Transcript
A (0:00)
My name is Paul Kelly and I have the honor to be here as one of LSE's pro directors to welcome you to LSE campus and to chair this evening's public lecture. It's a great pleasure for me to welcome Sir Philip to the lse. Philip Craven has been President of the International Paralympic Committee, the global governing body of the Paralympic Movement, since 2001 and oversaw his sixth Paralympic Games in London last year. You may remember that during his time as IPC president, the Paralympic movement has enjoyed significant growth and now boasts over 200 members, including 174 National Paralympic Committees across the globe. The Paralympic Games have also developed rapidly and following London 2012, they're now the third biggest sporting event in the world, behind the Olympics and the Football World Cup. In addition to being global head of the Paralympic movement, Sir Philip is an IOC member and member of the British Olympic Association's Executive Board. Before becoming President of the ipc, Sir Philip was President of the International Wheelchair Basketball Federation, having previously held roles at national and international level within the sport. He's five times Paralympian, having made his debut in 1972, competing in two sports, swimming and wheelchair basketball. He went on to represent Great Britain at wheelchair basketball at a further four Paralympic Games between 1976 and 1988. During his international wheelchair basketball career, Sir Philip won the 1973 world title and two European titles in 1971 and 1974. In 1991, he received an MBE in recognition of his services to wheelchair basketball and in 2005 was knighted for his services to Paralympic sport. He's also received numerous honorary doctorates and in 2012 was presented with the Sports Industry Awards, Lifetime achievement. For those Twitter users in the audience, there are such people. The hashtag for today's event is lseipc. As usual, after the lecture, there will be a chance for you to put your questions to the speaker. But now will you please join me in welcoming Sir Philip Craven to lse. And his lecture is entitled the Paralympic Movement Takes Off.
B (2:52)
Thank you very much, Paul. And if we can. Yes, that's it. We've got the first slide moving there and. Yeah, well, this invitation came completely out of the blue, you know, from lse. And the last time I'd even thought about the word economics was when I was 16 and I just had four months in bed following my rock climbing accident. And I thought, you know, I don't like economics. And I just started my air levels and I thought, I'm going to use this as an excuse to drop economics and stick with economic history and geography, and it worked, by the way. But anyway, I'm really pleased to be back here and I'm sure that my views on economics have changed and can be enhanced this evening. But I'm really here to talk about athletes, and there's a great American archer there, won a silver medal in London. But we are about the athletes in the Paralympic movement. But how did we put that fact down on paper to create the vision? Because I have read the odd. Not a book on leadership, but I've read the odd thing on leadership. And if there's one thing that the leader, the president or the chairman of an organization should do is to ensure that the vision is fit for purpose and then review it from time to time to see it is still so. Well, back in 2002, I'd been president for a year, or less than a year, actually, and we wrote the vision of the IPC before we got McKinsey in to help us with our first strategic review. We had to get down on paper what we were about before any consultants came in and started telling us what to do. I have to say that McKinsey did a great job, but I'm glad we got it down on paper. So what was that vision? Well, there it is up on the screen for you to enable Paralympic athletes to achieve sporting excellence and inspire and excite the world. And I'll just take two or three minutes just to explain what that's all about. I know it makes pretty simple sense, but it took some time to get this together. And probably the most important word is the second one, which is enable, which is all about empowerment, but it's not about doing it for others. It's about creating a stage upon which athletes, upon which the members of the IPC can perform, and anything we can do to support that performance, that's what we're about. So to enable and Paralympic athletes. Well, of course, to begin with, they wanted athletes with a disability in there, and I said, absolutely not, we're not having that. And so I had to get my thinking pretty sharp early on, when I became president, to say, we're not having the D word involved in our vision. So, Paralympic athletes. But what are Paralympic athletes? Are they just Paralympians who perform at the Paralympic Games? Well, no, it's every individual that wishes to partake in Paralympic sport at whatever level. It doesn't matter what level, but we need to enable them, whether it's at the grassroots level, whether it's just to use sport as a vehicle to a far more Interesting life, or it's to try and get a gold medal at the Paralympic Games. So sporting excellence, that does make sense. But to inspire and excite the world? Well, we only had inspire in there to begin with, and then myself and our CEO did some media training and we were terrible at that. That was in 2003. But we did a bit of a whiteboard session, and a word that I put up there was excited. He said, I like that. Well, I said, if you like it, it's going in the vision. So that's where it became inspired and excite. But really, what happens before and what happened in London before you're inspired? Well, you're probably surprised the Americans use the word shock because they're expecting basketball players to not be able to even maybe catch the ball and stuff like this. And so you have to see it, you have to experience