John Coates, the mastermind behind two Australian Olympics

Few men are credited with bringing one Olympics to these shores. John Coates has now brought two Games to Australia,

John Coates is arguably the best sports administrator Australia has seen

The then premier of NSW Bob Carr was not happy. Here was the state government spending mega-millions on helping to stage the 2000 Sydney Olympics, yet he was getting all kinds of grief because it seemed all the main appointments were men.

“How can you say that?” demanded Australian Olympic boss John Coates. “Why, just today I appointed the deputy mayors of the Athlete’s Village, Sallyanne Atkinson and Judy Patching.”

Everyone else in the room suddenly swallowed a cough. Was Coates seriously attempting to pass off the esteemed figure of Julius Lockington “Judy” Patching, AO, OBE, the veritable rock on which the Australian Olympic movement was founded, as a woman? But Coates maintained stead eye contract with Carr throughout and the premier, who clearly knows his American history but seemingly not his Australian sporting folklore, shrugged and moved on to other matters.

Nothing Coates had done was wrong or even inappropriate. And he would have looked a royal idiot had Carr and Patching been lifelong friends. But he had summed up his audience and recognised that for all of the premier’s undoubted brilliance, he couldn’t know everything.

In a sense, that it how Coates has reached where he is today, arguably the greatest sporting administrator in the history of Australia, greater even than Patching. Few men are credited with bringing one Olympics to these shores. Coates has now brought two Games to Australia, that is if one may be so bold as to count Brisbane as well as Sydney.

It is still possible, of course, that the Queensland capital could jeopardise the privileged position into which the International Olympic Committee has thrust it – acknowledging it as its only preferred candidate for the 2032 Games – but that would entail a bungle of unimaginable proportions. Coates just does not make those kinds of mistakes.

It is not only that he can anticipate what curly questions the IOC could throw at Brisbane over the coming weeks but, as a man who has himself assessed dozens of Olympic bids, he virtually has written the book on how to make cocky candidate cities squirm.

“I guess what has happened is that I know so much about how all this has worked,” said Coates. “I guess I am so well respected in the IOC.”

There is an argument that could be made – and knowing the nature of Olympic politics, is being made – that because he is so respected, he should put himself above involving himself as minutely in a Games bid as he has with Brisbane. Coates, however, doesn’t see it that way.

“On the other hand, I think I should be doing whatever I can for the Olympic movement.”

It was the aforementioned Sallyanne Atkinson who first brought it to his attention that what the IOC really needed to do was abandon the corrupt, venal way of deciding which of a number of candidate cities should be chosen to host the Games. “Why doesn’t the IOC just pick a city that it wants and be done with it,” Atkinson had asked when, as Lord Mayor of Brisbane, she had seen the IOC up close in all its murky glory as it worked through the candidates for the 1992 Olympics.

Funnily enough, that is precisely the system that Coates as a vice-president of the IOC has helped to bring about. Then again, he probably didn’t need Atkinson to tell him that.

Coates will always be remembered as the mastermind of the campaign to bring the Games to Sydney in 2000, but how heavily that triumph hinged on his feat in bringing Brisbane in as an unlikely bronze medal behind eventual 1992 host city, Barcelona, and runner-up Paris.

In a way Atkinson and Coates came up smelling of roses, but it was garbage that brought him into her life.

She had taken office at City Hall in April 1985, just as the bungling of Brisbane’s garbage contracts was really starting to get on the nose. Trouble was that the workers in the Health and Recreation department of the Brisbane City Council were far too infatuated with the city’s novel Olympic bid to devote their time to such mundane matters as sanitation. Something needed to be done and so Atkinson telephoned the Australian Olympic Federation boss Kevan Gosper for help.

“He flew directly to Brisbane that day in the Shell company jet,” Atkinson recalled. “I explained to him that I needed to outsource the Olympic bid, to take it out of the council workers’ hands. He recommended John Coates.”

Coates was a rising force in Australian sports administration but a political neophyte. He was about to embark on an extraordinary journey through the labyrinth of Olympic politics. He and Atkinson worked together so well that even today he credits her with being extremely important in his life.

“He understood that I was the front person,” she said. “I was young and pretty and spoke French, so he would wheel me out. His ego never got in the way.”

She smiles that he has come full circle. That he started with a Brisbane Olympic bid and now, at the age of 70, he is finishing with another. She has witnessed his ferocious battles to fight off challengers to his position as boss of the Australian Olympic movement and shudders to think what it would be like to oppose Coates.

But that is a side of him she never knew.

She was asked if she could recall anything inspirational he had done or said.

“I thought everything he did was inspired,” she answered.