David Mason Interview
A very special interview coming your way today as we sit down with the executive producer of presentation for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Bid David Mason to learn a little bit more about his unique role with the bid that helped bring the games to Australia. David goes into extensive detail about just what he did that was so important for the Sydney bid, and how him being brought in really helped change the tone of the campaign. He also goes into detail about the different strategies used for the final presentation that Sydney gave to the IOC, as well as just what it meant to him to play such a crucial role in a bid that had such an effect on all of Australia. It's an incredible chat that no Olympic fan can miss!
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note this is an automated transcript that may contain errors.
BEN WATERWORTH: It is Off The Podium, An Olympics Podcast coming to you today for a very special interview, a very unique interview, which I'm very excited to bring to you today. We've had lots of people on this show, from athletes to journalists to marketing, ticketing experts, everything else in between, but we've got a unique one today. We're speaking to David Mason, who was the executive producer of presentation on the Sydney 2000 Olympic bid. Now, it was David's role to essentially put together the final presentation, a 45-minute presentation that was presented to the IOC to help secure the Olympics for Sydney back in 1993. So that's when the games were awarded, ultimately held in the year 2000. And David just tells an absolutely fascinating story about how he was brought into the bid, how he was creating the presentation, and how that ultimately led to Sydney getting the vote to host the games by a solitary vote, an incredible, incredible achievement. And this is an incredibly fascinating chat here from David, really going behind the scenes of everything, and I was enthralled by every single second of his story here. So I'm gonna shut up, I'm gonna hand over to myself to introduce David properly. Here is our chat with executive producer of the presentation of the Sydney 2000 Olympic bid, David Mason.
BEN WATERWORTH: I'm very excited today to be able to talk to our next guest. We've had a bunch of people on to talk a little bit more about things outside of the sporting aspects of the Olympics. We've talked about marketing, we've talked about journalism, we have talked about everything else in between and more. And today we're gonna add to that to learn a little bit more about presentations for Olympic bids and how important they are to help bring the attention to the IOC and then help bring an Olympics to the city who is bidding for it. We are joined today by David Mason, who is the executive producer, I should say, for presentation on the Sydney 2000 bid. And I'm very excited to learn a little bit more about how he got involved and everything else that he did, which ultimately helped land Sydney The Games back in the year 2000. David, first of all, welcome to Off The Podium. It's a pleasure to speak to you today.
DAVID MASON: Thank you very much indeed. Dying to talk about it.
BEN WATERWORTH: It's very exciting actually, because just a bit of a tangent here for people who are listening to this and maybe listen to some of the other shows that I'm involved in. You and I met probably about a year or so ago on another show I do, Australian Survivor Archives, where we talked about your role being the EP of a season of Australian Survivor back in the day. And sort of through that conversation, I discovered your connection to the Sydney Olympic bid, got me a bit excited as an Olympic fan. And so I'm kind of glad we could get to talk about this. Because is this something that is often talked about? I mean, you're obviously got a very esteemed career in television as an executive producer, but does this sort of come up much about your role that you did have with the Sydney Olympic bid?
DAVID MASON: It doesn't come up much because really it's sort of very behind the scenes. Everyone thinks about the opening ceremony. That's what they think about in terms of the Olympics and shows and stuff. But the bid process, I mean, it was a complete eye opener to me. I mean, I had no idea about it when I started off. I had no idea what was involved and learned, well, we all learned, the entire team learned very quickly about what was required to bid for the games.
BEN WATERWORTH: So on that page, how do you get involved? How does somebody approach you to basically be like, hey, help us out here. We want to do this. Or were you approaching them kind of how it all came about?
DAVID MASON: Yeah, it was a bit of both. I was an exec producer at Seven Network at the time. This is back in 1993, and I was an exec producer in the news department, and I was creating news documentaries for Seven. And one of the ones I wanted to do, and we made, was about Sydney's Olympic bid, the early days of the bid. And I went around and filmed in some of the old Olympic cities like Barcelona. And we filmed in a lot of the other bidding cities. We filmed bits and pieces about all the other bids and what they had on offer. And I went to Beijing to film, as it were, their bid and what it is, how their Olympics would look. They were, obviously, Sydney's biggest rivals. And they treated me like, frankly, an IOC member. They were showing me everything, absolutely everything. And they had supreme confidence. And they were like, it was this. They said, well, nice of Sydney to bid, but really, you don't stand a chance. We'll show you how it's done. And they were showing us absolutely everything. And it was impressive, but it was very Chinese. And they were intimating to me, saying, look, Sydney doesn't have a chance. They said, Sydney, it's a dirty city. You have prostitutes. The IOC doesn't like grubbiness like that. You need to be a world-class city. I was taking all this on board and writing notes, thinking, okay, well, that's as much of a threat that they think Sydney is, okay? And I went back to Sydney, and I obviously interviewed Rod McGeeok, the head of the BID and a few others within the BID team. And I got back to Sydney. I phoned Rod's office, and I said, I've got a bit of intel from Beijing about their BID. Love to come and talk to you about it. And so he invited me along, and I got the impression that he was doing the, well, let's keep the media sweet. You know, well, I'll give this guy 10 minutes of my time so he can download a little bit and feel good about it. And I started talking, and he said, oh, David, just stop there. And then he picked up the intercom to his PA and said, Margaret, call the team in. We need a meeting. So he called in all the exact team and said, okay, David, now start again. And so I did the full download about the Beijing BID and what they thought about Sydney, things like the prostitutes and everything. And then I said, what they haven't, what, you know, it's an outsider, I know nothing about the Olympic BID process. What they haven't caught on about, though, is the environment. I said, Beijing, as we all know, hideously polluted. How they will get it to be unpolluted till end of their summer. I have no idea the place is filthy. It's filthy for athletes, let alone anyone else. And I said, I should backtrack a bit. I was also helping start environmental movements called Planet Ark, and I've done in climate change documentaries and stuff like that leading up to it. So I said to Rod and the team, I said, look, this is a real opportunity for Sydney. I said, this is the dawn of a new millennium. And at the moment, the Olympics has three arms. It has, sorry, it has two arms. It has sport and it has culture. So why doesn't Sydney go to the IOC and say, would the IOC like to consider a third arm of the Olympic movement an environment? And then Sydney could present itself at the dawn of the new millennium as the first green games. And there was silence in the room. And I thought, oh shit, I really overstepped the mark. And then one of the team looked up at Rod and said, Rod, I think there's quite a lot we need to do about this to change the way we're pitching the bid. I think we need to leap onto this now. And things started to change. And we presented Sydney the green bid. I mean, it's a bit of a semantics, but we knew that Beijing could not begin to compete in those terms, let alone anything else. So moving along, the TV show went to air and everything. And I got a call a few weeks later from the head of communications for the bid, a chap called Ian Doese. And he said, David, great, great dog. He said, great dog, I love it. Now we're looking at getting someone to make all our films for the presentation. So what directors would you, we're thinking of Peter Ware and this and that. And I immediately said, look, you don't want a filmmaker because they're just going to make their films for themselves and they'll be fantastic, but they won't really do the job. Oh, oh, he said, so what sort of person do you want? And I said, you don't really want anyone from advertising because they're going to do a 45 second, 30 second message and they're not going to sell it either. Oh, so what sort of person? I said, you need someone who's good at telling stories over the course of 45 minutes. Oh, what sort of person that? Me.
