THE ANNUAL REPORT 2014 SPORTSPRO DESTINATIONS 2014
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LEGACY
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Destinations Report 2014 LEGACY
The SPoRTS ConSulTanCy The BRIefIng: legacy
I
t might be the most overused word in the sports industry but ‘legacy’ is by no means a redundant one, according to Angus Buchanan of The Sports Consultancy. “The word is in the lexicon and rightly,” he says. “It just happened to be a nebulous concept that someone gave a word to but nobody would question whether we should be talking about place or destination marketing as a key benefit, or economic impact. Those words go unchallenged. Legacy, for some reason, is. But I don’t see a reason why it should be. It’s incredibly important. We should probably all get over the fact it seems like a cliché because it’s critical, fundamental.” Legacy has become a catch-all for virtually everything that happens after an event has been staged, some of it tangible – the physical infrastructure, for example – and some of it rather less so – the so-called ‘feelgood factor’ - but Datnow argues that it can at least be compartmentalised. “There’s a skills legacy, the amount of people who were skilled through the London Olympic Games who are now, for example, in Baku and Glasgow. There are significant lessons to be learnt from skilling a domestic workforce to deliver all the various elements from hospitality to international relations to event delivery and logistics. There’s a volunteering legacy, and social legacies and then the more traditional ones like stadium and event legacies. I think we’re seeing very positive legacies, certainly on the events side in the UK. I think people criticise legacy because it can be nebulous in some people’s minds – people question where is the legacy for London? Some of the less tangible legacies, like social cohesion, reducing obesity, the 104 | www.sportspromedia.com
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We should probably all get over the fact it seems like a cliché because it’s fundamental. feelgood factor, are very difficult to quantify. “One of the key things is working out what your legacies will be and then managing expectations because I think there can be nothing worse than promising legacies which aren’t fulfilled,” he adds. “Provided legacy plans are realistic and achievable I think the public will feel as though it has got a return on investment if those legacies are achieved.” Legacy will be a watchword in Russia and Brazil this year, as each stages its own mega-event. Years in the planning and involving significant physical infrastructure developments, the Sochi 2014 winter Olympics and June’s Fifa World Cup have been closely monitored during the build-up and, in all likelihood, will be closely scrutinised in the months and years after they have been completed, both by interested observers from around the world but also by the country’s residents. In Brazil, the build-up to last year’s Confederations Cup was marred by protests in several of the country’s major cities, in part a reaction to the level of public spending on new stadia to host soccer’s biggest tournament. “If the argument is we are building infrastructure simply for the event, that is something that is very hard to communicate to the populous and that might be the impression Brazilians have around the
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Fifa World Cup. I don’t think that would be fair, but that might be the impression. “There is nothing more reassuring, and we speak from experience from a rights-holder’s perspective, than approaching a market and seeing a sports facility and hearing ‘we are building it anyway, but the fact we’re building it means we can host you and the timing in which we’re having this discussion may allow you to have some input into the construction to make sure it fits your major event – but it’s a reason for us to celebrate the completion of infrastructure’. If it does, you have a much easier job of communicating that to your citizenry.” Ensuring that the public is engaged from the beginning of a major event project – the pre-bidding stage – is fundamental to the chances of maximising the benefits and creating a legacy of which a host can be proud, although, as Buchanan points out, that need rather depends on the style of government. “They vary wildly from country to country – and in some cases, quite frankly, the necessity of the bringing the public with you will vary according to the style of government,” he says. “Perhaps, rather than thinking about legacy,” Buchanan continues, “it’s about where the major event fits within your own national or city development. ‘Is it
the fact we really need to redevelop the waterfront area of Barcelona [host of the 1992 summer Olympic Games] and a great way to capitalise on that and celebrate it will be by hosting a major, major event, which will provide us with a fixed timeline and the impetus required to do it?’ What comes first – is it the desire for redevelopment and to build infrastructure, or is it the desire just to host a major event? It’s communicating what it is you’re trying to achieve.
“I think you could argue in the case of Brazil and the Middle East, they are in the position where they are saying ‘we are ready now, we are developing and that means we have the infrastructure and are capable now to build and host a major event’. In the case of Sochi, [IOC president] Thomas Bach recently said that when you talk about a US$50 billion budget, you are lumping into that an enormous amount of redevelopment that
was going on in any event. It would be unfair to set that off against one event. It comes down to making sure the capital requirements of the investment required to host an event is appropriate considering where you are in the development of infrastructure and whether it fits your overall plan for regional, city or national development rather than an end in itself. Because when it’s an end in itself, you end up with white elephants.”
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12 LESSONS FROM 2012 By James Emmett and Eoin Connolly Originally published September 2013 edition of SportsPro
Over a year on on from the London Olympics and the legacy promises made by the organisers and the bid team are coming under scrutiny. Some of them are tangible today, others may not be gleaned for many years. Effective or not, there are lessons to be heeded but also, as our comprehensive legacy update shows, several conclusions which can already be drawn.