it. And so you're surprised, then you're inspired, then you're probably excited. I mean, the crowds in the park were amazing last year. The excitement there, you could. It was just this amazing human energy. And then if you do all that, then maybe you can think about changing the world as well, you know? And so there are a couple of words that don't appear in our vision, but definitely happen when it comes to Paralympics. And just before I move on, this surprise. Donna Ritchie, she was the captain of the women's wheelchair basketball team, the Australian one, the Aussies, in Sydney in 2000. And she put it in another way, and she said, paralympians don't have the time to worry about what doesn't work, they just maximize what does. And it's that transformational thing from the negativity of the D word to the positivity of sport. And I'll come back to that in a little while, but I don't know if you saw the values on there. They're not on there now. Now we've got Ellie Simmons going for gold, obviously, and probably succeeding in getting gold at last year's Games. But we have four values. I have to tell you that my view on values is that if you represent your values, do you really need them written down? But some people want them written down. So the first one is determination. And Alex Ferguson was asked before he'd sewn up the title last year, you know, what is the key thing that's going to get United, Manchester United, that is to win the title. And he said, it's determination. And he was right. Courage is the second one. Athletes don't see themselves as courageous, but everybody else Does. That's why that word's still in there. Inspiration. Well, Sebko took our third value and used it to, to inspire a generation. And the fourth one, equality, which is really pretty important. There isn't a disability act now in Britain, it's an equality act. And I really do support that title. Don't ask me whether I support what's in the act because I'm not ready. But I really do support that. And really, in a way, quality. You can look at sport for all at the moment. You know, it's everything that's not elite sport. I think it should be redefined and all sport should be part of sport for all and sport should be for all, should be for everybody. But equality and the way Paralympic sport affects people, affects people who try it or watch it. You know, you can start to realize you can be good at something because you might get a look when you've lost the use of your legs or your eyes or something. You wouldn't see it if you'd lost the use of your eyes, but you get the feeling that you're not very good at anything. So you raise self esteem, you practice this self determination and you experience fun, you feel good, you're healthy and you get to know and admire your body. And that's not just the parts that work, it can be the parts that don't work as well. But I'm a bit of a big head anyway. But if you saw the opening ceremony it in London, one of the final comments was, you are what you are and that's what it is. Paralympic sport. You're not trying to be somebody else, but you are what you are. So now, before I just explain a little bit more about why the Paralympic movement did take off in London, then I think we should just see a video just to bring back the memories of. Of London and last year. Well, that was a bit of a memory from last year, but seeing Boris Johnson with the flag there just before we get onto the next. Well, the slide's there, but I'll come back to it in a moment that we were in the green. I've just been in your green room here and it is a real nice little room where you can get together before you come on stage. But we were in the stadium. It was supposedly the green room, which. But it was like a concrete hole where myself and Boris and the mayor of Rio were located. And I said, what's up, Boris? He had a really depressed look on his face and he said, I don't want to give that flag he said, I'm not giving you that flag. I said, well, come on, Boris. I said, you're going to mess things up completely. I said, we're not like the ioc. I said, you can waive it as long as you want, as long as you give it to me. And eventually he did. Of course, it got passed on to Rio, but he didn't want that incredible spirit that had been in London and the UK for probably four months to disappear. And so that was Boris. But already Paul has referred to this slide here in his few opening remarks. But this is just a slide to show the number of tickets sold at the Olympics in 2012, and then the FIFA World cup from 2010, and then the Paralympics, 2.78 million tickets sold ahead of the four other events that are up there. And so London was amazing, just from that point of view. And it all kicked off from International Paralympic Day on Trafalgar Square a year before the Games. And the tickets were launched the following day. And within a week, I think a million had been sold and the rest's history. But it was quite amazing. I mean, really, it's this partnership with the IOC and the possibility to have both Games officially together in 1996 in Atlanta, Paralympics was small beer. But moving on with this agreement we've had with the IOC now since 2001, but the first Games that were affected by that, of course, were seven years hence. So the first Games were Beijing and then we had Vancouver, and so London were only the third Games where we had this relationship with the ioc. And then therefore, look out Sochi Rio and Pyeongchang in Tokyo. But moving on, as you can see from that, the British public were alive like never before. As I've said before, from May to mid September, 2.78 million tickets sold, 1 million more than in Beijing. And the atmosphere in the Olympic and Paralympic park, that's what I call it anyway, even though it's only called the Olympic park by most. But of course, I put a Paralympic in there if I can. It was indeed superhuman, and in the sense that hundreds of thousands of people were interacting in a hyper positive way. Each of them was having fun. And that was the key thing. It was fun. It was great to be alive, you know, in London and the uk. Last year still is now, by the way, but last year was exceptional. 