BEN WATERWORTH: Hang on, David, hang on.
DAVID MASON: I'll get straight back to you. He got back the following day and said, David, can you come in for a meeting? So I pitched myself. Absolutely. I said, I'm an outsider, I'm a foreigner. I've only been in Australia by that time, maybe eight years or so. I still found myself as an outsider to Sydney, outsider to Australia, but in love with the city, in love with the country. So I get to see Australia, see Sydney as an outsider, but have an insider's view and an insider's love for the city. And obviously the skills experience, one would hope to sell that, help sell that. And so those are some of the skills I brought in. I was seconded from seven for about six months altogether to create this thing, and had no idea about where to start. All I knew was we've got 45 minutes on the final day of the entire campaign. This is maybe four hours before all the IOC members vote. We've got 45 minutes to sell the games to them. And I should say, this is the lead up, you know, years, years of campaigning, of lobbying, of creating the bid itself. It's not just a case of, oh, well, we'll chuck up some films and then hope they like them. No, this is, the presentation is the culmination. It's just the encapsulation of everything that's been done for years. It's, you know, it's a tiny, tiny, it's not even a cherry on top. It's a stalk of the cherry on top of the entire thing. I mean, it's absolutely meaningless in the scheme of things compared to the amount of work that goes into creating the bid, including construction. I mean, look, half the sites were being constructed while we were bidding out at Homebush. So it's a tiny, tiny fraction of the entire bid. But as we, as I soon began to learn, it actually has an amazing impact. And I should say, this is going back to 1993. The bidding process now is different. There are, it isn't done by the whole IOC. There's an executive committee, the IOC that assesses all the bids. It's very different now. But way back then in 93, the entire IOC, there were 108, no, at the time there were 89 members then. And they visited every city. It was a junket. Every IOC member visited every city, and they would treat it like Bolton's show and everything and wine and dine. It's also very political. They have their blocks, their factions about which country, well, you voted for us five years ago, so we'll vote for you. There's so much behind that, as I know you're aware. So there's only so much that the grid process can actually do. And with Sydney, we were up against Manchester, Berlin, Istanbul, Beijing, okay, and us. We kind of thought the others, it may be Manchester, but Istanbul and Berlin weren't really in the running. Our big rival, obviously, was Beijing. And so all the lobbying and everything that goes on in the years ahead, and you think, well, how on earth is a presentation gonna change anything? You know, these eyes, they've made up their minds. By the time they get into this hall, they're seeing all these presentations, they've made up their minds. Now, what's the point? And that was my opinion when we started the whole process. And then I began to learn two things. One, the voting process, as I'm sure you know, the voting process as it was, it's a knockout vote. So the first city that gets 50% plus one of the vote gets the games. So everyone votes, and it's a blind vote. Secret ballot. Everyone, all the IOC members vote. And then if no one city has got 50%, 50 plus 1%, then the bottom city drops off, the lowest scoring city, and then everyone recasts their vote. And a lot of IOC members, frankly, will cast their vote for who they said they would on the first round. Okay, that didn't get in. Right, gloves off. We'll actually vote for who we want now. Or, once your favourite city has dropped off, now I can vote for someone else, and then maybe that city drops off, and it goes through all the rounds until one city gets 50% plus one. And so, as your favourite city drops off into the next round, and you get into the next round, the IOC members start to look around about, okay, well, I wanted Berlin there out, I wanted Istanbul there out, I wanted Manchester there out, okay, it's between these two now, between Beijing and Sydney, who am I gonna go for? And some will have political staff and so on. And some, as we realised later, two IOC members had their votes swung, changed their minds as a result of the presentation. And Sydney one by one. Now, we want to know this when we start the whole process, but when we got to it at the end, that's how close we were, and that's the impact that the presentation had. And it wasn't, it's not just, we say it's just a video or whatever and some speeches. I'm gonna go through the whole lot to tell you, tell listeners how we constructed the whole thing in order to make that impact. And it sat with me, and I learned so much doing this. I didn't come in with the answers. I came in coming in with lots of questions about how do we do this? And we pulled together some amazing people, said, okay, this is how we're gonna do it, and we're gonna do this. And we played, we played a lot of games throughout the whole lot, the whole thing. I mean, there's me as an outsider as a Brit, well, Brit and Australian citizenship, but grew up as a Brit, and I learned so much about the Australian larrikin way of bending rules, not doing anything illegal or immoral, but just bending stuff so we can just do a good job. And time and time again, we did this and had fun with it. There's so many, I'll go through lots of things. I mean, the first time this began to emerge these tactics, we're just doing for fun, frankly. The BID board was in Stuttgart, the international world championships, athletics world championships. And so whenever there's a world championships, we're gonna be IOC members, so therefore the BID team are there, lobbying and showing our presence and stuff. And it's only four or five people from the BID team, the senior people. And we knew, this is a time, this is 1993, when faxes were the form of communication. There was no email, it was all fax. And so we knew that any fax that we sent to the BID team to Rod in the hotel would be taken off the fax machine at the hotel, photocopied, delivered, and the photocopied would go to the Berlin team. We knew that. Everything was just porous, we knew that. So I set it up. I sent Rod an email, an email of fax, saying, dear Rod, I hope everything's going well in Stuttgart. We just need to talk about budgets for the presentation. I have to insist that $50,000 is really not going to be sufficient. I'm sorry to say this, and I know money's tight, we are going to need $75,000 for this. Can we talk urgently, because we have to start making commitments now? It's all bullshit. Our budget was $750,000 back in 1993. But Berlin took this, and they thought, oh, Sydney's only spending $75,000 on their budget, so they don't know whether it was a result. But their entire presentation was pretty lame. And that was just a little bit of a trickery. We're spending 10 times that amount on the final presentation. It's just fun stuff like that.
