importance in creating the Olympic vision and the way of working”23 (Rogers, personal communication, February 15, 2012). Having worked with both of them previously in Vancouver and knowing them well, Rogers was able to create an alignment between the City and the Province on the issue of inner-city inclusivity and sustainability (Rogers, personal communication, February 15, 2012). Furthermore, since Rogers was both the main employee for the City and a member of the VANOC board, she was able to introduce sustainability and inclusivity concepts not only into the City’s, but also VANOC’s Olympic vision (Rogers, personal communication, February 15, 2012). Whistler was Rogers’s keen sustainability ally in the bid and all subsequent negotiations with VANOC and other Olympic stakeholders. Jim Godfrey, the municipal administrator of Whistler, strongly supported urban sustainability values and saw the Games as a vehicle to accomplish Whistler’s long term plans to become an advanced sustainable community by 202024 and helped Rogers to spearhead sustainability ideas in the bid development and Olympic planning process (Rogers, personal communication, February 15, 2012). Rogers played a key role in the development of the City’s sustainability governance system. Thus, she created a sustainability team, which later became the Sustainability Group within the City government (Rogers, personal communication, February 15, 2012). 4.2.6 Including Sustainability Commitments in the Bid Book It was very astute and strategic of the City to insist on the inclusion of sustainability commitments in the bid book. The City realized that Olympic planning is an extremely front-loaded process (Rogers, personal communication, February 15, 2012), meaning that once the bid book is submitted to and accepted by the IOC, A lot of the main legacies have already been identified. While of course this doesn’t mean that legacies and plans have been cast in stone, it’s unlikely that Olympic stakeholders will take on new commitments after the Bid book is submitted. (Coady, personal communication, February 20, 2012) Needless to say, the mere inclusion of sustainability commitments in the bid book does not guarantee their delivery in the end. Olympic history has seen a lot of false promises. As Chapter 3 has shown, Vancouver was not an exception to this rule. However, incorporating sustainability commitments in the bid and publicly announcing that the City was going to be guided by sustainability principles in planning and staging the Games, made sustainability a matter of Vancouver’s international reputation and certainly improved the chances of Olympic sustainability goals to be met. In hindsight, Am Johal, the Chairperson of the IOCC, compares the Olympic planning process to a corporate franchise, which is operated in accordance with the conditions of the franchise agreement. Whatever the city incorporates in the Olympic “franchise agreement”, i.e. the bid book, has effects on the whole planning process (Johal, personal communication, March 28, 2012). 23
Premier Gordon Campbell served as Vancouver Mayor in 1986-1993 (including the time of World Expo); Ken Dobell was the former Vancouver City Manager. 24 “Whistler 2020: Moving Towards a Sustainable Future” is Whistler’s long-term urban sustainability vision adopted in 2005
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