Five years after the 2000 Olympic Games, Sydney Games officials are now touring the world providing their expertise to other countries hosting the Olympic Games.
Sydney Olympic executive Richard Palfreyman, who is running the Turin 2006 Winter Games press centre says, “we didn’t advertise or specifically go looking for work – it came to us”.
The Australian reports that scores of Australian executives and companies that worked on the 2000 Sydney Games now find themselves at the centre of the international sports event management business.
Expertise developed in Sydney is transforming how cities win and stage events ranging from rugby World Cups and rugby leagues sevens tournaments to Pan American and Asian Games.
It’s one of the greatest legacies of the Sydney Games, which the newspaper says has translated into lucrative contracts in industries such as architecture and construction, corporate hospitality, communications technology, security, transport logistics and media management.
There were several former Sydney officials behind London’s victorious bid for the 2012 Summer Games and Australian companies working on the infrastructure of the Beijing 2008 Games.
Twenty Australian have top jobs in the preparations for the Turin 2006 Winter Games. Evelina Christillin, deputy president of the Turin Games organizing committee says, “there’s a circuit of Olympic specialists. They are the elite of the elite – super professionals who move from one Olympics to the next. They are more flexible, open to big changes and more used to moving around”.
Some Sydney 200 executives have started a “transfer of knowledge” program, drafting a set of “hot-to” documents and selling them to the IOC for $4.5 million, reports the Australian.
Former SOCOG board members and Australian Olympic Committee secretary-general Craig McLatchey was headhunted to run a new IOC-backed enterprise, Olympic Games Knowledge Services, based in Lausanne Switzerland, which was set up to provide detailed advice to Olympic organizing committees. It has now been spun off into the privately held Event Knowledge Services of which he is chief executive officer. It now has other clients which include the International Rugby Board, FIFA, the Commonwealth Games Federation and the Olympic Council of Asia, which is holding the 2006 Asian Games in Doha Qata.
