Archive for July, 2006

A little moan about Air Canada

Saturday, July 8th, 2006

My journey to Vancouver from London was on Air Canada. I am not these days a frequent traveller but nevertheless compared to the previous long haul flight I took on Virgin Atlantic, Air Canada was woeful. In particular:

  • No standard lap top plug (in business class); you need some crappy converter which costs CAN$120
  • Very uncomfortable seats made worse by skinny pillows
  • Really bad temperature control – I was too hot for most of the flight
  • Rubbish under the seats in front of me which had not been cleared out since the last flight

I don’t recommend Air Canada.

Posted in General comment | No Comments »

Thanks to our hosts

Saturday, July 8th, 2006

A big thank you to VANOC for hosting the meetings, esepcially to Ward Chapin and his technology team.

Posted in General comment | No Comments »

Four intense days

Saturday, July 8th, 2006

Nearing the end of four quite intense days in Vancouver. TOROC have provided a huge amount of data and the job of filtering relevant pieces for LOCOG is not easy. Why? Well, technology moves so fast that the lessons from 2006 may not have any real context in 2012. That said, some things stand out and are perhaps the perennial challenges in running successful sports events – seamless communicaiton up and down, teamwork, sticking to sound values (really sticking to them), total clarity on budgets, local initiative and devolved decision making. These are just as important to technology as to any other functional area in the organising of a Games.

Posted in London 2012 | No Comments »

Vancouver debrief

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

I am now in Vancouver at the Turin 2006 Winter Olympic Games technology debrief. Four days poring over the lessons from Turin. (The technology sessions precede the main debrief next week.) It is refreshing that the Turin technology team are willing to share things in a very frank way. The biggest lessons often come from mistakes, after all. So thanks to them.

Posted in London 2012 | No Comments »