Sitting in Scott Logan’s Dartmouth office, high above Halifax Harbour, it is easy to see the big picture. Logan, a former competitive paddler and the CEO of the Halifax 2014 Commonwealth Games Bid Committee, is a big-picture guy. The theme of our conversation is whether Atlantic Canadians can truly imagine the Games coming here.

My thoughts drift back to a week earlier, when I was flying into Louisville, Ky., looking down on Churchill Downs, the massive racetrack that is the public face of the city. On the ground I learned that university football and basketball are spectacles of near-professional scale. This is a sports town.

What do business guys in Louisville think of all the attention to sports? “The city kind of shuts down for a few days at Derby time,” the president of a technology firm told me. He paused. “Yeah, we do a lot of international business networking then.” We drove past a banner promoting the Ryder Cup, golf’s premier international showcase, which will be coming to the Valhalla Golf Club in 2008. “That’s going to bring in a lot of money,” he said.

The short answer is that business and sports mix well in this Kentucky city that is about the same size as Halifax. Those Americans can mix business with just about anything. Meanwhile, back in Atlantica, we aren’t quite sure what to make of the bid for the Games. The bid committee says independent polls indicate that a majority of Nova Scotians are in favour of the Games, although a vocal minority at City Hall and elsewhere say that the costs to the taxpayer will be too high.

The evidence is that cities that have hosted the Games in the past have been transformed, adding not only new sports facilities but also a sense of pride and civic engagement, not to mention new business opportunities. Maybe what we have here is a failure of imagination. You can’t accuse Scott Logan of that. He explains that when he became a competitive paddler, he learned visualization techniques designed to work alongside the brutal training regime.

“You need to experience the moment in advance,” he says. “You see yourself and feel yourself taking every stroke, feeling what it is like to cross the finish line first. We trained around scenarios, imagining a cross chop from the right, from the left. You learn to control your body differently this way. I still use sports psychology to prepare for press conferences. It is all about inspiration and aspiration.”

Logan’s task is daunting. He travels the world meeting representatives of the Commonwealth countries that will vote to select the winner from the three finalists, trying to convince them that Halifax will be the best place to send their athletes and other delegates. He is also pitching the Games hard on his home turf. Besides money from all levels of government and the private sector, it will take a large volunteer effort and plenty of goodwill for the Games to work. Maybe Atlantic Canada is the key sell.

“Here, people don’t know what we don’t have, what the future might be,” says Logan. “Our job is to help them see it. Until you have experienced something like this with the senses, it can be hard to imagine. We try to bring the concept to life. We are asking Nova Scotians to take a chance on something that will change their lives forever.”

Australian Tony Holding has been hired to help sell the Games. A former phys ed teacher, he loves the spectacle. “Sports are euphoric, addictive, unscripted natural drama,” he says. He comes from Melbourne, “which thinks of itself as the events capital of Australia, the southern hemisphere, the world.” He is only half joking.

Melbourne hosted the Summer Olympics in 1956 and the Commonwealth Games in 2006. It hosts the Australian Open tennis championship and a Formula One race. “Sports bring in money, opportunity, branding, new facilities,” says Holding. “In Melbourne we now have multiple stadia, two indoor tennis centres, swimming, and it is all profitable. They all bring in visitors and business. It helps to brand the city. And we take great pride in delivery and in making people feel good.”
Australia is sports mad, Holding adds; it’s a country of only 21 million people that ranked fourth in the world in the last summer Olympics. “Australia and Canada have a similar background,” he says, “ but in Australia medals matter so much. Before Brisbane got the Games in 1982, it had a lifeless downtown. The Games brought it to life. Now it is almost as big as Melbourne. Halifax is a great sports city and has hosted big events like the Tall Ships, but the Commonwealth Games are on a different level, with more athletes than the winter Olympics.”

The Games’ vote takes place in November. Abuja, Nigeria, bills itself as the “African Games” (the continent has never hosted the Games); and Glasgow, Scotland, has had one million pledges of support from Scots around the globe.
Winning the vote won’t be easy. The key may be believing it here first.