After 20 years leading Scotland’s event strategy, VisitScotland’s Paul Bush flags a need for more “robust” business cases from hosts in a tough economic climate, while reflecting on proposals that didn’t make the cut, including a shared Winter Olympics with Nordic countries.
Scotland as an elite sports hosting venue was a very different proposition in 2004.
The Open Championship made its biennial appearance on a Scottish links, Scotland hosted Six Nations foes England and France at Murrayfield Stadium as usual and the perennial dogfight between Celtic and Rangers consumed the focus of the public and media alike.
In terms of World Championship level events, the hosting calendar was restricted to the World Outdoor Bowls Championship in Ayr and the World Indoor Tug of War Championships at Glasgow’s ageing Kelvin Hall, the host of international athletics meets and boxing at the end of the 20th century.
Scotland’s failed joint bid with Ireland to host Euro 2008 garnered just one Uefa executive committee vote and provided the jolt required for an event bidding and hosting strategy overhaul.
That shake-up was led by Bush, an Englishman from Leicester and former swimming coach, chief executive of Scottish Swimming and Scotland’s team general manager at the 2002 Commonwealth Games.
Since joining EventScotland as sports director, Scotland’s roll call of events is stellar.
It includes the 2014 Ryder Cup, the 2014 Commonwealth Games, the 2018 multi-sport European Championships, the 2019 Solheim Cup, Euro 2020, the 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships and the 2024 World Athletics Indoor Championships. It extends to the World Championships in artistic gymnastics (2015), badminton (2017), cross country running (2008), IPC swimming (2015), mountain biking (2007), orienteering (2015 and 2024) and women’s curling (2005), along with various Davis Cup ties.
Wind back 20 years and Bush was busy helping Glasgow win the bid for badminton’s 2007 Sudirman Cup, defeating Korea at an International Badminton Federation council meeting in Jakarta. For him, that was the start of the shift in mentality.
“Winning the Sudirman Cup gave us the confidence to move forward and look right across the portfolio,” he tells SportBusiness. “Then we went after lots of other things – some quite audaciously.
“If you look at 2014 and the hosting of the Commonwealth Games, Ryder Cup, MTV Music Awards and the BBC Sports Personality of the Year alongside your core programme, not many nations would do that.”
Event costs spiral
Having left his long-held role last month, Bush predicts a tough “two or three years” for all prospective hosts with more government scrutiny than ever over the public purse.
“You only realise how good it is when you haven’t got it,” he surmises. “That’s one of the big discussions currently in terms of the challenges around the economic situation, not just for Scotland but the UK and Europe generally. Without ongoing continued investment, we will not have that portfolio pipeline.”
Those tough discussions have been had recently by Ian Reid, Bush’s successor as chair of Commonwealth Games Scotland, around Glasgow’s rescue plan for the 2026 Games. And that despite a budget largely covered off by compensation received by the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) and Commonwealth Games Australia after Victoria’s costly withdrawal.
Most of the big events, according to Bush, will now have to be predicated on “really robust business cases”.
“Events are more expensive. The supply chain has shrunk and is distressed even now on the back of Covid. That allows a smaller supply chain to charge greater prices.
“The price of [plastic] bucket seats is twice what it was pre Covid and security services are two or three times the price. Procurement is much more challenging to get sufficient numbers of people to make it competitive at the right price.”
The three variations of return on investment (ROI) measurement will need to be articulated together “to land the big stuff”, according to Bush. These are: the gross value added economic impact; international profile building through television and media to drive tourism; and the wider portfolio of benefits across the community, health, the environment and sports participation.
“At the [2023] Cycling World Championships, we managed to do all three,” he outlines. “The challenge moving forward for big events will be to demonstrate that when you’re pitching the business case.”
‘Stuff was on the edge’
The sector dynamics of 2004 also differ hugely to 2024.
Expensive campaigns fine-tuned by rival PR consultants – and all the political manoeuvring that came with it – are largely distinct. Mega events are awarded long into the future after periods of exclusive negotiation with prospective hosts.
Other rights-holders have got creative and designed event and hosting concepts from a blank sheet of paper, typified by the first conversations held by Bush and UCI president David Lappartient over Scotland hosting the first multi-discipline Cycling World Championships.
For Bush, the change is welcome.
“I think it’s much healthier,” he reflects. “There will still be competitive tension but there won’t be in the same way.
“It reduces cost and ensures a really strong pipeline for the rights-holder. Personally, I wouldn’t want to go back to the cut-throat bidding processes. At times they weren’t particularly pleasant. Stuff was on the edge.”
Glasgow’s comprehensive defeat to Buenos Aires in the race to host the 2018 Youth Olympics was chastening, receiving just 13 votes and failing even to make the second round (between Buenos Aires and Medellin).
