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The torch lady takes the cake |
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With Olympics officials fending off questions regarding whether Sydney is prepared for the biggest show on earth, one Olympics manager is smiling – and with good reason. Di Henry, the General Manager of the Torch Relay, is seeing her plans and hard work come to fruition without a hitch. |
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Wherever the event veteran has traveled over the past 88 days, she has been cheered on by thousands of ordinary people who wanted to thank her for bringing the Olympic Torch to them. And no wonder, because by the time the flame reaches Sydney Olympic Park on 15th September it will have passed close by 85 percent of the Australian population. And for many it will be their only first-hand Olympic experience. Organisers believe more than 15 million Australians will have seen the torch by the opening of the Games. In every regional centre thousands of people poured onto the streets to watch as the torch passed by. In picturesque Leura in the Blue Mountains, for example, residents and tourists mingled on Father’s Day to catch a glimpse of the flame. Among them were elderly residents from a local nursing home who wept openly as the flame passed. Ms Henry believes that such emotion is a by-product of the relay’s success. “People love it. It’s a combination of the fact that the torch is a community celebration, it’s free and it’s a one off.” She said people could also relate to the event because community representatives were carrying the torch. “The bearers are someone’s brother, sister, mother, cousin,” she said. In fact, more than 11,000 runners will have carried the torch as it circumnavigated the country, covering more than 24,000 kilometres. With the torch relay’s success now waiting to fill the pages of our history books, the question remains as to what it takes to manage an event of such magnitude? For Ms Henry, success has been on the plans for a long time. She began working for SOCOG five years ago, juggling arrangements for the torch relay while managing other Olympic-related launches and celebrations. In 1997 planning for success started in earnest with six staff appointed to assist her. A year later that number doubled and by the end of 1999 there were more than 30 staff dedicated to the task. Ms Henry’s team now tops 230, with 110 staff working on the Torch Relay on any given day. And she chose every one of them. “I interviewed prospective staff all day, every Friday, for a year. That’s what it takes to find exceptional staff,” she said. And they are an exceptional team, she emphasised. Together with Ms Henry, the team have been on the road every day for more than ten hours. “Despite all the stress, nobody has said a cross word,” she said proudly. Ms Henry is also quick to sing the praises of her 2IC, Barry Gallagher. A recruit from the police service, he’s the logistics whiz behind the operation, according to Ms Henry. “Barry has just thanked me for my support – that means a lot to me.” It may well be this support, together with good management, that has shielded the celebration from any serious criticism and ensured that the event has remained, to date, almost incident free. The couple of incidents which have occurred, such as a torch bearer falling from his bike, have affected Ms Henry however. “The days when something happened to one of the torch bearers were hard days - long days,” she said. The enormity of organising the event has not fazed her, however. “I was initially anxious and rode behind Barry in the command vehicle each day, and we had to make up some of the rules as we went along. But after the first month I began to relax and let my team make the minute-to-minute decisions. Things like whether a dad (torch bearer) could have his children run next to him.” Ms Henry still kept a close eye on proceedings anywhere something different was occurring – and that was at least once every day. “This morning we’ve had two occasions which were out of the ordinary. Marjorie Jackson ran around the track with the flame at Lithgow, and the flame was taken down the scenic railway at Katoomba.” In fact the flame will have crossed the country using more than 50 types of transportation - by camel, cable car, surf life saving boat, scuba diver, road train, rail train, Flying Doctor Service aircraft and the list goes on. “Most were just my wacky ideas. I thought about what epitomized that location, such as the reef in northern Queensland. All that was left then were the logistics of how to get the flame under water, in that case.” Ms Henry was aided in such tasks by the Advance Team, a group of 14 staff dedicated to finding solutions to logistics questions. “The torch relay is like organising a sports event and two community festivals every day for 100 days,” she said. There are staging and sound considerations, catering, policing, dozens of bush fire and SES volunteers, road blocks, entertainers, and VIPs to meet at each cauldron location. There are more than 50 vehicles traveling with the convoy – police and SOCOG vehicles mostly. Ms Henry admitted that the coordination task was large, but not difficult. And in typical Di Henry fashion, she refused to let the hard times outshine the good. “I’ll have been on the road 154 days when the torch reaches the Olympic site, and I’ve seen things most people will never see. Doing the Oceanic part of the relay was pretty fantastic, and it’s hard to beat going to work every day on a jet. I’ve given speeches in front of crowds of more than a million people – that’s an amazing feeling,” she said. In fact, Ms Henry will have given more than 300 Olympic speeches – one at every lunch celebration and another each evening. Her addresses are filled with humour, passion and inspiration. “Australia will have the best Olympics the world has ever seen,” she declared to a crowd of more than 2,000 in Katoomba. On reflecting which event in her career has been the most memorable, she said that it would have to be the torch relay. It has enveloped her life for so long. And like so many other Australians, she refers to the torch as if it were a person “The torch is having lunch at Katoomba today and then it will stop overnight in Penrith.” It is a curious personification of an inanimate object – resulting from the public interest brought about by the Internet site, according to Ms Henry. “I think being able to log on anytime and track where the torch is that day has boosted interest. People love the Internet site,” she said. She also learnt a lot from the Atlanta Games – experience which will never leave her. Even after the Sydney Games are long gone. “What will I be doing after these Games? There is a 12-day torch relay for the Paralympics and my contract with SOCOG finishes in December. But I can’t tell you what I’ll be doing after that – I’ll have to see what comes along,” Ms Henry said. In the meanwhile she is quietly confident that the largest community event Australia has ever seen will continue to unfold with ease. |
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