Preparing For The Winter Games...In Halifax

By Michelle Cyr-Whiting

City residents line Victoria Street to 'wow' Canada Games judges last August

Prince George, B.C. - The clock to the 2015 Canada Winter Games has been ticking down from the moment it was announced Prince George won the bid back on September 17th...

Since then, members of the original Bid Committee have been racing against time to lay the foundation for a 'team' that will host the country's best winter athletes four years from now. Pressing them on, is the fact that Halifax gets set to host the 2011 Games in less than one month and it's the only opportunity to see first-hand what it will take to host the winter sports competition.

Spokesperson, Tracy Calogheros, has shifted from the original committee to a Bid Transition Team and she is one of three people who've been asked to stay on as part of the future host society. (Finlay Sinclair and Jim Martin with the Fraser-Fort George Regional District are the other two.) Calogheros says the paperwork to create an official host society was filed with the B.C. Society Act office last week and there's now a two-week waiting period. She says once the host society is a legal entity, with its constitution and bylaws in place, it can finalize its board, begin holding meetings, open a bank account, and, generally, get down to the business of preparing for the games. 

But Calogheros says the timeframe was just too tight to get the society in place before the Halifax Games. She says there have been a number of 'chicken versus egg' situations since being awarded the bid that are frustrating, but unavoidable. "In speaking with the Canada Games people in tele-conference, they've all said there are these standards - where you want to have people in place by certain dates - but then they say no one ever meets those dates." She says, "In a perfect world, we would have had a CEO hired the day after we were awarded the Games, but, I mean, that's just not feasible."

So members of the transition team are off to next month's Winter Games in Nova Scotia. It will be a large contingent of approximately 12 team members and four VIPs (Mayor Dan Rogers, Chief Dominic Frederick and two spots are hoped to be filled by potential corporate sponsors). Calogheros says, "None of these people are going for the full two weeks - they're just going for chunks of time and it's all scheduled so they're there for different 'pieces of the puzzle'."

They'll all be taking part in 'Transfer-of-Knowledge' programs put on by Canada Games officials, which cover everything from the history and scope of the games, to media relations, to governance of the host committee. She says, "There's a few chunks of time where we're allowed to shadow peers or go to sports events, but everyday there's at least two of these ToK sessions."

"That's why we couldn't wait until we had a host society in place, we had to make sure we were at these games," says Calogheros. They could also go to the Summer Games in Sherbrooke, but, she says, "This was our one shot at seeing the arena sports and the alpine sports and how they're dealing with the challenges specifically related to snow, and cold and weather."

Calogheros anticipates the group will be going public with its search for a CEO during the Halifax games.

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Opinion250 will run a five-part series in the days leading up to the 2011 Winter Games in Halifax

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