With less than three weeks to go before the 2008 host city is announced, Toronto’s Olympic bid committee is sticking to its game plan, said TO-Bid COO Bob Richardson, despite Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman’s inappropriate remarks about Africans.
A group, likely including the bid’s president and CEO John Bitove, will head to the European Olympic Committee meetings next week in Porturoz, Slovenia, in the hopes of turning European IOC members on to Toronto. Officials from the four other bid cities will also be present.
And at home, Toronto bid organizers are winding up a month-long arts and culture festival.
Richardson discounted any lasting effects of the media uproar over Mayor Lastman’s comments and said, “we consider the matter over. We’ve turned the page”.
Richardson said that Claude Bebear, the head of the Paris bid, called Bitove yesterday to denounce a Toronto newspaper that said Paris organizers were gloating over the negative fallout for Toronto from the Mayor’s blunder. Richardson said that Bebear called to “disassociate himself and the bid” from remarks by a French official with no connections to the Paris bid. And in Paris a bid official said, “we wish good luck to everyone, but we would not make some comment like that…it is not the issue”.
Bitove said the 2008 vote is going to be close. He said, “would I be surprised if (China wins) and we lose by 25 votes? No. But do I feel there is a movement (out there) that everyone is talking about Toronto being the best bid (technically)? Absolutely.”
Olympian Curtis Hibbert is convinced that many IOC members have yet to make up their minds and still are open for a good sell job. He believes that Team 2008, the group of athletes that represented the Toronto bid at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, made “an incredible impression” on the IOC.
But one Olympic insider in Europe said that the Team 2008 concept backfired in Sydney. “Most IOC members are old and they don’t want to be reminded of that by a bunch of goofy athletes parading arouond in J. Crew shirts”, he said.
