2002 Winter Olympics
- Mitt Romney Rescued the 2002 Winter Olympics by turning a $379 million deficit into a $100 million profit as emergency C.E.O.
- Supervised a multi-national security effort that allowed the 2002 Olympics to proceed without incident only a year after September 11th.
Major Speeches about the Olympics
From RGA
Governor Romney first attained national recognition for his role in turning around the 2002 Winter Olympics. With the 2002 Games mired in controversy and facing a financial crisis, Romney was asked to take over as President and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, leaving behind a successful career as an entrepreneur.
Governor Romney has said he felt compelled to assume the seemingly impossible task of rescuing the Games by both the urgings of his wife, Ann, and by the memory of his father, George Romney, who had been a successful businessman, three-term Governor of Michigan, and a tireless advocate of volunteerism in America.
In his three years at the helm in Salt Lake, Romney erased a $379 million operating deficit, organized 23,000 volunteers, galvanized community spirit, and oversaw an unprecedented security mobilization just months after the September 11th attacks, leading to one of the most successful Olympics in our country's history.
Other
Governor Romney has said he felt compelled to assume the seemingly impossible task of rescuing the Games by both the urgings of his wife, Ann, and by the memory of his father, George Romney, who had been a successful businessman, three-term Governor of Michigan, and a tireless advocate of volunteerism in America.
In his three years at the helm in Salt Lake, Romney erased a $379 million operating deficit, organized 23,000 volunteers, galvanized community spirit, and oversaw an unprecedented security mobilization just months after the September 11th attacks, leading to one of the most successful Olympics in our country's history.
Romney first obtained national attention when he served as CEO of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games held in Salt Lake City. In 1999 the event was $379 million short of its revenue goals, and there were damaging allegations of bribery involving top officials. In an effort to get the event back on track, Romney was asked to lead the organization of the Games. The Organizing Committee's leadership and policies were restructured, budgets were tightened and fundraising was placed back on track. Under his leadership, the 2002 Olympic Winter Games turned into a spectacular success, clearing a profit of $100 million. Romney himself contributed $1 million, and donated his three years of pay ($275,000 per annum) to charity.10 He wrote a book about his experience called Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games
I actually had the fun of applying those principals in the Olympics. When I went on that Olympic jog I had mentioned, I got out there and found out that we had a severe financial crisis. We had nowhere near as much money as was necessary to build our Olympic venues and hold our games. The first thing we had to do was to change some team members -- and we did that -- carry on a full audit of where we were -- that showed us we were three hundred and ninety million dollars in the hole -- and then we had to figure out what was important and focus on it.
One of my favorite stories was about our speed-skating oval. We had to build a speed-skating oval, and they're big. You see them on TV and these guys skate around on the speed-skating oval and you think, I wonder how big that is. You can fit four football fields inside that doorway. Four football fields and no posts. That's part of our contract because the TV cameras have to be able to race around and see no interference with the athletes. Japan built theirs, called the M-Wave -- beautiful building, a $300 million price tag. Our budget was $35 million; we had a problem. With the team we had assembled and with extraordinary focus, our team came up with some remarkable designs and built a building for $30 million dollars, and we built it with overhead cables. We built it in the structure, if you will, of a suspension bridge. We had piers outside of the building, we had stretched cables across, and held up a roof. And by virtue of building it that way -- I am not an engineer, and I apologize for engineering folks here -- but, instead of having to build a very tall building to hold the stress of a roof and the snow that we had on top of it, we were able to bring the roof down very close to the ice. That meant we had a lot less cubic space inside the building to heat and to cool and that meant we were able to control the climate a good deal better. By the way, not only did we save money by bringing the structure down -- we used one-third less steel in this building than in a conventional building -- but by controlling the climate we were able to affect the characteristics of the ice a great deal better. You may have noted during the winter Olympic games, that of the 8 events that were held in our speed-skating oval, 7 of the 8 broke new world records, and the reason was quiet simply because we had to innovate and had to focus on finding a way to save money. We had to bring our roof down to control the climate better, and by virtue of that created something known as 'fast ice' -- which is hard on the bottom and soft on top.
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