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1. London’s international image was softened and modernised The 2012 Games were never going to be about putting the British capital on the map since it’s already at its centre, the line of longitude having been fixed at zero in London since the 1800s. The city is one of the most instantly recognisable in the world, and has been for hundreds of years. But, because of its history, the global view of London is arguably derived from a bygone era – all Georgian architecture, stiff upper lips, an obsession with tea and absolutely no eye contact at any time on public transport. That changed with London 2012. For the 680,000 foreign visitors who came to the UK specifically to watch or work at the Olympics or Paralympics, and to the billions watching around the world, the Games transmitted an energy, an easiness and a general happiness not traditionally associated with London or Londoners. Tessa Jowell, a Londoner born
and bred and the British politician most closely associated with the Games, puts it best. “I think what the Olympic Games has succeeded in doing is presenting a different image of London,” she says, “from one principally defined by old heritage to one defined by new and young creativity, and I think people now understand that London is an open, diverse and tolerant city; it’s a young city. And that has confounded the stereotype of London of even five years ago.” As secretary of state for the department of culture, media and sport in the early 2000s, it was Jowell who convinced Tony Blair’s government to support a London bid for the Games. The day after that bid was ultimately won, in July 2005, London was struck by a coordinated terrorist attack to its public transport network. 52 were killed and 700 were injured.
From that point, security was going to be a central theme in preparing for the Games – a sentiment that was only heightened when the summer of 2011 saw riots break out across the city. And despite the preevent wobble from key contractor G4S – whose inability to deliver the promised number of security staff prompted the army to step in to man entrances and carry out security checks – security at Gamestime was impeccable. Figures released on the day of the closing ceremony showed that just 250 arrests were made by police working on Olympic security, and 139 of those were for ticket touting. The inclusion of free transport travel cards for all Olympic ticket holders was another PR coup for London, softening the impact for visitors of the city’s reputation as one of the most expensive in the world.
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2. Economic impact will be measured, both positively and negatively, for years to come When the British government signed off on the initial bid, it was in the belief that the Games would not only attract tourists for years to come, but would signal to the world that Britain was open for (more) business. The government would later have five economic targets from London 2012: to support the UK’s economic recovery by maximising trade and investment opportunities, to enhance the UK’s reputation for delivering large-scale projects, to act as a showcase for UK expertise, to improve the ambition and capability of British business, and to grow tourism. Such is the nature of statistics, there will always be figures available not only to those who believed the Games were an incomparable economic catalyst, but to those that believed them a cataclysmic waste of money, too. To mark the first anniversary of the Games, the British government, in tandem with the Mayor of London’s office, released a report entitled ‘Inspired by 2012: The legacy from the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games’. The report announced that, to date, UK£9.9 billion in international trade and investment had been won as a direct result of Games-time activity, with tourist spend set to exceed UK£19 billion for the first time this year. As far as exports go, UK£120 million of contracts have gone to British companies for work on the Brazil 2014 Fifa World Cup, and the Rio 2016 Olympics, while over 60 contracts have been won by UK companies for work on the Sochi 2014 Games and the 2018 Fifa World Cup in Russia. The report puts some flesh on those bones by highlighting the work of UK Trade and Investment (UKTI). Working to a government target of UK£11 billion in Games-inspired trade and investment by 2016, UKTI delivered 17 days of business summits for 4,000 business leaders from 63 countries at the British Business Embassy at Lancaster House. Of the UK£9.9 billion
The British government wove London 2012 into efforts to drive international investment in the UK
headline investment figure, the report attributes UK£5.9 billion in export sales from UKTI events such as the British Business Embassy. London mayor Boris Johnson stocked up on enough political capital to last him at least another election during the Games, but he was also busy entertaining 200 international senior executives last summer. London House hosted an additional 3,000 people in an initiative that the report states has created almost 2,000 jobs in London through 24 investment projects, including one from Huawei Technologies of China, one from Infosys of India, and another from Gensler of the US. The report points to continued investment in London to come: the UK£1.2 billion development in Royal Albert Dock by Chinese company ABP, the UK£700 million investment into Battersea Nine Elms
by Chinese developer Dalian Wanda Group, and the UK£1 billion regeneration project in Croydon being undertaken partly by the Australian retail developer Westfield. Whether these investments would have gone ahead were it not for the Olympics is another matter. “A number of the figures in the report are based on assumptions rather than cash in the bank,” says Jowell, urging caution. “I think that we’d all want to see the cash in the bank before in any way being comfortable that we’ve realised the potential. The tourism legacy is one that will build year on year.” While international visitor numbers were up year on year by one per cent in 2012, Britain’s tourism agency, VisitBritain, has a target to generate an extra 4.7 million visitors to the UK by 2016, and an extra UK£2.3 billion in tourism spend.
