Vancouver Organizing Committee Faces Olympic Questions Head On

25 February 2010

Renee Smith-Valade is the Vice President of Communications for Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC)

Staging an Olympics is a huge undertaking, and so is dealing with all of the international media which come to the host city to cover the Games. The woman who heads up the communications team for the Vancouver Winter Games is Renee Smith-Valade.

Renee Smith-Valade's official title is Vice President, Communications. And reporters who attend the Vancouver Organizing Committee's (VANOC) joint daily briefing with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are quite familiar with her, as she serves as the official spokesperson for VANOC.

Smith-Valade told VOA one of the key communications objectives for the Vancouver Olympics was to present Canada's linguistic duality of English and French, which are also the two languages of the IOC.

"We wanted to raise the bar a bit and right from the way in which we recruited the communications staff, to my own commitment to French, we've tried to build a communications team that is fluently bilingual. And so whether it's here [in the Main Press Center] or in any of the other press centers, our spokes-people are able to answer questions in both French and English and not rely on the simultaneous or the consecutive translation," she explained.

Smith-Valade emphasized that with great teamwork, anyone who is speaking on behalf of the organizing committee is well prepared. When the committee believes there are issues better addressed by others, they invite them in to field questions from the media.