Fifty-three-year-old John Furlong, briefly a member of the Dublin football panel under Kevin Heffernan, and an Irish basketball international in the early 1970s, had previously headed up the Canadian city’s successful bid to host the games.
“This is not a job, it’s a cause,” said Furlong, the son of a prison governor from Tipperary when taking charge of what will be a $2 billion operation over the next six years. “It’s a huge challenge. I will, for my part, give it all I have,” he said.
The recent announcement that he had landed the $300,000-a-year post from a field of 200 other candidates was marred somewhat by Dick Pound of the International Olympic Committee describing the selection process as “rigged,” and openly questioning the Dubliner’s suitability for the task.
“Mr. Furlong is a perfectly capable person and a nice person, but he doesn’t have the experience that you need for this job,” Pound said.
That criticism was out of step with the mood that otherwise greeted the news in Furlong’s adopted home state of British Columbia. Several newspaper editorials immediately sprung to his defense because his leadership and his speechmaking are reckoned to have been vital to the city’s triumph over Pyeongchang, South Korea, by 56 votes to 53 in the 2010 bidding contest last year in Prague, the Czech Republic.
“I remember being made captain of a Gaelic football team in Dublin,” Furlong said in an interview last week. “It was my second game as captain and I figured I’d played one of my best-ever games. I was covered in mud, absolutely exhausted and the coach said, ‘Is there any chance that you’ll be making a contribution some time soon?’ Then I realized he wasn’t talking about playing. He was talking about, ‘When are you going to lead, to do something to make these players successful?’ I’ve always taken that quite seriously.”
Educated at St. Vincent’s CBS in Glasnevin, where he was part of a successful school basketball team, Furlong first worked as a recreation manager at NewPark Comprehensive in Tallaght before immigrating to Canada in 1974. Upon his arrival at Edmonton Airport, a customs official examined his passport, handed it back to him and said: “Welcome to Canada. Make us better.” On his way to taking up a pre-arranged job establishing an athletics program at a Catholic High School in Prince George, he took that request to heart.
“I grew up in jail,” Furlong said. “The only environment I knew was living in Irish prisons. My father became the top civil servant in the prison system. He ended his career in Mountjoy. It was an odd environment because we were introduced to things other kids wouldn’t hear about. There was always massive panic and tension whenever there was an escape and you could see the stress and the impact it had on the family.”
After just two years in Canada, Furlong became director of parks and recreation in Prince George, and his career in sports administration took off simultaneously. By the time he moved on from there to a similar job in Nanaimo, he’d also become a prominent official in the British Columbia Games, the Northern Games and the Canada Games. A long-serving member of the Canadian Olympic Committee, he’d already been honored several times for his contribution to sport in the province before taking charge of the Vancouver bid in 2001.
“I’m not surprised, really,” said Dave Fitzsimons, a former teammate of Furlong’s in St. Vincent’s CBS. “He was always a real go-getter. In Dublin in the early 1970s, he would have almost been considered ahead of his time in terms of his ideas for the leisure industry. He was a guy with tremendous energy and vision.”
A grandfather of six and father of four grown-up children and a 9-year-old daughter, Molly, from his second marriage, Furlong continued his own sporting career in Canada. Up until he became involved in the Vancouver bid, he’d been a nationally ranked squash player in his age group.
“I actually got frightened into playing sports when I was about 12,” he recalled. “I was at a Christian Brothers school and I was the new guy in the classroom and the brother walked in and said, ‘I hope you play football.’ I thought the only right answer was to say I did. That day I came home and asked my mother to buy me football boots. The next day I was wearing a school shirt and not having an idea what I was doing.”
Within a few years, the boy who didn’t know how to play was good enough to graduate from Na Fianna to the Dublin senior football panel, a place where his superior level of fitness was often used by Heffernan as a stick to beat the rest of the players.
“In Ireland, if you’re in the middle of a successful Gaelic football career, it’s not something you walk away from,” Furlong said in an interview last summer. “My father was a bit disappointed that I was leaving Ireland. I was in my early 20s and he and I were very close.
“On the day I was leaving, he was a bit brokenhearted and he said to me, ‘Well, we’ve done the best we can to teach you good values, to raise you, teach you the difference between right and wrong. We’ve given you a pretty good education. You’ve traveled a bit and played sports and you know how to be respectful and all that. It seems like you’re going to a place where that should count for something.’ “
And so it has.