70,000 – the number of previously unemployed Londoners who found work as a result of the Games, according to the 2012 Olympic Jobs Evaluation Report 108 | www.sportspromedia.com
3. No Fifa World Cup, but plenty of events to go round In the run-up to the Games, governmentgalvanised bids from across Britain’s sporting landscape saw a line-up of some 70 major events committed to British soil over the next ten years. Those events all fall under UK Sport’s ‘Gold Event Series’, and 36 of them are world or European championships. Of course, there would have been an agenda-dominating event to come in 2018 had England’s bid to host that year’s Fifa World Cup not fallen well short when the votes were made in 2010. Nevertheless,
It is hoped that the new Ride London cycling event can become an annual staple for the city
London 2012 has proved, if proof were needed, that the UK not only has the capacity to host major international events, but that in doing so it can augment the reputation of those events to another level. Organisers of both the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France cycling races will be counting on that as they capitalise on the UK’s current cycling boom by bringing the starts of their respective events to Belfast and Yorkshire next year. Ride London, a weekend-long London Marathon-style cycling event in and around the capital, achieved huge success in its inaugural running in early August. With a little more effort securing big names for the professional race, it could become one of the standout annual events spawned by the Games. According to Iain Edmondson, head of major events at official promotional body London & Partners, effective Games-time data capture should ensure that the UK’s ability to sell out events endures. The Locog database, Edmondson explains, consists of five million people who signed up and were interested in tickets for certain sports during the Games. “The ability to communicate with that audience has now been passed on to a consortium of UK Sport, London & Partners and Sport England,” he says, “and there are monthly communications that go out to that audience that are appropriate and targeted to their interests, or evolved to meet the future interests. It’s collectively people being smart enough to recognise the value in that to do it and do it properly.”
Selected international sporting events in the UK, post London 2012 Rugby League World Cup
2013
Triathlon World Championships Grand Final
2013
IPC Athletics Grand Prix Final
2013
World Youth Netball Championships
2013
World Squash Championships
2013
Gymnastics World Cup
2013
WTF Taekwondo Grand Prix Final
2013
Wheelchair Singles Tennis Masters
2014
Giro d’Italia
2014
Tour de France
2014
Ryder Cup
2014
Commonwealth Games
2014
IRB Rugby World Cup
2015
World Gymnastics Championships
2015
IPC Swimming World Championships
2015
European Wheelchair Basketball Championships
2015
World Canoe Slalom Championships
2015
European Eventing Championships
2015
European Hockey Championships
2015
IAAF World Athletics Championships
2017
IPC World Athletics Championships
2017
ICC Cricket World Cup
2019
4. Olympic stadium saga aside, proper legacy planning ensured a commercial future for the Olympic Park July’s Anniversary Games may have been a good opportunity for Londoners to indulge some early-onset nostalgia but it was also a reminder of the costly row that threatened to undermine the London 2012 legacy programme. London’s Olympic Stadium will now, finally, be stripped down from its Games mode and reconfigured – at an unexpected UK£150 million expense – as a 54,000-capacity soccer stadium with
retractable seating in place for athletics. Premier League club West Ham United will move in as the anchor tenant in the summer of 2016, by which time the stadium will already have proven its worth as a multi-sport facility when it hosts games in the 2015 Rugby World Cup. Third-tier soccer club Leyton Orient remain hopeful of a groundshare. The IAAF World Athletics Championships and their IPC equivalent
will arrive in 2017, while early rumours are circulating that the stadium will also form the centrepiece of a London bid for the 2022 Commonwealth Games. For Edmondson, an agonising process has at least produced the desired result. “To be honest, it’s perfect, really,” he says. “Getting something that’s complementary to what London offers.” Other new permanent venues left over from the Games will fill similar gaps in the British The Destinations Report 2014 | 109
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With the future of the Olympic Stadium settled, all of the permanent venues at the Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park have commercial plans in place
capital’s sporting landscape. The city has long suffered from a lack of Olympic-sized swimming pools, as Edmondson points out, and both the Aquatics Centre – set to host the 2015 European Swimming Championships – and the velopark will have a community and elite purpose. Both Edmondson and Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, one of the UK’s greatest ever athletes and a member of the Locog team, flag up the potential of the less heralded Copper Box handball arena as an appropriate home for sports like British basketball and handball. Then there is the Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park itself – already the new home of the Wireless music festival – with its adjacent housing and Westfield shopping centre. Jowell describes the reclamation of a long-derelict area as “the most tangible legacy left by the Games”, pointing out that three-quarters of the UK£7 billion spent on that part of the Olympic project went