4,237 athletes, 164 national Paralympic committees, 20 sports. There'll be 22 in Rio, by the way. And then moving on there, just to see that the impact of The London Paralympics was not just limited to the uk. Probably I'm blocking one of those slides there, but you can see that the TV coverage in hours and the accumulated audience has steadily risen. In fact, it's risen rapidly from Athens through Beijing to London. And this slide does not include the amount of home broadcasting to the home nation. So this is what has been broadcast to the world from the Games, not including, not including the whole nation. And you can see that the growth has been phenomenal. If we move to the next slide, you'll see a still of Johnny winning the 100 metres. But really, just to ask the question again, why was London so successful? Well, again, I'm going to acknowledge the debt that we owe to our close and productive partnership with the ioc. It's getting closer and it's getting better as we move forward. But I think we've also got to congratulate locog. What an organizing committee it was. I had the privilege to be on the board because I'm an IOC member, not because I'm president of the ipc. And we knew we were going to have good games, very good games, but I was still amazed about what happened. And I think a lot of it goes down to low cog, but a lot of it goes down to the way that the different teams involved in organizing both Games got on together and really gave to the centre and didn't want to be top dog, but they wanted to have all the different teams coming together. And you saw what that brought. And there was a mutually beneficial partnership with Channel 4. Of course, BBC had done it before, but LocalG decided after consultation with different parties, that they should go with Channel four. And I think that, that it paid off. There was 500 hours of coverage on their channels. Their superhumans advertising was termed an act of branding genius. And they won the Gold Lion Award at the Cannes Lion Festival and many other awards as well. But at the end of the day, as you can see from that, what made London 2012 were the athletic performances, were the athletes. Of course, Britain did amazingly well. And there we have the BPA sat down there with Tim Hollingsworth, the CEO. But the other thing that many, many other countries said was that it wasn't just Britain and the British athletes that the crowds were supporting, but it was the athletes from all over the world. And that was something very special and very specific. Maybe British, but also Paralympic. That's what happens at the Paralympic Games. And so awareness of Paralympic athletes. I think that there you see Tanny Gray Thompson, of course, she retired, I think she retired in Athens, Beijing. Thanks, thanks. And therefore her notoriety, of course, had dropped between September 2010 and September 2012. But if, then you look to Ellie Simmons, David Weir, Oscar Pistorius, of course, because of the Olympics and the Paralympics. Lee Pearson, one of our great equestrian riders. I don't know if we should call them athletes. Of course, call them athletes. Johnny Peacock and Sarah's story. And so a lot more athletes were known by the public, other than just Tanny Gray Thompson, if I may put it that way, and Oscar Pistorius. And so they really were previously on the fringe, but now really in the public domain. And I think another slide that I have up here, another picture, if we can move on to the next one, is Esther Vergeer. Now, she's without doubt the greatest wheelchair tennis player ever. And she retired after London. I think she was unbeaten in I don't know how many matches. And I was privileged to be present at the final in Beijing. I know I had an appointment to go and see Volkswagen about some sponsorship, but I just couldn't leave the final. And I had the CEO at Volkswagen saying, when are you coming? I said, well, I can't leave this. And then I ended up commentating down the phone to him on the match. And me went, it went one way and then the other, but she. But she won in the end. But she. Now I'm speaking to her later this week and she's absolutely committed to the development of Paralympic sport throughout the world and someone with whom we'll be working very closely. But the benefits of London for people with an impairment in the uk. Well, it's really a little bit too early to talk about the long term effect of the London Paralympics, but we can theorise and we've got some figures up there. 81% of people surveyed after the Games thought that there had been a positive effect on how people with an impairment are viewed by the British public. Even more significantly, 50% said their own attitudes had changed. And 70% of people with an impairment agreed that the London 2012 was inspirational for them. But I think what I've noticed, and you did say it was my sixth Paralympics when you introduced me, so that it's all right, but what happens again at a Games? Why are these perceptions transformed? And you know, there was Ian Jury who wrote what I think a terrible title for a song, but I came to realize during London that it was a great title for a song. What is it? Spasticus Artisticus. But why did he write it? Because it was. He was rebelling against the Year of the disabled in 1981, where all he saw was concrete ramps were put all over the show. But that didn't change perceptions one little bit. And so what happens at the Paralympics, it's not laws that change perceptions, sometimes you have to have laws, but it's positive experiences that stay forever in your mind and your perceptions get transformed. And that's what happened and