BEN WATERWORTH: Strategy going on now. It's all the strategy going on. It's kind of, this is what leads you into doing so much reality TV. You're on the bone.
DAVID MASON: Exactly, it led me into doing the mole. Exactly, how can we do things without being immoral, just being a little bit sly? And it was stuff like that. So if you can imagine the presentation as it was back then in 93, basically a bunch of people talking, PowerPoints and a couple of films.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yeah.
DAVID MASON: Boring as hell. And I thought, okay, well, number one, I hate the thought of PowerPoints and static slides and stuff like that. It's just, oh, so dull. So this is in the early days of digital tape, very early days. So Philips had come out with a digital tape player, and the machine cost about $100,000 or something, and no one had one, but Philips lent us one. So we decided, okay, we're gonna use this machine simply because it can run video, moving pictures, and when we need to and when we want to, we just hit pause and it gives us a perfect freeze. And then we can release pause and it plays videos. So we thought, okay, if someone's talking, they're doing their speech, we can have moving pictures behind them, and every now and then throughout their speech, we'll have a couple of stills that we can pause on, allow them to catch up, release, so that the pictures will always be in sync with what they're saying, no matter what speed they go. And it worked really, really well. I mean, when we got to Monte Carlo, for instance, to do for the IOC Congress, we all had some rehearsal time within the stadium there to do technical run-throughs and stuff, and we brought in our machine, and they said, no, you cannot use the machine, no, use these machines. Sorry for the accent. I said, I know. Oh, it is quite clear, there's a level playing ground. You are not allowed to bring in your own machines. We said, oh, this is tragic. I'm so, this is our, this is the standard of video. This is the machines we use in Australia. We don't use it, we don't use it. No, no, we kind of learned that. I knew this would happen. I said, look, tell you what, I'm so sorry. This misunderstanding. Although it's just a machine. If we just leave it in the room, then anyone else can use it as well. That'll create the level playing field. Oh, okay, fine. No one had that format, so we could use the machine. And everyone was just blown out of the water with things like that. That's just a teeny little technical thing that just helps bring the presentation to life. Are there little tricks we did when we got to Monte Carlo? Again, there was strict rules about what you're allowed to do in Monte Carlo. You're not allowed to turn the place. You're not allowed to put up marquees and this and that and clutter Monte Carlo. There were real strong rules. However, we knew that Prince Albert was an IOC member, was a fan of Sydney, so we approached him and we got permission from the Monte Carlo government to bring in some street theatre. And they weren't your didgeridoos and your kangaroos and stuff. It was actually a really classy, urban, creative theatre, slight avant-garde theatre. They looked fantastic and just very slightly branded Sydney. You could barely notice it, but everyone knew we were from Sydney, but it was very subtle. We were giving away those clip-on kangaroos, giving those away to people in Monaco. Not the ocean, to everyone in Monaco. Everywhere you went to Monaco, people had clip-on koalas in every shop, in every taxi, whatever. It just felt like, we kind of felt that Monaco is a bit like Sydney. It's on the coast. It's pretty chill, pretty laid back. We had that kind of rapport with them. Now, what happened then, though, when there was the British bid, the Manchester bid, the chairman of the bid apparently caught his team together and said, for F's sake, everywhere F-ing go, I can see F-ing Sydney. They've come halfway across the world, and all you can see is F-ing Sydney. So tomorrow, I want to see Grenadier Guard. I want to see Elizabethans. I want to see double-decker busses. I want to see taxis. Make this place look like Manchester. The following day, they had double-decker busses clogging up the streets of Monaco, pissing everyone off. They had black cabs, taxi written on, not for hire. Really gonna piss people off. They had Grenadier Guards marching up and down the promenade and getting in people's way. They completely screwed it up. I mean, so we were always very careful. And yeah, we're gonna be cheeky about stuff, but we're gonna be really respectful to show this is how the games will be. It'll be cheap, it'll be fun, it'll be joyful and lighthearted. And that's how a lot of our presentation ended up being. And I'll start, if I may, I'll start to talk about-
BEN WATERWORTH: Please do, no, I want to hear about it for sure.
