Transcript: Olympic sports consultant - Bob Elphinston & Associates
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Transcript
[Introduction slides to background music]
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>>Voiceover: There is no doubt that hosting an Olympic Games requires a huge coordination effort by hundreds of thousands of people. Leading sports administrator, Bob Elphinston, says at the end of the day it’s all about sport.
>>Bob Elphinston: So London has drawn very much on the Sydney experience in creating the Olympic Delivery Authority and in following the model of how we develop sport and the use of the competition managers, venue managers, and how sport needs to lead the way. At the end of the day the Olympic Games is about the athlete. If you have no athletes it doesn’t matter about the broadcast systems or the media or the sponsors, they don’t have an event. So we have to be concerned about the quality of the services at the venues, the transport, the food, the Olympic Village from the athletes’ perspective, and it’s about educating the organising committee that sport is the priority and that’s often difficult for people involved in marketing or in transport or in security.
>>Voiceover: London hopes that the years of planning and heavy investment will make for a very successful games.
>>Bob Elphinston: Cities more and more these days realise that whilst their staff and their expertise needs to come from the local community, they do need to draw on international expertise and we’ve seen that with every Olympic since. It’s about guiding and giving them the best advice, learning from the experiences and ultimately they make their own decisions and, you know, advisers or consultants provide the best advice and ultimately the organising committee will decide what to do with that advice and hopefully they benefit from it.
>>Voiceover: The Olympics are the largest peacetime event in the world and leave a lasting and hopefully successful legacy on any host city.
>>Bob Elphinston: Sustainability and legacy, and the Olympic Committee and the Olympic movement now is demanding much more of host cities and probably Sydney started to lead the way in this way although we were slow to deliver the legacy but now 12 years on after the Sydney Games, the legacy of the Sydney Olympics is quite superb. I mean one only has to visit Sydney Olympic Park and the other venues and the success of the Olympic Village which became a remarkable housing estate is there for all to see and London has learnt very well from this experience.
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