on regeneration: “meaning washing two million tonnes of soil, decontaminating the radioactivity, getting rid of the mountains of rubbish, piles of old fridges, shopping trolleys, and general dereliction.” The iCITY consortium also signed a 200-year lease on the UK£300 million international media centre in May, transforming it into a high-capacity digital data storage facility, and renting space to the likes of Loughborough University, Hackney Community College and BT Sport. Connections to east London were heavily bolstered in the years before the Games and London’s transport network coped unexpectedly well with the heavy volumes of visitors. Still, major projects such as the UK£14.8 billion west-to-east Crossrail network are ongoing, as are debates over the future of the city’s airport infrastructure. Edmondson, however, points to “really big changes which sometimes go under the
radar” as key transport benefits of London 2012. “Just things like accessibility and disabled access on public transport – buses, Underground, even taxis – have taken a massive step forward in the quality of life for people in London,” he says. “The Olympics has been a catalyst for that.” Contributions to Olympic Stadium conversion costs: UK Treasury
UK£60 million
Newham Council
UK£40 million
London Legacy Development Corporation
UK£20 million
West Ham United FC
UK£15 million (plus UK£2 million a year rent, share of catering revenues, lump sum if club is sold in next ten years)
The construction of 11,000 new homes is planned at the Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park, plus the largest new green space in any European city. 110 | www.sportspromedia.com
5. Olympic sport cannot drive nationwide sports participation on its own, but there is still time to develop a coherent strategy Perhaps none of London 2012’s bold legacy claims has looked as difficult to deliver upon as the suggestion that the Olympics would encourage greater participation. Pre-Games targets to encourage two million more Britons to take up sport before the opening ceremony were quietly revised. A year after the Games, it is unclear to what extent national habits are changing. The headline figure that the British government is keen to stress is that 1.3 million more people in the country are participating in sport on a weekly basis than in 2005, when the bid was successful. In London, according to the mayor’s office, an extra 277,500 had taken up sport over the same period. These figures themselves are disputed, with Tessa Jowell noting that the targets set during the bid phase had counted those doing sport three times a week, rather than once. A deeper row has brewed over funding. The government has ring-fenced spending on elite athletes through the UK Sport vehicle – which distributes money from the government and National Lottery to sports based on their performance against medal targets. However, there are concerns that grassroots spending, particularly on school sport, is more vulnerable. An annual UK£150 million ‘legacy boost’ for schools was announced at the start of the year but that comes in place of a UK£162 fund which was withdrawn in 2010. In January, plans to merge UK Sport with Sport England – one of the home nation bodies responsible for delivering funding to the grassroots – were scrapped. That decision was welcomed by sporting bodies as providing stability, but the lack of a coherent grassroots strategy may yet undermine the achievements
Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson (second left) says “systemic change” is needed in UK school sport
British sport is making on the world stage. Grey-Thompson calls for a “radical change” in how sport is taught in schools, with an emphasis on more bespoke training in physical education for teachers. “It’s not about investing massive sums of money,” she says, “it’s about systemic change.” Jowell cleaves to a similar line. “It requires drive and purpose,” she says of reform to school sport, “training more coaches, harnessing the huge volunteer army of coaches. More people volunteer in sport than they do in any other activity in the country. There is enormous potential here to be realised. We’ve just got to get on and do it.” Few elements of the UK’s post-Olympic strategy have become quite so politicised as participation. In September, the
Conservative-led coalition government scrapped a requirement for schoolchildren to take part in a guaranteed two hours of sport per week. Boris Johnson – perhaps burnishing his credentials as London’s Olympic mayor for a future run at the leadership of the party – responded by demanding two hours of school sport per day. For her part, Labour’s Jowell has suggested “a cross-party commitment to a ten-year plan for sporting growth”. Edmondson, meanwhile, gives his backing to mass participation schemes like the weekly Park Run – a timed, free five-kilometre run operated in several UK cities – as a way of stimulating greater activity. “Because it’s more about making it accessible,” he says, “and making it sustainable in numbers.”
6. The euphoria has faded, but the confidence remains “They said we couldn’t run a bath,” said Boris Johnson in July, “and we delivered the greatest Olympic and Paralympic Games the world has ever seen.” Self-confidence might be the biggest
unseen benefit to the UK of last year’s Olympic Games, after a build-up marked by a very British self-defeatism about the country’s major events capabilities. “I remember until about six weeks before
the Games,” says Grey-Thompson, “every other conversation I had was with people saying, ‘We’re never going to finish building it, the Games Makers will never turn up, the sport will be rubbish and the transport won’t The Destinations Report 2014 | 111
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work, the weather’s going to be rubbish.’” The result, of course, was quite different, with even the sun cooperating for two weeks of one of the UK’s wettest recent summers. Those tasked with building on last year’s success, Edmondson says, are taking fresh belief into the organisation of major events. “There’s almost a desire to do it because we can,” he says, citing London’s 2014 Tour de France stage as an example, “rather than thinking, how the hell are we going to do that?” The euphoria which greeted London 2012 has unsurprisingly proved harder to recapture, even if it has not been forgotten.