that's what will continue to happen. But I think that there's Malou van Rijn from the Netherlands again. It's not that I've got a particular favorite in the Netherlands, and of course, there's a lot of British athletes that I'm showing, but another great athlete, really, Oscar Pistorius, is female, not double, but, you know, the female epitome of an amputee athlete. But you can tell me if I'm right with this, but in the UK, since the Paralympics, 50,000 more people have tried out Paralympic sport. Now, that's at all different levels and that's a great figure. And we've had a National Paralympic Day in the park on the 7th of September, and so things are really, really developing. But I think that what I would like to say is just a little story that my friend Gordon told me over there to put in. And it was about a young girl in South Wales who was normally a very placid girl, but after watching the game, she demanded that her mother take her to the local sports centre. And on arrival, she spoke to the staff and really demanded that she could play sport like her own friend, you know, like all her friends. Now that sports centre offers a suite of Paralympic sports, and that's happened all over the country and people are saying, oh, there's not a lot of legacy, there's lots and lots of legacy, but so much of it is happening locally and that really is how we would wish it to happen for people saying, I can do this, let me do it. But furthermore, as you can see from that, there was commercial success in London and csr, corporate social responsibility, another term that I can't stand, by the way. But we've moved from that to Paralympics being sound commercial practice. And we just announced recently, in conjunction with U.S. paralympics and NBC, that for the first time from the Sochi Winter Games and from the Summer Games in Rio, NBC will be showing Paralympic sport live in the usa. And that's a major, major breakthrough. I remember being interviewed at around midnight in Athens in 2004 on national radio in the US, and they were saying, isn't it a disaster for the IPC that you don't have TV coverage in the States. I said, no, it's not a disaster for us. I said, we will get it sometime. But I said, it's a disaster for the USA and US athletes and the families of US Athletes, and you should fix it and get it moving. Well, it's taken about nine years, but here we are and we've got loads of time. We're here for the long haul anyway. But I think also I've got this slide up here because this is really, as you can see, in the Great Lakes area of East Africa, where they're looking to. They're getting coached in sitting volleyball. But I just wanted to mention a little bit more about commercial sponsors. Sainsbury's, of course, were the first sponsor that only sponsored the Paralympics and not the Olympics, and they had an incredible return for their investment. But I think also I'd just like to give you a couple of quotes from bp, who were sponsors of both the Olympics and Paralympics in London and have since signed up with both the British Paralympic association and the British Olympic association and also with the International Paralympic Committee. And Luc Bardin, their group chief sales and marketing officer, has. Well, he sent me a testimony, really, as to why bp, on one page, why they were signing up with us. But I've just got three of the. Of the courts that he put in this unsolicited testimony, I can assure you. And he said, from the very first introductions BP had with National Paralympic committees, because they started with National Paralympic committees and then came to the international scene in a number of countries, we realized that there was something very special about the Paralympic movement and Paralympians. Then he went on to say, during the London Paralympics, the BP brand lived one of its very best associations. Our employees were deeply proud and our business partners were inspired. And finally, a little bit longer, he said today. And of course, he sent me this on the day that we signed up with them in July, he said, we're delighted to have extended our relationship through our global partnership agreement until at least 2016. We believe this continued association with the Paralympic movement can make a real and sustained difference to the way BP's values are lived. Hopefully, we can help your team to spread the word. With deep appreciation and congratulations for the tremendous human energy you've all shown in developing the Paralympic movement to this point. It has incredible and increasing potential to impact many important constituencies and people around the world. Just moving on to the brand and the Paralympic brand, another one of our strategic goals. I mean, listening to me, you'd think that the Job's done, job done, finished, over with. Let's get on to the next job in hand. But that's not the case. We've only just begun. And I think that we've put our position here on this degree of development, simple graph, but if you look where we were in Beijing, we just started to climb. Well, we've continued to climb to London, but look where the Olympics are. I mean, one of the most valuable and best known brands in the world. We're not really chasing the IOC with regard to the exposure of the brand. We've got, as I said before, a good relationship with them, but we are developing our own brand and we're moving at our own speed. But we must maintain the momentum from London through 2014, 2016, 2018 and now 2020 in Tokyo to really start to realize our full potential. Rio in 2016. Well, there's some figures up there. 