DAVID MASON: So there are lots of things you need to cover off in the presentation, a lot of the technical stuff. This is how basically this is gonna be run. This is where the savings are. The Sydney bit had a lot of aces up its sleeve. It was gonna be the first games quite possibly ever. I can't remember, maybe the first games ever where every single athlete is in the one village. Normally, sailing is somewhere else, or a question, and they've gotta be in their own villages somewhere miles up. We had everyone in the same village. That means so much to the IOC, because the Olympics, as you know, are a festival of sport. It's not like a world championship. It's a festival where everyone comes together. So that was gold. The fact that we had so many stadiums half built, the fact that the government was buying, we had so many aces up our sleeve. And in fact, the executive committee had done a report on Sydney and said, Sydney is faultless. We are the number one. We score 10 out of 10 in every category. So we knew we had to do that, but we knew because we were 10 out of 10 and everyone knew it, we didn't have to dwell on that at all. What I began to realise as I worked on creating with all the other team, I mean, it's not just me, God forbid, it was everyone pulling it together. And we realised that if you imagine on the final day, we got four or five cities, all making their presentations to the IOC, and then they vote. So if you're an IOC member, you're in this hall, this stadium type thing, listening to these things going on all day long. You get to lunchtime, you got a couple more to go, then you're falling asleep. Because everyone's saying the same thing. Ours will be the best games ever. We believe in the Olympics. We really want the, you know, everything, the same again and again and again, and the same thing's being trotted out. And really nothing's gonna stick. You know, if you're being told facts and figures and stuff, and we are the best, and you know, flag waving, we really love the games and everything, it's just mind-blowingly boring. And let's face it, the IOC mostly, the time anyway, in the 60s plus, and really been there, seen that, and then they've gotta go and vote. And all the presentations blur into each other. So we knew, okay, so we gotta separate ourselves. Our presentation was before lunch, which is actually a really good time, but we knew that ours still had to be memorable by the time they get to vote. And we knew, my brain's already set, that people don't remember facts, they remember emotions, and they remember stories. So our presentation really was about emotions and stories. So that we wanted the IOC members at the end of our presentation to feel what the Sydney Olympics would be like, and to feel the emotions that athletes feel. The IOC are mostly athletes, or former athletes. And we know that they have really strong emotions about competing and about the Olympics. And we wanted to be able to recreate those emotions so that they would feel it, and they would carry that feeling through to the vote. Those good feelings about olympism, and therefore about Sydney. So I'm now gonna run through about how the presentation itself was constructed. We got 45 minutes. And it started off with a really powerful, I wish I could show you these films, because they are amazing. A really powerful little 22nd film with some, I should tell you a bit about the team, by the way. The filmmaker, I did hire an advertising filmmaker, a chap called Adrian Haywood, because he makes, he used to make really emotional films. And so we had that ad side of it. The writer for the whole thing was a chap called Graham Freudenberg, who was a political writer, a Labour Party political writer. And we had Keating in power at the time. And the other significant person was a chap from a company called Rogan called Neil Flett. And his company creates corporate presentations for companies pitching for business. And there's corporate communications. And a lot of the skills he brought in, and which you'll hear about as I tell you about the presentation, one of the skills he brought in were just absolutely pivotal. For instance, we trained all the speakers, including Paul Keating, we trained them in public speaking about how to deliver every single word. And every single sentence paragraph had a beat and a point to it. The entire, all the speeches were constructed wonderfully by Graham Frunberg, the speechwriter. And the films from Adrian Haywood and his team were extraordinary. So the whole thing starts off, if you can imagine, lights come down and you hear this, a little bit of a ditch, a little bit of a rumm, rumm, rumm, rumm, rumm, rumm, rumm, rumm, rumm, rumm. And the screen lights up with these amazing images of Australia. Just beautiful images, and then an orchestral coming up behind it as I run, and I'm just filling the auditorium with the sound of these pictures. And then we get a helicopter shot tracking across some trees, and then lifting up, it's coming across Bradley's head in Sydney, lifting up and revealing the city and the bridge. And as it lifts up, if you remember the Sydney logo, which covered the shapes of the Opera House. They just come up over the Opera House and resolve itself to the logo. With a beautiful culmination of the music. And that is the start. That's just the start. And you think, whoa, this feels powerful. We knew that Beijing's bid would be powerful. And we needed to start with some power. So up comes the spotlight onto the lectern, and there is Kevin Gosper, IOC member. And he's literally formality, 20 seconds long, introducing our bid. There then comes, after that, talk really about the technical side of the bid. This is what the bid is. We'll be here, we'll be there. This is how it's run. This is the village. This is how the whole thing will operate. The committee said we got 10 out of 10, we got 10 out of 10. So once we've talked about the technical sides of the bid, obviously, we need to talk about the athletes. And we didn't want an athlete saying, yeah, I really want the games, the games are really cool or whatever. We want to convey to the IOC that we understand what the games really are. I thought we had Kieran Perkins, I think five times gold medallist, terrific, terrific bloke.
BEN WATERWORTH: I mean, fresh off Barcelona success at that point. Very fresh.
DAVID MASON: And so he steps up to the lectern, and he starts talking about what it's like to be an Olympian. Now, the IOC know this, they're Olympians themselves, but he's talking about, he's reminding them of how special the Olympics are for an athlete. In the village, to compete, it's way more than the world championship. This is the pinnacle of what it is to be an athlete. And he leads into the next film, which is about sport. And I should just say, with these films, they're images and they're music. There is no commentary. There is no voiceover. But the simple reason that most of the IOC, most of the audience are listening to headsets with simultaneous translation. Only about half are listening in English. And the moment you have some plans, then you can't hear the music. You can't feel anything. You just hear someone and translating live. And now this is that and it's really stilted. So, you know, give people a break. Give people a break just to sit back and watch the imagery and the music before they listen to more words. Just on that point, by the way, about the simultaneous translation, one of the other tricks we did, it's not a trick, it's a courtesy. We had all of our speeches translated into the various languages that were being relayed to the IOC members. So, we delivered those to the translators the night before. So, they would find the dissimilar translations at the same time, but they actually had a script they could read. Two things. One, they could then put more intonation in it. So, instead of just following along, they had it there and they could read it and they could help sell the message, frankly. That was just a little... No one else did that. I can't believe that no one else did that.
BEN WATERWORTH: It kind of seems obvious that you would do that, like get it prepared for it.
DAVID MASON: A little courtesy. Yeah. We gave them a single box of chocolate peach as well.
BEN WATERWORTH: A little incentive on top of the translation, why not? Was there a kangaroo on the box of chocolates as well?