And eye contact is once again forbidden on public transport. For millions in the UK, the Games were a holiday from a period marked by economic uncertainty and austerity. The fate of the country’s Paralympic heroes is a case in point. In 2012 their achievements were said to have changed national attitudes towards disability but in 2013, several medallists face major lifestyle challenges due to government benefit reforms. Still, over two thirds of those questioned in a BBC survey conducted by ComRes to mark the first anniversary of the Games said that public expenditure on them had been
worthwhile, a figure which rose markedly in areas closer to the capital. Ultimately, goodwill around the Games will probably be tied to ongoing success in British sport, not to mention the viability of more tangible legacy projects. Edmondson foresees a further effect of the Games which will be measured over generations, rather than years. In decades to come, he notes, the young people affected by the Games will be policy-makers themselves, and he believes “that’s where we’ll really see the shift in the landscape of making it easier for sport to be part of our daily lives in the UK”.
7. The Games Maker model was a revelation that will spawn a thousand copycats For many of the millions of people who attended London 2012 events last year, the spirit and success of the Games were embodied by the Games Makers, the 70,000 purple-shirted volunteers who lent cheer and backbone to the local effort. “I think we’ve proved that if you let people be themselves that the character will come out,” said Phil Sherwood, the head of volunteering for Locog, in an interview with SportsPro late last year, “and that whilst we’ve got this reserved nature we’re actually a very, very welcoming nation.” Sherwood has himself established staff relations consultancy Purple and Red, bringing his Games Makers experience to the corporate and events world. The success of the London 2012 project has awakened interest in volunteering, with thousands of Britons hoping to share in the sense of fulfilment enjoyed by those at London 2012. To some extent, this has meant highlighting the importance of volunteers to British sport, with groups like Sport Makers aiming to connect people with opportunities at local clubs and events. Major event planners are also making greater play of their use of volunteers, following the Games Maker model. In June, over 900 red-shirted ‘cricketeers’ were a highly visible presence at cricket grounds as England and Wales hosted the ICC Champions Trophy, while ‘race makers’ were on hand to help at British horse racing venues across the summer. July’s Anniversary Games saw volunteers flood back to the Olympic Park. 112 | www.sportspromedia.com
The Games Maker project was a major London 2012 success and will be replicated at other events
Anecdotally, there is plenty of evidence that being part of the Games has left its mark on those who helped out. “I saw someone on the tube the other day and asked him where he was a Games Maker,” says Grey-Thompson,
“and he got really excited because I’d spotted his trainers. I’m sure it wasn’t perfect, but the fact that they still wear their shoes and watches means it must have rubbed off.” The impact may well be felt much
Grey-Thompson recalls spotting a thrilled ex-Olympic volunteer after recognising his grey trainers
62 per cent of Games Makers said they hoped to continue volunteering after London 2012 42 per cent of Londoners said the Games Makers had inspired them to begin volunteering or increase their efforts Figures from Inspired by 2012: The legacy from the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, report issued by UK government and mayor of London
further afield than that. 104 young Russians participated in the Sochi-London-Sochi project last year, and will go on to lead teams of volunteers in the winter Games in 2014. Around 25,000 volunteers are expected to be involved in Sochi 2014. The
project is a pioneering one in a country where volunteerism remains an unfamiliar movement, and the organisers hope it will have the added benefit of presenting a younger, friendlier Russian face to the world. That is an ambition shared by those
preparing for the Fifa World Cup there in 2018. Speaking to SportsPro in October 2012, the local organising committee chief executive Alexey Sorokin said: “The key word is soul. We will show the world a hospitable Russian soul.”
8 . London 2012 was also a lesson for the Olympic movement In IOC president Jacques Rogge’s closing speech to the “happy and glorious” 2012 Olympics, he made a point of singling out London’s Games Makers for praise. After 17 “unforgettable days”, Rogge declared, the world would “never forget the smiles, the kindness and the spirit of the wonderful volunteers, the much-needed heroes of the Games”. London’s volunteering operation is likely to be taken and replicated in future Games, and there were several other ‘takeaways’ for the IOC to consider. The fervour which greeted each day of competition during the Paralympics, and the successful marketing campaign that provoked it, were a breakthrough for disability sport. “The equivalence of the Olympic and Paralympic Games was hugely important for disability in general,” says Jowell. If London gave the Paralympic movement a springboard, there are moves within the city itself to sustain that momentum. Speaking in the wake of the Anniversary Games, the three-day event a year on from London 2012 that saw elite athletes and para-athletes compete again in front of capacity crowds at the Olympic Stadium, Edmondson explains that concerted efforts were made to have the IPC Athletics World Championships run alongside the ablebodied version in London in 2017.
The aggressive stance taken against the use of Olympic marks by small businesses was unpopular
“Since the Games there’s been a desire to say, ‘Well, look, this is actually the kind of thing that London can do for global sport,’ that we want to help sustain a shift for disability sport which 2017 will be a big marker for that,” he explains. “British Athletics are doing a lot for other disability sport events in the lead-up to that as well. It’s actually something that we’re doing that’s good for the city but also good for global sport. Having a much more visible platform for disability sport is nothing but a good thing, really.”
