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Chairman's Blog

15.10.2007

Launching the blog

Welcome to my blog. This is definitely unfamiliar territory for me – blogging is not something I have done before. Please excuse me, therefore, if I break any blogging protocols as I get into this new habit.

This has been an extraordinary past four months. Since being appointed as Chairman of the Doha 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Bid, my working life has certainly been turned upside down. Nothing in my long business career has quite prepared me for this immersion into the world of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

In a very short time, however, the Doha team has managed to achieve a great deal. As we are all starting to learn, the pace will only get faster as our Bid progresses.

I hope to use this blog to record my experiences as Doha 2016 Bid Chairman – and also as a slightly different way of telling anyone who is interested a little of the ‘inside story’ of the Doha 2016 campaign.

So far, the highlights for me have been the creation of the Bid logo and tagline. I’m very proud of our new logo, which was designed for us by a team of students at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar.

It is a truly homegrown logo. The design is a pictorial representation of the Aldahma flower, the ‘Flower of the Spring,’ which is found in our deserts, cleverly drawn using the traditional Arabic calligraphy normally used in henna designs.The flower petals spell out our name – ‘Doha 2016’.

The tagline of ‘Celebrating Change’ really does represent everything we are trying to achieve in our Bid to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Doha. We explain our hopes and ambitions throughout this website, so I won’t outline them all again. Suffice to say that, if we are given the honour of hosting the Games in 2016, Doha promises to host the greatest celebration the Olympic Movement has ever seen.

I’m was also delighted to welcome Nada Zeidan as our first Bid Ambassador. I had not met her before she joined our Bid team. She is a wonderful example of a woman succeeding in what is often thought of as a Man’s World. Not only does she compete on the international stage in archery and rally driving, she is also highly accomplished in taekwondo, shooting and horse riding. She has a fearsome set of abilities, but is the most charming person to meet. Nada is a great asset to our team.

I spent some time this month with the rest of the Doha Bid Committee at the IOC’s workshop about the 2016 Candidature process, which was held in Lausanne, Switzerland. It was a great honour to be in the Olympic Museum, the home of the Olympic Movement.

The workshop took the form of a series of seminars, which were held over three and a half days, and which were designed to instruct all the Applicant City Bid Committees in the technical aspects required to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games. These include elements such as security, accommodation, transport, technology, sustainable development and legacy. If anyone was under any illusion about the scale of the task ahead, the workshop certainly put them right.

The workshop met all our expectations, helping us to focus our minds on the key criteria for a successful Olympic Bid. Our Application File is well underway, but the workshop will enable us to refine both our plan and the document we need to submit to the IOC.

I should add that it was also a pleasure to meet the team leaders of the other bidding cities. There was a great spirit of comradeship between us all and I am very confident that we will have a good and fair competition in the spirit of the Olympic Movement.