DAVID MASON: If there wasn't, there should have been. And so the sport film isn't all about, yeah, we're the best at sport, we've won everything, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is actually about defeat. So we have a whole bunch of different sports, some Olympians, some older people playing bowl, some boxing, some playing, some running, everything in the community. It was all community sport, rowing and tennis, everyone playing sport, as if the whole of Sydney is full of sport. Well, actually, yes, it is. And participating and watching. And a couple of scenes of this young girl playing tennis and losing, and absolutely devastated that she's just lost beside herself. And these films are 90 seconds long. This is pure advertising to be able to deliver this kind of message in a 90 second film. And lots of other sports going, but we keep on coming back to this tennis player who picks themselves up, and we see them training hard and going to the gym and training hard and hitting hard and hitting hard, and then playing another match and winning. And that sense of winning is what every Olympian, every athlete knows. It's actually not about the winning. It's about, it was all worthwhile. All that effort has just come to that moment. And that's why the victory is so special and so pure. It's not just, hey, I'm better than everyone else. It's just, oh, the release. And that's what we see in that film. And the IOC members are just glued to it because they can feel what that is. Anyway, so that film ends, and Spotlight comes up onto the lectern. And the lectern is empty. There's no one there. And then you see a little hand come up to the side and just waving. And there's this awful feeling in the auditorium. A mistake's been made. What's happening? What's happening? Your little hand waving. And suddenly, Kieran Perkins suddenly gets up, runs across, picks up a little footstool, runs across, puts it behind the lectern. This little 11-year-old girl, Tanya Blanco, steps up onto it. Wow. Looks over to Kieran and says, Thanks, Kieran. That one stage-managed act created by Neil, Neil Slatt, that one stage-managed act does so much. It commands your attention. It says things go wrong, but you know what? We deal with it. It establishes, we've got a very small girl here. You couldn't see her. Now she's standing up. I see a lot of the grandparents in there. They are sitting there horrified that this 11-year-old girl is embarrassed now on a world stage because something didn't go right. And they are emotionally just open themselves to her. It's okay, darling, it's all right. We're not frightening. They're not saying that, but you can feel that kind of expanse in the room. You know, metaphorically, their arms enveloping her. And she gets up and just starts, as if nothing's... Thanks, Karen, says, Mr. President, ladies, gentlemen, your Royal Highnesses, my name is Tanya Blanco. And she goes into it. And she isn't saying, I want to be an athlete. She's saying, you know, how she'd love to have the games in her city. And she'd do anything for the games, even if it meant selling ice creams, just to be part of the games. And so it's a bit of candy floss, if you like, for the ice cream. Just a little bit of a break, a little bit of a humour, a little of emotion. And at the end of it, she says, there's someone I'd like to introduce to you now who knows a lot more about, who's very important in our country and can talk to you about how we'll do the Olympics. He's our Prime Minister, Mr Keating. So she is introducing the PM. Now the IOC, they couldn't be bothered with politicians. They promised the world that they're not going to be there in seven years' time. And they'll come and say all the right stuff, but boring. But we knew we had to have it. We had to establish we have the Prime Ministerial support. So he comes up, puts his arm around Tanya, says, Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, if it was my way, I wouldn't be speaking today. The Olympics are about the young people, about Kieran, about Tanya. It's their games. It's not about us. It's not about politicians. But having said that, thanks, Tanya. She goes back. Then Keating does his spiel, and he does the normal stuff of, this is what we promise, what it means to us. Australia has been one of only two countries at every single Olympics since 1996. That's the level of our support, yada, yada, yada. At the end of his speech, and so he gets through all that stuff, at the end of his speech, he defers. Now, it's really unusual for a politician to defer to anyone. And he defers. He says, I'd like to introduce now someone who knows more about what it's like to be a visitor to Sydney than I do. And it's my wife, Anita. His then wife. So he introduces Anita, and we're trained a lot with her. And she speaks. She comes from the Netherlands originally. She speaks multiple languages. So she gets up, she starts talking in two or three different languages, then carries on in English with a very, very heavy, with a strong accent, deliberately. And she talks about what it's like to be a visitor to Sydney. And this again is so important for the IOC, for all the people coming into an Olympic city. So she talks about what it's like to be a visitor and to be welcomed to Sydney. And at the end of that, she introduces the final film, again, just music and pictures. And this is about the people of Sydney. And it's a beautiful film about all the different people, about mateship and so many different vignettes and scenes of young and old, of people working, of people just being cheerful, of just the mateship, the camaraderie of Sydney, of people just enjoying, thank you, our outdoor lives, enjoying being with each other. And it just feels like, wow, what a place. This just feels beautiful. And showing a lot of the shops and the shopping, because IOC's, the male IOC members' wives like to shop, get that in there, you know, stuff like that. At the end of that, we come up to our final speech. Oh, I should say, I forgot to mention Tanya Blanco. In her speech, she's the only person of all our speakers, she's the only person who asks for the games. She actually says the word, please can we have the games? No one else asks, but you can get away with it with an 11-year-old.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yeah, exactly. She's just being polite, she's just doing what her parents do, like, be polite, please and thank you. Exactly.
DAVID MASON: She said please, she did say please. And so we get to the final, and after the final film, the light comes up on the lectern, and there's Rod, and Rod McGioc, and all the IOC members know him. He's had dinner with all of them, met them in their own homes, he knows everyone. And he does the summation of everything, that in the technical excellence of the bid, of the welcome, of the support, everything that they've just said, just a summation of everything they've just heard and seen. And at the end, he sums it up, he says, on behalf of the people of Oceania, on behalf of the people of Australia, on behalf of the people of Sydney, we humbly submit our bid. Simple as that.
BEN WATERWORTH: That's powerful, though. It's powerful.
DAVID MASON: It's really powerful. And that was the end of the 45 minutes. I think we had 20 seconds to spare. And that was the end, and then everyone goes off to lunch. And we'll...
BEN WATERWORTH: Right.
DAVID MASON: I then start breathing again. Because we had so many different scenarios. What if this doesn't work? What if this machine fails? And we had backup to backup, just in case. Anything failed. We even had standby speakers who could do any of the roles in case any of the speakers themselves painted. So we had backups, ready to step in, things like that.
BEN WATERWORTH: I would like to say Paul Keating faint, and then he comes back up, Paul Keating.
DAVID MASON: Anyway, so we then have the rest of the afternoon until the whole, the IC, they see more presentations, but we knew we'd hit a really solid, solid six. And then it comes to the evening, and everyone's assembling in the stadium. And I'm sorry that people, listeners won't see this. Anyone who is around at the time might remember in the stadium a whole bunch of people wearing orange t-shirts.
BEN WATERWORTH: Ah, yes, yes.
DAVID MASON: This is, this is...
BEN WATERWORTH: Share the Spirit. There it is, the logo with everything there.
DAVID MASON: I should say, by the way, it would share the Spirit. One reason why we had the speeches translated is if you don't translate it right, it can come out as Share the Death. So we're quite clear.
BEN WATERWORTH: Sydney 2000, Share the Death.
DAVID MASON: Share the Death, exactly.
BEN WATERWORTH: Does it quite have the same ring to it?