Locog’s attitude to diversity in general is one to be applauded and mimicked. Sponsors and suppliers were encouraged to think about who they employed and how they gave back to their communities, and the organisers themselves practised what they preached. “Locog did what they were trying to get other companies to do,” says GreyThompson. “I think the age range went from 16 to 70, and that included lots of diversity. The public coming to the Games was diverse, so the business had to be The Destinations Report 2014 | 113
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diverse. They had a lot of pin badges; they had an LGBT pin, a disability pin, and stuff like that so that people felt part of it. I think the LGBT pin was the biggest selling pin.” With Russia’s anti-gay laws coming into focus as the country prepares to host the 2014 winter Games in Sochi, it is a legacy the Olympic movement could do with transferring immediately. Commercially, despite the success of the local sponsorship programme, the anti-ambush regulations now deemed mandatory by the IOC in the law of any country wishing to host the Games put strain on the hundreds of businesses that helped put on the London Games. Unable to talk about their association until a landmark ‘Supplier Recognition Programme’ was agreed between the British Olympic Association, the UK government and the IOC, nearly 700 licensees are only now benefiting from being able to tell their own Olympic stories. “I think the IOC is going to have to look again at the degree of restriction imposed on branding and intellectual
London 2012 could come to be seen as a watershed in the progress of the Paralympic movement
property,” says Jowell. “Certainly one of the things that did cause bad feeling was small and medium-sized businesses that took part
in creating the Olympic Park not being able to declare their responsibility for the role they played in it. I think that was missing a chance.”
9. The UK is experiencing the natural ebb of an Olympic sponsorship cycle, but there are sponsors out there Talk of London and the UK being consumed by a sponsorship vacuum in the wake of the Games is exaggerated. There will be an inevitable drop-off in corporate funding after any Olympics. The majority of support from Locog sponsors went into organising the Games themselves – as the 57 per cent of value-in-kind income the organisers received from them will attest – while the wider local market will also dry up as non-Olympic sponsors looking to create some kind of illicit association no longer have a reason to do so. Regardless of the Games, London was and remains one of the world’s sporting and cultural capitals, and therefore an inevitable magnet for sponsors. Fresh from its role as Locog’s communications and Paralympicsspecific sponsor, BT is significantly increasing its sports sponsorship spending, owing largely to its entrance into the sports broadcast landscape this year. Of all the campaigns around the Games, Virgin Media’s ambushing broadband one is 114 | www.sportspromedia.com
perhaps the most enduring. Ads featuring a Branson-bearded Mo Farah and Usain Bolt are still being produced, and with more no doubt in the pipeline as the telecoms brand builds towards the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, a property it signed an official partnership with in May. Another branch of the Virgin business empire, Virgin Money, has signed a significant deal post-Olympics, renewing its title sponsorship of the London Marathon for five years in April. UK-based multinational insurance company Prudential had no association with the Games, but signed on as the title backer of the cycling legacy event Ride London in a three-year deal. Meanwhile Sainsbury’s, a key backer of the Paralympics, acted in the same role for London’s athletics legacy event, the Anniversary Games, though that deal was part of a wider agreement that saw the supermarket chain come in to replace Aviva as a major sponsor of British Athletics. The track and field governing body was one of eight in the UK to have major deals expire
in the immediate aftermath of the Games. Not all of them have been so effective in finding replacements. Unable to find a sponsor to back its own planned legacy event, for example, the British Volleyball Federation had to scrap plans to hold another event at Horse Guards Parade this year. To ensure a commercial legacy for Britain’s Olympic governing bodies, Sir Keith Mills, one of Britain’s most celebrated entrepreneurs and the deputy chairman of Locog, had proposed pooling the rights of most of the country’s sporting governing bodies in the wake of the Games. The British Sports Marketing Bureau project, however, never got off the ground. “There are more than 70 sports bodies in the UK, governing bodies of sports, Sports Coach UK, the English Institute of Sport, and they all currently try to raise their own commercial partnerships,” Mills explained to SportsPro in late July. “My experience of working with commercial partners is that commercial partners generally are not
interested in a sport, they’re interested in people who buy their products. So if you’re P&G, you’re only interested in things that can get you to mums because mums buy their products. The bureau would then have gone off and put together a school sports programme with some netball, gymnastics,
some swimming, a collection of rights, which deliver to P&G what they want. “The majority of people in sport thought this was a really good idea. It might not have represented the FA or the RFU but pretty much the rest of sport. So we said, ‘If you tell us you will endorse us, we, and I was going
to take the lead on it, we’re going to get some money from government, set up a not-forprofit company, I’ll go out and hire the people and we’ll go out and represent sport. It won’t cost you a penny.’ Out of 70 we got just short of 40 that said ‘yes’ and that was a long way short of where we needed to get to.”
