Olympic federations, along with the spring Executive Board meetings for the IOC, networking sessions and panel discussions. It’s more geared to the business side of sports events than the marketing side, but where it really shines is the networking.
If you are a community that wishes to host a major sporting event, a firm that wants to help build or manage said event, or a federation looking for more government and hosting support… this is the place to be.
Fortunately for Canadian organizations, the 2012 SportAccord will be hosted in Quebec City. Although I have to tell you, being in London this week was pretty bloody fun.
The buzz in London, as you can imagine, is all about the 2012 Games. The regeneration of the impoverished east side of London through Games infrastructure is a guarantee of lasting legacy.
The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, welcomed all SportAccord delegates by announcing that because they are almost done all the venues, he feels it is important to call a “snap Olympics.” So guess what? The 2012 games could actually be happening in a few weeks! Of course he was kidding. But given what Harper has done to us… it’s not really that funny.
Mayor Johnson is beyond funny. He suggested that if we couldn’t do a snap Olympics, there should be a politics Olympics. He thought Dick Cheney would be a star in the shooting events and Colonel Gaddafi should try the “high jump.”
The SportAccord Chair, a politician by the name of Lord Digby Jones Kt (yes, we are in England), was no bore himself, recounting the time he gave a political speech to an audience of one. When he asked the chap if he could skip the Q&A and just go home, the fellow begged him not to leave, because he, in fact, was the next speaker up on the dais!
But Lord Jones said something that struck me to the core. He talked about how in his business life and political life, he has been privileged to be in positions to make a difference in people’s lives. But in sport, he felt we had an opportunity to make the difference in people’s lives. He beseeched us all, members of the business, sport and political communities, to do whatever we could to provide that difference to young people. His words were to the effect that it is our duty to give every young athlete the opportunity to try their best, to train their hardest, to lay it all on the line to win. And that, win or lose, victory would be found through that opportunity to compete. Not just participate, but compete with all the resources imaginable.
This message has been incorporated in the theme for this year’s conference, which is Sport Matters.
It is clear to me that this message has not been lost on the Chair of the 2012 Games, Lord Sebastian Coe, holder of two Olympic golds and two Olympic silvers. He emphasized that these London Games would be a failure if they in fact were not England’s Games. That may be familiar messaging to Canadians, but Coe cited that he isn’t just talking about “cheering.” He talked about how the London Games have been striving to create youth sports programs. So school children that have never been in a boat are now competing at the highest levels of rowing. He talked of their “20-12” program that is striving to engage 12 million youth in sports, in 20 impoverished countries around the world by Games time. To date, they have reached 10.6 million, and will easily surpass their goal. This global legacy program is so exciting that the Rio 2016 OCOG have now picked up this program and the IOC is considering embedding it through future Games.
The efforts of these organizations should not be lost upon us as lessons for our projects and marketing programs. Yes, selling cases and generating media are critical. But we cannot forget. Sport Matters. In fact Music Matters, Saving Lives Matters, Volunteering Matters. If we create programs that are all about the marketing and forget what matters, our credibility will be shot.
Embed that expression into your next brief: (Blank) Matters. Engrain it into your next client recommendation. Express it in your next sponsorship pitch. Encourage your stakeholders to discover it.
Sport Matters.