10% of the Brazilian population are already interested in the Paralympic Games. And this was 40 months before the Games took place, compared to 12% in London. With two years to go, 75% of the Brazilian population are very much in favour of the Paralympic Games, 23% are neutral, and 70% of Brazilians are favourable towards brands that sponsor the Paralympic Games. Now, that might surprise you as to why that is the case, but if you look further down, you see the way the Brazilian Paralympic team has moved from 24th in the medal table in Sydney to seventh in London, and they're hoping for a fifth place, which they probably will achieve in Rio. And I think one of them there, you've got one of the greatest Brazilian athletes, Teresina Guillermina, 200 and 200 meter champion, totally blind and with an incredibly colorful. What do you call that sort of thing? Yeah, mask across her eyes. Thank you. But I think also we need to just tell a little story about why is it that Brazil knows about Paralympics? Well, the. Then he's still the president of the Brazilian Paralympic Committee, in 2004, decided that he would buy the TV rights from the IPC for Athens. And then he gave them to two television companies in Brazil. Didn't charge any money for it, but since then, Globo, which is the biggest TV company in Brazil, are the national rights holders for the Paralympics in Rio in 2016. And they're not the national rights holders for the Olympics, but this is the company that's got the widest coverage in Brazil, and that's owing again to a Paralympic manager, if I can put it that way, taking the initiative. Moving on now to this Young lady from Tokyo, as you can see, we've got the Olympic rings on the left because she was there at the presentation of Tokyo 2020 in Buenos Aires just a month ago. But of course, she's a Paralympian and moving forward and looking to Tokyo, that it was quite amazing, really, how I saw the Tokyo presentation in Lausanne at the IOC headquarters in early, early July this year, and the one thing it was lacking was that spirit, that passion. And, well, I don't know whether I should say too much, but of course, I'm very free with my advice. And I said to the CEO, you've just got to get more, maybe non Japanese passion in your presentation. And what did they do? Well, they went to this young lady, a Paralympian, Mami Sato, who really following Her Imperial Highness's presentation, right at the very start, it was Mami who introduced the front row of the presenting group, which included the Prime Minister. And she gave it in a very sort of upbeat way, which really transformed the whole feeling, I think, that the members got from the Tokyo presentation. Now, I'm not saying that it was this lady that swung it for Tokyo. They won by a big majority. And maybe presentations to IOC members may get, I don't know, 2, 3, 4, 5 votes coming your way that weren't there to begin with. But she had a great performance, she is a great performer on the track, but also now as a presenter, and I think also I've been giving an interview here. Where's the gentleman? He's down here. Now, before I gave this, before I started this lecture, there's a lot of things happening in Japan for Paralympic sport in the Japanese Paralympic Committee. They've got a vision now which goes to 2030 for the development of Paris sport in Japan. They had it before Tokyo got the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games. But these Games are going to be an incredible vehicle to move this vision forward. And finally, if I may say, and it's great to hear it, that the Japanese government have realized that Paralympic sport should not be under the Ministry of Welfare, but should be under the Ministry of Sport. And so that's been moved there. Now, you might say that should have happened 20 years ago, but it takes time in different countries for things to happen, for the timing to be right, for the right people to be there, and real progress is being made there. So I'm coming to the end of what I've got to say now, but I think that slide that's up there, the impact of the Paralympic Games being far broader than just the impact of an amazing international sports event. And there written down, I would say, four of the principal objectives of the movement, they're not written quite that way in our strategic plan. But I think that increased attendance at the Games, whatever that might mean, by the way, more athletes, more sports, more media, more spectators, as you've seen, that's been growing to enhance the appeal of the Paralympic brand to sponsors already covered that. Particularly to encourage people with an impairment to take up sport at whatever level, but just take it up, enjoy it, feel good, move forward with it, and then to change perceptions and to have a far more favorable attitude to people with an impairment in the world. And that really has worked and will continue to work. So, finally, this young lady, Isabella, at one of our development camps around the world, one of the things that I was asked to talk about, and maybe we can talk more about it, maybe at question time, but it is, can we stage great Paralympic Games and can we also develop Paralympic sport around the world? Do we have the resources for that? Well, we didn't have until this latest third four year strategic plan. In 2011, we launched the Agitas foundation during the Games in London at the Paralympic Bowl. And now we have more resources. And so we have given equal importance in this current strategic plan, which finishes at the end of next year, to the development of athlete development around the world as well as the Games. And so they are our two key areas, along with developing the brand. And this young lady, well, she could be a great Paralympian of the future. But I think that also, if I can just take you back to that one point in our vision that we are about enabling Paralympic athletes to achieve sporting excellence. But that's at any level that they wish to move to and they wish to view as sporting excellence. And just to conclude, before we get into some questions, I'd just like to say that, yes, it is the Paralympic movement that really has taken off in London and not just the Paralympic Games. Thank you very much.