10. International Inspiration is a model for the IOC, but the onus is still on sponsors to lead the way in the community If legacy is now a central theme in any major event bidding process, it is probably thanks to London’s bid for the 2012 Games. Fresh from the Athens Olympics of 2004 – perhaps the best example of a Games carried out with little to no forethought as to what would come afterwards – the London team went into the 2005 IOC voting process with a powerful dual goal that resonated with an IOC membership desperate to avoid another expensive hangover. The 2012 Games would provide a tangible legacy not only in London, the bid team claimed, but also around the world. “We were absolutely determined that these would not only be London’s Games in the UK, but they would be London’s Games with extended global benefit,” recalls Jowell, a key member of the bidding party. Mills, vice chairman of the bid, has subsequently admitted that at that stage the bid team hadn’t the faintest idea about how they would go about achieving the global part of that promise. What emerged was International Inspiration, a programme developed by Unicef, the British Council and UK Sport and designed to enrich the lives of millions of youngsters around the world through sport and physical education. Even before London 2012 the programme
had achieved its original target of reaching 12 million children in 20 countries; the onus now is on making sure International Inspiration initiatives become sustainable in the long term. “The fact it is now being carried on is quite exciting,” notes Grey-Thompson. If a global Olympic CSR model now seems to be in place, it might also be argued that London 2012 demonstrated the increasing importance attached to community-focused initiatives by corporates in the UK. To cite one example, Lloyds TSB bank, a top-tier domestic Locog partner, shaped much of its Games sponsorship around a programme called Local Heroes, selecting 45 up-andcoming athletes from different parts of the country to provide a focal point in communities across the nation. Lloyds also launched the National School Sport Week in collaboration with the Youth Sports Trust, with 21,000 schools signing up to take part. In some cases non-Games sponsors have taken up the baton in the months since London 2012. British supermarket chain Asda, for example, signed up gold medalist long jumper Greg Rutherford in July to front its new Asda Active fitness drive, which helped the Sports Leaders UK charity run 400 free sports days in primary
Olympic gymnast Beth Tweddle takes part in an official London 2012 legacy project for children
schools across Britain this summer. Such initiatives appear to lend weight to Jowell’s view that “up and down the country there are projects that are creating social benefit that would never have happened without the Olympics”.
11. There was no cyber revolution, but substantive technological leaps were made The first social Olympics presented the organisers with two substantial challenges. Firstly, to make sure that digital devices worked so that Olympic experiences could be recorded, en masse, like never before – satisfying plenty of sponsor activation plans
in the process. But secondly, to protect the Olympic movement’s chief source of income – television rights fees – by ensuring that use of digital devices didn’t infringe on any broadcaster rights. While encouraging the use of social
media under the catchy internal motto ‘don’t commercialise it, personalise it’, the IOC’s television department was nevertheless prompted to deal with around 100,000 incidences of what it deemed to be piracy during the Games, and most of The Destinations Report 2014 | 115
Destinations Report 2014 LEGACY
Athletes took to sharing experiences of London
the illegal, personally uploaded live streams “within minutes”. That so many illegal streams from unique positions inside venues were possible is, in its own way, a credit to the beefed-up network capacity around the Olympic Park. Ofcom, the UK’s independent regulator for communications, borrowed radio spectrum capacity from the Ministry of Defence as part of its strategy to keep everyone connected at the Games. It was a strategy that Jowell calls “a big leap” forward. “We didn’t have the communications collapse that we had, for instance, at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games,” she
says. “I think the management of spectrum by Ofcom showed that you could have people taking pictures on their smartphones, phoning their mums and dads, girlfriends and boyfriends and being able to get through.” Grey-Thompson, who was vice chair of Locog’s athletes’ commission, says the wrangling that went on to get a Wi-Fi system installed in the athletes village would seem extraordinary now. “You’re trying to think four or five years ahead,” she says. “It seems so out of date now, but we had a really big fight early on to get Wi-Fi in the village. They were saying, ‘Really? Are you sure we need to spend on that?’”
3,500 – the number of point of sale devices with contactless capabilities installed by IOC sponsor Visa across Olympic venues. “That’s the same size as a city like Reading – it’s huge,” explained Mariano Dima, chief marketing officer at Visa Europe, which used the Games to showcase new contactless payment technology in tandem with Lloyds TSB and Samsung. 12. The media have never been more interested in the Olympic and Paralympic Games, but they are no longer the sole information gatekeepers While Facebook was founded before the Athens Olympics in 2004, and Twitter arrived two years later, London 2012 was truly the first digital Games. 20,000 members of the media were accredited in London, but, thanks principally to social media, information sources extended far beyond that number.