“We got totally politically outmanoeuvred in Lausanne in not winning the bid for the Youth Olympic Games in 2013,”, Bush concedes. “We were a bit naïve about the Olympic bidding process at that time and Buenos Aires beat us comfortably.”
So, does the YOG remain the one that got away?
Not for Bush.
“At the time we were bitterly disappointed but in a way, we secured other things that were equally as good if not bigger and better. The bravery of hosting the first-ever [multi-sport] European Championships in 2018 on the back of 2014 was phenomenal. I’m just a bit disappointed that [the event] has not kicked on to the next level.”
Sports programme ‘reset’
As the Chef de Mission for Scotland at Melbourne 2006, the driving force behind the Glasgow 2014 bid and himself the former CGS chair, the Commonwealth Games retain an emotional pull for Bush.
Yet, he recognises the need for an overhaul of an event that has – under its traditional format – been scrambling around for hosts and its very future.
The CGF last week described Glasgow 2026 as an “important first step” to “reset and reframe” the ethos of the Games.
Bush remarks: “It’s not sustainable for the Commonwealth, and the relatively small number of single countries that can host it – Australia, the UK, New Zealand and theoretically Canada – to spend £500m to £700m or more.
“I don’t think there’s that level of money now in any economy.
“I think there is an opportunity for the CGF to rethink what their true purpose is in the sports pipeline. The sports calendar is so congested now, and athletes make tough choices on where they compete.
“There’s an opportunity to have a reset on the sports programme and they’ve got to be open minded to the delivery being very different. Building a village is no longer realistic for a Commonwealth Games. Paying all of the teams’ costs to come is no longer realistic.”
Hosting the Games across multiple locations, such as several Caribbean islands or Fiji, Samoa and New Zealand, should be considered, he feels.
“I sadly think there’s a bit of a closed mindset to that approach.”
The Olympic Movement is further ahead in changes made to its sports programme but has the challenge of sports’ cursory one-time involvement with the Games, such as break dancing at Paris 2024 and – potentially – flag football or lacrosse at Los Angeles 2028.
Bush observes: “A bit like the Commonwealth Games, how does the IOC rationalise what its sports programme is? Sports are making fleeting appearances which isn’t healthy for that sport.
“For break dancing, it comes in and you excite a populus of young people and then it’s not in LA so how does that work? Coming in and out is not terribly helpful. A three quadrennial run would be helpful, but what is the process for sports coming in and out?
“Should the IOC be the sole arbitrators of that, or should it be a wider population of people who can measure it in a different way?”
Future events
While some will put forward the 2014 Commonwealth Games, Bush names the 2023 Cycling World Championships as the “biggest and most impressive event ever done in Scotland”.
Also in cycling, one live conversation is around hosting the Tour de France’s Grand Départ, potentially with other UK nations.
“After 2014 and the success of Yorkshire [staging the Grand Départ], it’s always been an aspiration of UK Sport to bring that event back to the UK,” says Bush.
“The Tour de France is always on a hit list of events but until it comes to fruition it’s never signed and sealed. ASO is the rights-holder and they choose their locations very carefully but one day in the future one would hope it would come back to the UK.”
UK Sport has been undertaking a feasibility study into staging the curtain raiser in 2027 and has been in talks with ASO.
Bringing the World Rugby Sevens to Melrose, the spiritual home of the game, was one proposal that failed to come to pass during Bush’s tenure. EventScotland was keen to move a leg to the Borders town from 2006 to 2010 but the notion “didn’t work geopolitically in the rugby world”.
As it turned out, Murrayfield staged a leg from 2006 to 2011 before Scotstoun Stadium in Glasgow kept the event going for four more years. Bringing Rugby World Cup matches back to Scotland for the first time since 2007 remains an aspiration of Bush’s but looks increasingly unlikely anytime soon.
Other more far-fetched bids were considered but never came to fruition.
One was a joint proposal with Nordic countries to stage the Winter Olympics, an event never hosted by a UK nation.
“Scotland could host curling, figure skating, short track skating and big air [snowboarding]. We could host the ones that are pop-up or portable and then the skiing goes to Nordic countries. I don’t think it’s that wacky actually.”
The French Alps and Salt Lake City are the recommended hosts in 2030 and 2034, respectively, in the brave new world of Olympic hosting, while Switzerland has already started dialogue with a view to playing host in 2038.
The Scottish hosting landscape will again look very different come 2046 – the next realistic opportunity – but, looking back at two decades of more wins than losses, Bush places a Winter Olympics in the “unrealistic dream” category.
Looking ahead 20 years, the strength of Scotland’s major event portfolio will largely be shaped by the success – or not – of difficult funding conversations with the state and local authorities.