Australia Also Has Many Gold Medal Event People

This week we’ve been rightfully proud of the brilliant results so many of our athletes are achieving at the Paris Olympics.  It’s so good to see.

This has been in juxtaposition to another Victorian parliamentary inquiry hearing on Friday into the Victoria 2026 Commonwealth Games debacle.

What is not understood – and even in much of the Event Industry – is that there is a large number of Australian event people and businesses who continue to work on Olympic Games and other major events around the world.

And in many cases, not just on one Olympic Games but on four, five, six or more Olympics, as well as Commonwealth Games and many other major events.

Event people and businesses that continue to be the very best in the world at what they do.  The Event Industry equivalent of being Olympic medal winning athletes.

My knowledge of this started with seeing Ric Birch producing the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 – forty years ago. It was so good to see an Australian producing the biggest event in the world.

Following the Sydney Olympics – which were exceptionally well organised – a large number of the Australian event people and businesses who worked on them went on to play key roles on other Olympic Games and major events all around the world and many still do to this day.

They are world leaders in event strategy, ceremonies, sports presentation, torch relays, infrastructure, logistics, transport, broadcast audio, cleaning, rigging and so many other areas. 

It is truly impressive what they have all achieved and continue to do.

Yet the Victorian parliamentary inquiry has shown that when the Victoria government first started to pursue the Commonwealth Games in 2021 they didn’t bring together a taskforce of some of Australia’s most experienced Games professionals to lead the effort. Instead it was led by bureaucrats from the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions as well as the Department of Health with little real operational event experience – let alone Commonwealth Games or Olympics experience. They went on what could best be described as a boys own adventure – unencumbered by knowledge or experience – to try to organise one of the largest events our country had seen.

(And yes, people outside the Event Industry think organising events is easy.)

The result was they couldn’t even get a proper business case together for the Commonwealth Games and it quickly ended in tears.  A complete debacle.

This was in very stark contrast to 2006, when Melbourne set a new standard for the Commonwealth Games with what was considered to be the best Commonwealth Games to date.

Australia is a country with so many brilliant athletes as we are again seeing in Paris – punching well above our weight.  But Australia is also lucky to have some of the very best event people in the world – including those working in Paris at the moment.  Again, punching well above our weight.

Its high time to finally recognise and acknowledge – and understand – the many brilliant Australian event people who work on major events around the world, and their extraordinary achievements.

But it is the nature of event people to just quietly get on and do extraordinary things without fuss or fanfare. Hence most of them are not widely known.

It’s also high time to actually utilise them.  That’s certainly the lesson for Victoria and for Brisbane 2032.