The UK media came down with Olympic fever
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“I was commentating on the cycling from the Mall and it was quite fun watching the British cyclists’ Twitter numbers change – going from 200 to 49,000 at the end of the day,” recalls Grey-Thompson. It wasn’t just the athletes: agenda-setting was done to a large extent by the wider public. “Our media feel it’s their duty to strip the gloss of optimism and achievement and present a rather more critical view,” explains Jowell of the British press corps, equally lauded and criticised around the world for their tenacity. “But they found themselves unable to do that becausea to do so would have been completely out of sync with the public mood. In a way what happened with the first four days of our Olympics was that the public owned them as theirs.” The mutually propelling positivity and interest from the public and the media spilled over from the Olympics into the Paralympics, helped to some degree by the fact that for the first time home broadcast duties were split between the two Games.
Channel 4 won awards for its coverage of the Paralympics, and is operating with a newfound confidence as a sports broadcaster today, but its marketing around the event was catching. “The Paralympics were at a whole new level,” confirms Grey-Thompson, who, with 11 gold medals to her name, is Britain’s greatest-ever Paralympian. “There were significantly more media there than at any other Games. British people like watching sport, they’re not necessarily bothered what it is. “I think there’s been a massive change in the way Paralympians are viewed with these Games and that’s because of the media coverage.” The civil rights issues in Russia and the social unrest seen during the Confederations Cup in Brazil are bound to be topics of focus for foreign media at the next two Games. Taking a lead, again, from the public mood may well result in rather different headlines than were produced last summer.
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Destinations report 2014 COLUMN
Supporting Canberra’S next 100 yearS James paterson, director of repucom’s government, tourism and events division.
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anberra is Australia’s capital city and part of the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), one of the eight States and Territories of Australia. Officially established as Australia’s capital city in 1913, it is now home to almost 400,000 residents. Last year, Canberra celebrated its centenary and this gave Canberra the strategic opportunity to showcase itself as major event destination. It also gave the city an opportunity to show event owners and sporting federations its excellent infrastructure and that it could successfully host a large variety of events from major blockbuster art exhibitions at the National Gallery, or first ever events like the Rugby League Test match between Australia and New Zealand and a cricket one day international featuring Australia. The ACT Government contracted Repucom to robustly measure both the holistic impact of its entire major event portfolio as well as gauge the support of the people of Canberra for hosting future events. The final strategic imperative was to provide the ACT with a consistent and objective pre and post event investment selection process designed for fully informed and objective decision making. The ACT Government fully embraced the notion that major events should deliver a host of benefits beyond purely economic gains. A tailored event impact evaluation program was therefore put in place to measure the following key impacts: Global marketing and media impacts To measure the event’s ability to showcase what Canberra has to offer and reinforce its key brand attributes in order to drive future visitation. Tourism impacts - To understand visitor satisfaction with Canberra as a destination. Event attendee satisfaction - To understand what attendees liked and didn’t like across all touch points of an event. Social and community impacts - To 118 | www.sportspromedia.com
gauge the impacts (both positive and negative) on the wider community and how, each event increased vibrancy, civic pride and whether they made Canberra a better place to live and work. Sponsorship impact - To measure sponsor awareness, perceptions and future purchase consideration. Economic impact – Visitation numbers, origin and whether attendees came or extended their stay as a direct result of the event. This detailed post event impact measurement was undertaken across both the ACT Government’s major event portfolio as well as the four Australian professional teams it supports. A separate representative on-going community impact tracking study with multiple objectives was also undertaken: To understand the awareness, engagement, interest and attendance across Canberra’s centenary events. In fact, almost three out of four people attended at least one event, 97 per cent of Canberrans were aware of the events and 85 per cent of them also believed that the events increased civic pride. To understand how important major events are viewed by the Canberra community. 94 per cent of Canberrans were supportive of an on-going calendar of major events. To research the appetite of the residents of Canberra for continued backing and future government investment in major events. Nine out of ten people expressed their support and 77 per cent of the residents of Canberra were happy that taxpayer funds were being used to invest in events. To assist future strategic direction. Driving visitors and supporting the economy were seen to be the most favoured benefits of hosting events in Canberra. To assist future strategic direction around what event genres the people of
Canberra would like to see. The people of Canberra proposed a varied major event program to cater for all tastes. There was also significant additional research that specifically analysed the levels of awareness and engagement with each key event as well a tracking study to benchmark the sporting interest, participation, consumption and engagement of the people of Canberra. Not only did this allow ACT Government to understand the holistic impact of its major events and the teams it supports, but it also provided a mandate to continue to invest in major events as well as helping to define the direction of what those future events might be. The final piece of strategic research required by the ACT Government was a thorough review of its current event investment procedures. Repucom was briefed to build a tailored, best practice event strategy framework to enable the ACT Government to maximise the benefits and outcomes it receives from its future major event investments, whilst utilising a consistent and directly comparable evaluation methodology. With Canberra having recently launched its new brand messaging and logo, this strategic approach has enabled the ACT Government to better understand the value and success of its events, the attitudes of its residents and how to align its future activities to showcase Canberra as a modern and transformational city that is looking forward to its next 100 years.