Tickets for Family Members Grows as Olympics Issue

11/10/2008

All Lawrie Johns wanted to do was watch his son, Brian, swim at the 2008 Summer Olympics, representing his home country of Canada. Beijing was Johns third Olympics as an Olympic parent; his son had competed in Sydney and Athens, and was on the team to compete again in Beijing. But when Johns, along with parents of other Canadian swimmers, asked about tickets, they were told that of the 527 they'd requested, they'd get a total of 17. Parents, it seemed, were simply not high on the list of those thought to deserve tickets.

"It's not like we were asking for charity," Johns remembers. "We weren't asking for free tickets. We just wanted a chance to buy tickets to the events our children were in. It may sound a little selfish to some, but we thought that if there were a line, we should be toward the front of it because of all the time we'd spent at practices and on supplies and in time making sure our swimmers were ready."

Eventually, Canada's swim parents were able to cobble together about half of the tickets they thought they needed. Then Johns' wife set up a system in which parents could pool their tickets, and make sure that at least one family member would be at each Olympian swimmer's event. Careful planning and hard work helped solve many of the ticketing problems the families of the Canadian swim team faced, but it was nonetheless frustrating, Johns says. And as he talked to family members of other Olympic competitors during his time in Beijing, he saw that the problems faced by Canadian swim team parents were faced by parents of Olympics athletes worldwide. The International Olympics Committee and others might talk often of the Olympic Family and their commitment to it, but it was clear in Beijing that the "family" wasn't necessarily seen as including the actual relatives of the athletes.

That will not, however, be the case with the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, at least not for family members of Canada's Winter Olympians. In early October, the Canadian Olympic Committee and Petro-Canada, a sponsor of the 2010 Games, announced a program that would guarantee not only tickets, but lodging as well, to relatives of Canada's Olympics team members. Given the publicity that surrounded the troubles of Johns and other swim team parents in Beijing, some might have thought that the COC/Petro-Canada initiative was a response to their woes. As it happened, though, Petro-Canada and some others had been thinking about this issue since mid-2007, and an outline of a way to help Olympians' families had been included in a book detailing Canada's plans for hosting the 2010 Winter Games.

"It was back in June 2007, at a conference of Canada's winter sports federations, that we unveiled our idea," says Steven Keith, Director of Olympic and Community Partnerships for Petro-Canada. "Petro-Canada has a long history of being involved with the Canadian Olympics team, and traditionally our programs have been focused on the grass roots. Our history has always been more about helping developing athletes than helping those who are already the elite. It started to become apparent to us that the families played this incredible role within the lives of the athletes, perhaps the most influential role. And we were aware that there are quite a number of families who seldom if ever have a chance to see their kids compete. It was an area where we felt we could add real value and hopefully make a real difference."

The program, as eventually established, will provide Olympics event tickets and four nights of hotel accommodations in Vancouver to two family members of each Canadian athlete. (It will also cover family members of athletes in the Canadian Paralympics Games, which will be held at the same time.) Though the program is aimed at parents, it's not restricted to them. It's up to the athletes to decide whom they want to get the tickets. It could, Keith notes, be a wife or husband or siblings rather than parents. But the idea, he says, is to let the athletes have someone important to them in attendance.

"If an athlete goes from the preliminaries to semi-finals and then finals, we'll make sure that family members have two tickets to each event," says Keith. In some cases, he notes, the logistics will be simple. Some skiing events begin and end during the course of a single day, so arranging it so family members can be in the stands is relatively simple. Other events are a bit more complicated; the curling competition, for example, runs for some 16 days. So figuring out which families need to be at which curling event could take some work.  But Keith insists that every effort will be made to assure family members can cheer on the athletes related to them.

Since the Petro-Canada Canadian Athlete Family Program was announced, it has received exceptionally positive response, says Keith. What it hasn't received, he admits, is inquiries from other countries' Olympics committees or Olympics sponsors asking how they can do something similar. One reason for that, he says, may be the difference between being a sponsor or host country for the Games themselves as opposed to being a sponsor for a nation's Olympics team. Because Canada is hosting the 2010 Games, and because Petro-Canada is sponsoring the entire Winter Olympics, not just the Canadian team, they have more resources than they would otherwise. If Petro-Canada had tried to do in Beijing what they're doing in Vancouver, they likely couldn't have pulled it off, Keith says.

Currently, the Petro-Canada Canadian Athlete Family Program is a one-time operation. There are no plans to try to extend it to the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Still, Keith admits that if the Petro-Canada/COC initiative gets national Olympics committees and sponsors thinking more about what they can do for the family members of athletes, they wouldn't mind. It would, he says, be a nice legacy.

Lawrie Johns agrees. While admiring what has been put in place for Canadians in the 2010 Games, he says he's never really asked for anything quite that elaborate. He'd be happy to find his own hotel room and make his own travel plans. All he wants is a chance for Olympians' family members to buy the tickets they need to see their children attempt to be the best in the world at what they do.

"My whole mission in life now is to work with people to take the Petro-Canada initiative and expand it to the summer Olympics," says Johns. "The mission that we have is that the IOC make the statement that, barring unusual circumstances, parents should have the right to buy tickets to their children's events. That would solve a lot of the problems."

In others words, when the IOC talks about its dedication to the "Olympics Family," as it often does, he'd like them to mean not just a metaphoric family, but real family members as well. It seems like a simple request, and one long overdue.