COVID and the Winter Olympics The IOC's Senior Advisor Christiaan Page, a leading sports technologist, speaks of the challenges the pandemic has placed on the 2022 winter Games. Christiaan Page has been involved in the world of sporting events and Games Technology for nearly 3 decades, making him an absolute authority in the field. His job is to provide innovative technology solutions to providers in the sporting and event industry. With 27 years of experience under his belt, he worked closely within the Olympic Games and Sporting events industry, catering to them with forward-thinking and intuitive new technologies. In order to pursue his work, Christiaan followed the Olympic Games throughout the years, experiencing life in the past 5 hosting cities, but also having lived in 13 different countries! A passionate, dedicated and vibrant individual, Christiaan lives by his favorite keywords: “Live, Learn, Legacy”, strongly believing that through living your dreams and learning as much as you can, you’ll ultimately be able to leave a lasting legacy. Christiaan is also an active public speaker who motivates audiences through workshops and presentations. Feel free to get in touch to find out more: info@christiaanpage.com Sponsored by Microshare. Listen to our other podcasts on the Manifest Density portal. - Subscribe to DataStream: the Microshare Newsletter - View our LinkedIn page - Contact Us The podcast can also be accessed on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, PlayerFM, Listen Notes, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Tune In, Podcast Addict, Himalaya, Deezer, and on Podbean. Episode transcript: The transcription of this episode is auto generated by a third-party source. While Microshare takes every precaution to insure that the content is accurate, errors can occur. Microshare, Inc. is not responsible for any errors or omissions, or for the results obtained from the use of this information. Michael Moran [00:00:01] This is manifest density. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this edition of Manifest Density, your host Michael Moran here, and we will explore the intersection, as always, of COVID 19. Global business and society. And this week, I'm very, very excited about our conversation today, coming straight from Beijing site of this year's Winter Olympics, and our guest is Christiaan Page, who's the founder of Legacy Sport based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Just like the International Olympic Committee, and Christiaan has been involved in sporting events and technology for three decades since Sydney 2000. For those of you who were born after 2000, as many of my listeners probably were, it's scary. Thought you really know your way around games, summer and winter. And now here you are at a game and at the games at a time of global pandemic. Obviously, we saw that play out in the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Now we're seeing China's approach to this. And first, I want to just introduce you and give you a chance to tell us how you are dealing with every level of the technology that makes these games happen. How is it going and give us a sense of how you got into this industry? Christiaan Page [00:01:26] Right. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on the show. Great to be here. And yeah, it is scary, scary opening. When you say yes, some of the lessons maybe may not have been around in Sydney 2000, but great to have you with us as well. So my involvement with the games obviously started back in Sydney 2000. I started my career, as you mentioned three decades ago. Now, actually my first one was an outside broadcast. You know, I was actually traveling. I was on a week's holiday backpacking and ran into a friend and I said, What are you doing tomorrow? And he said, I'm doing an outside broadcast and said, What's that? And he said, Oh, well, what you know, can I said, can I put my hand on a set kind of come along? And he said, Well, sure, why not? So I got there. I was shown how to roll cables. I was absolutely kind of mind blown by the fact he had those all these trucks and cameras and people running everywhere. And so they gave me a Two-Way radio, which obviously, as anyone knows, who works at events. Once you get it to a radio, kind of someone important. Anyway, I got to do all the running, and that was over a week by the end of that week. They offered me a job and said, Look, we're going to pay you. Do you want to come and work for us? And that was how I started. I think the journey has continued. Probably very similar vein. I've always managed to put my hand up. I think that's one of the things that has I love about the career that I've had and the opportunities that are presented themselves. I think it's also a little bit about being outside your comfort zone and saying, Well, yeah, I can have a go at doing that. And and I think there's the opportunities of a bigger, bigger and I've been able to, you know, work with great teams who've made it possible to do some, you know, some really great work. So as you mentioned, the technology piece is key to that. I've always had a fascination with technology and I think what we what it enables and what it drives in terms of modern events, broadcast and production is how we engage with our audience. And I think the technologies as they've evolved over the years and I've seen these changes has expanded. I think, you know, with the digital explosion, all those elements, we've really seen some real change in how we engage with our audiences. Michael Moran [00:03:41] Christiaan, these Olympic Games obviously have a particular challenge. There's the usual logistical challenges which we spoke about before we started recording from my days in broadcast. I mean, to do a live broadcast from anywhere is it is a challenge to do it from on a global basis around the world from a place like China is an extra challenge. And now you layer on top of that, a global pandemic and a government that has been as vigilant and and strict as any on the planet with regard to that pandemic. How is that complicated the job and have you seen any interesting technological attempts to to ease the way? Christiaan Page [00:04:26] Yeah, that's a great question. Look, the the the I have to say, first off, I think the efforts made by the Chinese government to enable us to still facilitate and have the games has been phenomenal. You know, they've got a zero policy, zero tolerance policy to COVID. You know, everybody is treated, you know, from, you know, any any detection of the virus. So and they, you know, the rigorous nature of the testing means that they do really catch everything as it comes through technologically. I think what we've seen is the processing. I'm going to say, if you look at behind the scenes, you know, the the the processing of just the testing and the volumes of testing that's required, you know, I'm tested every day. I have my PCR test. So it's not just a little antigen test, it's a full proper genetic test that they conduct every day. And they track all of this for not just the games population, but the whole population of what's going on in and working in around the games. And one of the really clever things and this is something the IOC did in partnership with the Chinese by boycotting the organizing committee and the Chinese government was to build the playbooks. And these playbooks really were sort of, you know, threaten to devour the definition, if you like, of how we were going to do this together. And what they did was they created two sort of definitions of a closed loop, which is effectively the bubble within the venues and then the outer loop, which is for everybody outside, basically who's been through to a 21 day quarantine and then they go out into and can go out into the general population of of of Beijing. But technologically, think about all of the tracking of all that data. That there's a lot of personal data is a lot of information that has to be recorded and protected. So a lot of systems behind the scenes in making sure that that has happened. You've also then got to integrate that with travel schedules. You know, I think from when I started my journey, I came out here at the beginning of January. Two weeks before that, I started doing recordings of my health records. Before that, I had to have a couple of tests, a PCR test that had to be recorded and sent to the organizations. You know, this is for everybody who's working on the games and we're talking, you know, thousands of athletes. We're talking thousands of my colleagues who work and work in sport and deliver the games. The broadcast is everybody behind the scenes. And then you've got this interesting sort of blend where you've got this crossover of, you know, the local team people based here in Beijing. They had to come inside the loop. So they've actually kind of committed to being inside the actual closed loop away from family and friends for the duration of the games and for the build up. So all of this is all tracked and managed through apps, so we can actually see what's going on and we can actually record all of our daily activities. So lots of lots of coordination, if that makes sense. Michael Moran [00:07:26] So Christian, I want to make sure that people understand not everybody's watching the Olympics like I do because I'm a skier. Yep, but there is when you say closed loop, we're talking Green Zone in Iraq, kind of closed when you go in and you don't leave that loop unless something terrible happens. You need to go to a hospital, probably, or when you leave, when you leave that back, right, the games are over and you're you're broken down and you're moving to the next step next city. So yeah, that's a that's a real corny. Christiaan Page [00:07:55] Yeah, absolutely, that's exactly right. So, you know, we we are in, you know, sealed vehicles, for example, so we travel literally from our bubble of our hotel, which is again, we cannot go outside the perimeter. We which we're fine with. We're in a compound of several hotels so we can interact with each other. We've got the restaurants, but all the stocks that have come in and also a part of that bubble. And if they're not, then they're in hazmat suits. So it really is wel