2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Staging Team
The task here involved the gathering of Canada’s Olympic athletes
together in Calgary. The job was to brief and clothe them before transporting
the group en mass to Salt Lake City and the Olympic Games.
Parameters
Staging is a very regimented procedure which involves getting the athletes
to Calgary, scheduling their time in relation to being measured for
Canadian team uniforms and briefing, then getting them on the plane
to Salt Lake City, where another team would take over from there. This
function was asked of Ron Taylor, personally, as a volunteer endeavour
(as are all Mission team appointments).
Duties
The job in this case was as Transportation Liaison. A schedule of arrivals
was determined by the athletes, officials and travel wing of the Canadian
Olympic Committee and from this list, a schedule of pick up and delivery
as well as ground activities were developed. People would be arriving
at all hours of the day for over a week so it was required to have drivers
on standby to do the runs. The job here was to recruit drivers and schedule
them as well as maintain the vehicle inventory. Each day very few or
very many people would need to be picked up from the airport and transported
within the city to the staging area as well as the hotel and in some
case, training facilities.
The final task of the process involved gathering all athletes from their
hotels or staging facility, along with their equipment, luggage and
team uniform materials and getting them first to a huge civic send-off
at Olympic Plaza in Calgary before boarding them on buses and getting
them to the airport for international check-in. From that point the
travel liaison took aver at the counter.
Results
During the week, the movement of people went very smoothly. On departure
day it was determined that due to the bulk of the luggage, the buses
were not big enough. With a deadline 30 minutes away for the civic reception,
the task then became to get people, as well as previously unbooked extras
buses pulled together in order to move athletes and their gear –
all before the start of the reception. It was accomplished and we got
them to Olympic Plaza, the airport and ultimately to a very successful
Olympic Games.
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