DAVID MASON: So that's one of the reasons why we had it translated. Anyway, so we all got this stadium for the announcement. And so we got the whole of Sydney sitting in one part of the stadium. I think we had Manchester next to us. We had Beijing beyond them and Berlin assembled. And up on the stage, the IOC board, when they come in, the IOC members come in to another part of the stadium, off to our right, up on the slope seat somewhere. We had this code set up with one of the IOC members, and I can't remember who it was, that when she came in, if she was wearing, the IOC members don't know the result. All they know is how many rounds the voting went through. We knew we had to get through that first round. If we didn't get through that, obviously, we didn't get through the first round, we're done for. But we needed 30 votes. There were 89 up for grabs. One IOC member, I think, was in prison for corruption charges. So instead of 90, there were 89. We needed 89. There were 89. So we needed 45 votes. We needed to start with 30 and then pick up another 15 as cities dropped out. And we needed to get through to the final two. Otherwise, we knew Beijing would have had it. So we had this code that one of the IOC members agreed that she would wear a scarf around her neck if it had got to the final two. If it was two cities, we knew it would be Sydney and Beijing. She would wear a scarf around her neck if it was the final two and she would tie it around her bag if it wasn't the final two, if it was three cities in the final round before the winner was, in which case we knew we would lose, because we knew that's how tight it was. So our hope was in mopping up the votes in all the different... If we can start with 30, well, we thought we did, and then mop up votes to crawl up to 45 out of 89. Anyway, so the IOC member came in and she was wearing a scarf around her neck. We thought, yes, it's down on final two. We are in with a chance. And then the IOC board come in and I'll say a couple of things. We're all on tenterhooks here. And someone gets up to the lectern and he says, first of all, we would like to thank all of the competing cities. We would like to thank Beijing. The Beijing contingent leap up out of their seats cheering. That was the announcement.
BEN WATERWORTH: Whoops!
DAVID MASON: Sheepishly sit down again. We would like to thank Berlin. And then he goes through the spiel. We have heard some tremendous... And I'm going to do this. Please don't edit down this time. This is real. News edited it down. And this is how it actually happened. So Simon is up there. He's got an envelope in his jacket. And he says, We regret there can be only one winner. And he takes the envelope out of his jacket. And the winner is... And he takes the envelope, and he opens the envelope, and he pulls out a bit of the paper, and he turns it around, and he reads it. And the winner is Sydney. 17 seconds.
BEN WATERWORTH: Wow. Wow.
DAVID MASON: That's how long we were waiting. And the joke goes around. The reason why it took 17 seconds is that someone had never seen Beijing spell like that before. Anyway, so he says Sydney, and he was seeing the news footage. We are all leaping out of our tits. And this is not a leap of joy. That's a leap of relief that we didn't screw up, that we beat the naysayers. So many times when we were out filming this stuff, the bid would get hectic. I'd say, you're wasting your time, mate. Beijing is a lot of time. It's all Coca-Cola. You're kidding yourselves. It's a waste of fucking money. So we, thank God, thank God, we're proven right. We're jumping up and down. I've got Kieran Perkins next to me. He's a big dude, as you can imagine. He's a big dude. And he's jumping up and down. I'm jumping up and down. We've both got tears running out of our eyes. He's got tears running out of our eyes. I said, I said, Kieran, this is as close to winning a gold medal as I will ever get. He looks at me, says, David, mate, this is a million times better than gold. What do you mean? He said, when you win gold, you're mostly winning it for yourself. We've just won it for Sydney. The water works gushing.
BEN WATERWORTH: Geez.
DAVID MASON: Absolutely gushing. Meanwhile, next to us, we get to know all the other bidding cities. Next to us, all the people from Manchester, and they are distraught. They're in tears. They knew they had an outside chance, but they're in tears. They come to the end of the road, and a couple of guys, a couple of people came up to us and said, thank God, you beat bloody Beijing.
BEN WATERWORTH: No one seemingly wanted Beijing to win except for Beijing.
DAVID MASON: If there's one consolation, you beat Beijing. And it was, as you can imagine, the party was on in Monaco that night for all the supporters and corporate sponsors and stuff. And we went to the parties and just thought, you know what, this is odd. For a moment, it was our victory. We go to the party and realise, no, it's not our victory. This is everyone's victory. We played a role in it, but this is a victory for everyone. And that is just so humbling to know that we've done this. For Sydney, for Australia, it's going to have a massive impact for the city in a way that goes way beyond, and I started to realise this as I was doing all the six-month work, goes way beyond a running, jumping, swimming festival. What this did, the bid and then the games, I believe, transformed the way Sydney-siders and Australians think of themselves. We're up on a world stage. We beat the world to something in an Australian way, doing it our way, and pulled off one of the best Olympics ever.
BEN WATERWORTH: Well, still is, according to IOC president as top what Samarant said, so it still technically is, right?
DAVID MASON: So it technically is, but a few glitches here and there, but it was bloody magic, and Sydney and Australia did it. And the bid was the first part of that process, but pulling off the games in such a fashion, God, every time we're feeling low about stuff, just think of that, just think of what we all did, what the whole of Sydney, the whole of Australia did, to do that, and we can do it again. It's a real life lesson for me, it's been with me all my life, but I think it's a terrific lesson for us all in Australia, in Sydney, that we're kind of getting used to punching above our weight, but this was way above our weight. It was the most remarkable thing to be part of.
BEN WATERWORTH: Which, the thing that's amazing, too, about that time, is that Brisbane had been failed, Melbourne had been failed, so kind of this was like third in a row that Sydney had done, too.
DAVID MASON: Now, here's the thing, particularly in the process as it was, and it may be now, very rarely will the city get the game's first time round. The expectation is it's going to take three or four bids.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yeah.
DAVID MASON: Fewer if you're lucky, but at the time, yep, you need runs on the board to really work up the best bid. And you learn, each bid you learn. And so, you know, Brisbane this time round has learned a lot from Sydney and from previous bid. It takes a lot of work. So no one ever thought for a moment that the previous bids were failures. They were the stepping stones on which Sydney launched itself. And Sydney didn't do a better job than anyone else. We just had the advantage of previous bids giving us that experience.
BEN WATERWORTH: And was that kind of talked about? Like, was that kind of the AOC maybe going, okay, well, sadly, Brisbane didn't get it, sadly, Melbourne didn't get it. So you use that experience of why those two bids didn't work and could have incorporated into the Sydney bid?
