Host Olympian Bid Success Tip For Framing Your Bid

The politics of global sport and their major event hosting are so murky you feel they’d make a Bond villain look positively kindergarten. We seem to have hit an epoch where each big flagship tournament has only one bidder. Such are reputations for irrecoupable costs, citizen disapproval and years of civic disruption, the next two Olympics to be awarded a home have just been given to the only runners. Even then, only after some disturbing backroom opaque dealing.

Despite this – and the ground breaking marvel that was London 2012 – I was fascinated at this week’s celebratory remarks of 2028’s winner, Los Angeles.

In the days of bungs Machiavelllian multi-round voting, I recall a renowned repeat vote-winner happily consulting to deep-pocketed cities suggest the system was such that victory was all about being everyone’s number two choice. A fact he alone revelled in as a succession of surprise hosts clinched the staging.

This time round, with the field shrunk to such an extent we are surely on the verge of multiple-city Games, an exuberant mayor Eric Garcetti is quoted as saying;

“[L.A.] didn’t make a bid that said, ‘if the Olympics comes, we’ll do all these things’. We said, ‘we’re doing all these things, the Olympics should come’.”

I did chuckle that it slightly echoes the now co-opted trusted tv speechifying staple, “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” In a kind of ‘think not how your company can fix your huge problem, but how your huge problem can be fixed for your company’ way.

[btw, note also the other selling wisdom he’s quoted with; “People like to build things, they don’t like to maintain them … you have to think of the life of the projects.” You could write a whole Sales chapter around that one…]

But consider carefully the mayor’s pitch thoughts.

Which of these might sound best to your prospect; ‘when you sign, we’ll do all these things’, or ‘we’re doing all these things, so you should sign’?

To prevail in this enlightened manner, you could also just channel another American, Henry Ford; “you can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do”.