IOC's Iron Grip on Cities Grows Tighter Every Olympics
IOC grip on cities grows tighter every time
From no-fly zones to free-speech areas, Olympic officials want to
control what the world can see
By Daphne Bramham, Vancouver Sun, August 15, 2009 a04
When Juan Antonio Samaranch was president of the International Olympic Committee, he demanded that those in the "movement" refer to him as Your Excellency.
Yet pretensions of grandeur aside, even under his watch the IOC never described itself as the "supreme authority" on all things Olympic, as it did under Jacques Rogge in Vancouver's host city agreement.
And while Rogge rejected the "His Excellency" honorific, he also spelled out in the host-city contract what creature comforts he requires come Games time.
To be precise, Rogge gets three multiple-screen video walls all hooked up to the international television signals of the Games. One will be in his room at the Westin Bayshore Hotel and two others in the IOC offices at the hotel, which has been totally booked for the Olympic Family.
It's only a small example of the growing demands the IOC puts on host cities. One is for more money. For the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, the IOC took 40 per cent of the broadcast revenue. This time, it's more than half.
If Vanoc pulls off a miracle and has a surplus, the IOC will take 20 per cent, twice the cut it demanded from Salt Lake City, which had a $50-million surplus. The IOC's share of marketing royalties from mascots and logo-wear has also risen, to 7.5 per cent from five.
At the same time, it has off-loaded costs.
One big-ticket item is the tab for all medical costs and anti-doping measures. For 2010, that's an estimated $13 million, a number that the B.C. auditor-general has repeatedly challenged as being too low. The auditor also challenged the $185 million security budget. It's now set at $1 billion. Unlike in 2002, host cities and organizing committees now pay all taxes, duties or indirect taxes "whether present or future" assessed to either the IOC or any third party owned or controlled by the IOC on revenue generated by the Games or to competitors as a reward for their performances.
(Perhaps it's because the province is on the hook for any Olympic cost overruns that Premier Gordon Campbell's unpopular harmonized sales tax won't be put in place until after the Games.) But the biggest burden the IOC puts on cities is ever-increasing demands to protect sponsorship and marketing rights, demands that bump up against citizens' rights and freedoms.
Like Vancouver, Salt Lake City agreed that there would be no advertising or propaganda outside the venues within view of television cameras or spectators watching the events. But that was the end of it. No other Utahans and Americans faced widespread restrictions on protest signs, pamphlets, leaflets and posters.
Eight years later, Vancouver's contract widened the "clean zone" beyond venues to "major access points leading to Olympic venues" and the torch relay route. Those are the so-called halo areas in Vancouver's omnibus bylaw, a bylaw that the contract also required. That's another addition and so is the required no-fly zone.
The Vancouver contract says that "no propaganda or advertising is allowed in the airspace over the city and other cities and venues hosting Olympic events during the period of the Games."
(There was a no-fly zone over the Utah capital in 2002, but only because five months earlier, New York's twin towers had been toppled by a terrorist attack. It's also noteworthy that Salt Lake City's total security budget was $310 million US. That's nearly double Vancouver's original security estimate, but only a third of the current budget.)
With the new, larger area for top-tier sponsors' exclusive advertising use, the IOC passed on all costs associated with preventing, policing and prosecuting ambush advertisers, propagandists and marketers infringing on Olympic trademarks, including mascots.
As detailed as the host city contracts are in some areas, there's no mention of "free-speech zones," "demonstration zones" or "protest zones," as they were called in Beijing.
Yet, the fenced enclosures for permit-paid protesters are Olympic hallmarks and remarkably similar from one city to the next.
Full details of Vancouver's have yet to be released, but the zones are promised to be in high-profile locations. They were in Salt Lake City as well, albeit with a total capacity of 170 people. Unlike in Beijing, plenty of demonstrators used the Salt Lake City enclosures. Only a few were arrested including an anti-abortion activist who broke the protest-zone rules and carried a placard that said "God Bless America."
Not that it headed off the feared riot. However, it wasn't incited by wild-eyed anti-anythings, but rather by a bunch of drunks after a beer garden closed early.
So what's in London's contract for 2012? It's impossible to know because London's freedom of information act doesn't require its release. Excellent.