DAVID MASON: It's more a playing card to the IOC. It's that we're committed. We've been bidding now for 12 years, well, eight years of bids, I guess, for the three bids. We're committed. We don't do this lightly. It's not just a throw dart at the board and hope we get it. This demonstrates our commitment. For those, yes, there were some lessons from the actual bids, but mostly it's a demonstration of the commitment to the movement. People ask me, you know, did I go on and work for the games? No, I chose not to because frankly, I just wanted to treasure the whole bid moment. But a few years after the games themselves, in 2005, I got a call out of the blue from the London bid. And they called me and said, David, can you jump on a plane, come to London, spend a week with us and help shape their final presentation? And boy, yeah, jump at the chance. And I helped them a little bit. I showed them some pointers. It's beautiful. It's all care, no responsibility. And showed them a few of the tips. And I was quite pleasantly staggered at how shabby and how lame their presentation was that they showed to me before we shifted things around. They had people talking over film, which is never going to work. They had just cliched shots of London. They had no emotion. They had nothing to resonate. And I thought, in your films, let's just start telling stories. And so I helped them create a film telling stories about some kids in different parts of the country and the world who had nothing but just glued there watching the Olympics and pursuing their Olympic dream, having watched the Olympics, and then going on to a London Olympics. I said, music-wise, I said, you know the Clash, London Calling?
BEN WATERWORTH: Yep, yep.
DAVID MASON: I said, you know, by now, by 2006, most of the IOC were growing up in the 70s, so punk means something to them. So London Calling, I had, I suggested, let's see that a girl, again, they cast an Eastender, a girl, a black girl, I think, and the shots of, you know, the classic shots of London, the touristy shots, we see her walking. She's walking past a TV store, like heaver TVs and stuff. And, you know, she stops and watches some of this London stuff on the TVs. The camera pulls back to her, and she says, you call that London? I'll show you London. And then we launch into her perspective of what London is, which is fresh and vibrant, and that's when the clash comes in. And just vibrant and full of energy, not your classic postcard shots. And stuff like that, just injecting a bit of energy into it and things like that. Anyway, so, well, they ended up winning the bid. Yeah, two from two.
BEN WATERWORTH: 100%. I dare try again.
DAVID MASON: My thoughts are, you know, as I said, the final presentation is such a tiny, tiny part of the jigsaw. It's one little part of one little jigsaw piece. It's so minuscule compared to getting, you know, the bid together. But, God, it's fun.
BEN WATERWORTH: The thing that I love about hearing everything that you told there, David, is that we're approaching nearly 30 years since this happened, and you're telling it like it was yesterday, and clearly you hold this up highly as something that it was just amazing to be a part of.
DAVID MASON: Completely. I think I was overwhelmed that I could contribute something personally. And then working with some of the best creatives in the country and learning from them that we can do this and that. The stage management things, you know, from Neil Flett, the films themselves, from Adrian, the speech writing from Graham Freudenberg, the full team, the communications team there, the technical team pulling in the actual bid itself and everything that goes into making Olympic Games in logistics, in government relations and everything. And even now, if I was given that job now, I'd still be out of my depth now. I was way out of my depth then. And I actually, because of this, I started I pulled out, I've got all these notes. I've still got all the speeches and everything here. And you know, heaps of share the spirit stuff. This is the full presentation rehearsals, the timetables and stuff, the official rehearsals, everything just done to the nth degree.
BEN WATERWORTH: I'm a man of organisation, David, and that looks very well organised. This wasn't me.
DAVID MASON: This is the communications team of the event. And these are the key members, the key people.
BEN WATERWORTH: This is obviously audio. Feel free to take some photos and we can put them up on our social media and sort of show people what they're showing me right now.
DAVID MASON: Completely. It's just amazing, amazing stuff. I have not opened this box for nearly 30 years. You're welcome.
BEN WATERWORTH: We like to dig up the memories.
DAVID MASON: It so has.
BEN WATERWORTH: I have to ask, you said you didn't work on further, you could have, but you didn't. But did you at least get a plum invite to the opening ceremony?
DAVID MASON: No, no, no. I wouldn't have dreamt it. I think I was making Treasure Island at the time, so I was busy. I went to see a lot of the games. I bought mine tickets, went to see a lot of the games. The games themselves were seven years after the bid. We were, so has been. There were 70 more people working on the games themselves, who really, really deserved tickets. Now, we, every now and then, the bid team would get together for dinner. We had the last one in 2003, the 10th anniversary. You haven't had one since, oh, it might have been the 30th anniversary. You think no one's still around? Yeah. But, no, it was, you know, people define team. What makes a team is when you have a group of people, a limited number of people, aiming for a defined goal in a limited time. That creates teamwork.
BEN WATERWORTH: That's a good way of looking at it.
DAVID MASON: You've got to have all those three in order to create a tight team. And we had it.
BEN WATERWORTH: I have to say, just through everything you're telling me about and kind of that process and everything, and we've talked a bit about this recently in terms of sort of how obviously Brisbane got it, and you mentioned, of course, things that are a lot different now. The one thing I want to take away from everything you just told me, sitting through that Brisbane presentation, I was very bored. I mean, they knew they had won the game, so they didn't have to do anything special, right? So I'd say bring back the pomp and patentry. I wanted to see a fancy bid, right? Because I don't want to see Scott and Anastasia talking for 45 minutes. Come on.
DAVID MASON: No, it's been no excuse for boredom. It's just basic communications. Engage with the audience in anything you're doing, whether it's television or film, a pitch, a meeting, work, talking to, whether it's at a wedding or a funeral or anything like that. Just engage with the audience. And the classic thing is you tell anecdotes, you tell stories. And stories with a meaning. You might raise something at one point, you plant, and then pay off later. Oh, that's why you talked about that. It's all that sort of stuff. And it just takes a bit of time, a bit of effort, a bit of creativity. To do that, it's actually criminal to bought people. I mean, it's...
BEN WATERWORTH: Yeah.
DAVID MASON: It drives me bonkers when...
BEN WATERWORTH: That's the problem, though, right? Like, there was no competition. Brisbane basically knew they had it, so they just kind of had to go through the motions, and then it was kind of like, okay.
DAVID MASON: Okay, I got it.
BEN WATERWORTH: That's it. Do you have, do you actually still have, like, I don't know, like on a VHS or something like that, a video of the presentation or anything along those lines?
DAVID MASON: I do. There are copyright, there are copyright issues regarding the film. So some of the films were filmed from scratch. A lot of the films used stock footage from the footage libraries and from commercials. The opening film about Australia, we didn't have the budget to film that. That alone would have cost several million dollars. So we didn't have the budget, but we used an agent's source, the most amazing imagery. We don't own that. And it's a shame. And we had to be careful at the time. The bid was set up for the bid. That was it. We were not there to spend public money on anything else other than the bid. And so we couldn't buy outright.
BEN WATERWORTH: It's a different time, though, isn't it? Nowadays, people want to see this online. They want to see it on YouTube. They kind of want to share it around. Whereas back then, you weren't thinking about things like that. You were expecting this to be seen once, and that's all it needs to be shown.
DAVID MASON: And that's what its role was. And quite rightly, we were not there to spend public money on something, you know, on a YouTube, frankly. We might regret it now, but it was actually the sensible use of money.
BEN WATERWORTH: At the end of the day, you did the job. You got that extra vote. You won the Olympics. We're more than 20 years removed from the best Olympics ever. Why does anyone need to watch it again?
DAVID MASON: And the other thing is, we should bear in mind, the films were designed to be presented in an auditorium in context with everything else. I looked back at some of them a while ago. I was transferring them from VHS to digital. Looking back at them, and I thought, oh yeah, they're okay. They don't have the same power that they had then in that context to that audience that it was aimed for. So yeah, it's a different time. And it's just, where did that time go? 28 years ago, but we did this.
BEN WATERWORTH: I'll age myself, and I don't know how this will make you feel. I was six when Sydney got it. I remember being a six-year-old, learning that Australia had got the Olympics. I was pretty excited as a six-year-old. Yeah, kind of living in that moment. As you were saying, I unfortunately didn't get to go to Sydney during the Games, but I mean, just the whole country was just awash with Olympic fever, not only in those tours for the entire year. I remember when the torch came to Hobart, and kind of just the feeling. It was just an incredible time to be in Australia and Australian. And this is where I think it's exciting looking ahead to Brisbane, that we're going to be lucky enough to have two Olympics basically in a lifetime, which is kind of strange for a country like Australia, like if you live in America or Europe, probably a bit different. And I'm sure we'll have some people who are still around in 2032, who are around when Melbourne happened, that have three in a lifetime. So it's kind of very unique. David, I have to say, you made my job very easy today. I didn't really ask any questions, but I loved every single second of it. I like this more often. I just sit back and listen. I like this, but seriously, I was really interested to get you on, as we said in the beginning in a conversation we had pretty much a year ago. And you lived up to every expectation because it was a fascinating story. I loved every second of it. And it's just a unique sort of angle that we haven't really talked about on the show before about that process.
DAVID MASON: Thank you so much. I mean, as you can see, I love telling stories. And I often get choked up talking about some of this, some of those moments. They really still touch and know with me and I choke up thinking about it. So it was a fantastic thing to be part of. And as I said earlier, just awesome for the whole of Sydney and Australia. That's my take home. I've done quite a lot of stuff in my career. Nothing comes close to that. Nothing comes close to the power of what we did and its consequences. A lot of people do that every day or every month, if you're in high office or something. That's the first time I've been involved in something that had a monumental effect on a city and on a country. People say, it wasn't really that important, was it? I say, well, important enough, and I don't often tell this to people, that when Paul Keating got back to Canberra, he is speaking in Parliament about the bid and Sydney's successful bid, and he mentions me by name. So I'm in Hansard.
BEN WATERWORTH: I was going to say, you're in Hansard.
DAVID MASON: I'm in Hansard of having helped Sydney get the Games, which I'm pretty chuffed about.
BEN WATERWORTH: I was going to say, that can't be taken from history. You're always there in Hansard. Spoken by the Prime Minister, too. So, wow. That's top of the resume there, David, I think. That goes a bit above Celebrity Survivor.
DAVID MASON: And I think any other big cities, you know to call.
BEN WATERWORTH: David, seriously, mate, absolute pleasure chatting with you about this and really do appreciate you going through these memories and everything. And we'll get you back on when you help Hobart win the Olympics.
DAVID MASON: Well, thank you so much for the opportunity. It's brought back a lot of memories for me, and I've really enjoyed it.
BEN WATERWORTH: And a big thanks to David there for his time. Just absolutely enthralling there. Just amazing to learn all of that process and how influential the final presentation can be. And it's sort of easy to look back on now and think, well, okay, the bid was done, the games are over, here we are, we're looking towards Brisbane, of course. But obviously, as David mentioned in that interview, a lot is put into an Olympic bid and just so many different elements to it. And so amazing to think that just a simple 45 minute presentation is that powerful that it can help sway, get a game to the city and how much an Olympics can, of course, change. We always hear about the negativity around Olympic bids now and how cities who host the Olympics kind of go into debt and you've got all these white elephants, but it's very rare that you do really hear about the positives about an Olympics and how it's much more than a two week celebration of sport. So I think that kind of captivated a little bit of what that means. And I guess what it's still meaning to the city of Sydney and the country of Australia all these years later. So great chat there from David and very much enjoyed every single second of that. We have so many more interviews coming your way, of course, here on Off The Podium. Plenty to get excited and involved about. Potentially, I might even learn how to speak properly eventually in one of these. So stay tuned for that. We've also got, we've teased a few times about doing a ranking of the Olympic medals. Kind of a bit of a geeked out moment for myself, Jarrod and Colin. That will be coming very, very soon too. Just a bit of a fun episode where we're gonna go over some of the Olympic medal designs from the last 30 or so years and rank what our favourites are. So stay tuned for that. And of course you can stay tuned to everything Off The Podium related by simply following us on all the social media channels, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. They're the ones. And of course find us on all the good podcast platforms. Search for Off The Podium. Subscribe while you're there. Leave us some feedback. Leave us a rating. We'd love to hear from you and hear what you think about the show. Big thanks again to David. Big thanks again to everyone for listening. My name is Ben. This is Off The Podium. And as always, go left. I really think so.
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