Interview - New Zealand "Ready to Fly" Says Rugby World Cup CEO

(ATR) Tournament CEO Martin Snedden tells Around the Rings only five countries can realistically win the Rugby World Cup opening tonight.

Luckily for the hosts, New Zealand is one them.

"I just sense that this could be the All Black year," Snedden says despite his rugby-crazed country's 24-year title drought.

Read on for his thoughts on how February's earthquake still impacts his organizing committee, whether ticket sales are living up to expectations and which other four countries stand a chance of winning this 45-day rugby deluge.

Around the Rings: My first question’s an obvious one. Is New Zealand ready for the Rugby World Cup opening tonight?

Martin Snedden: Absolutely. In fact, I think we’ve been ready for about four weeks now.

We had a major dress rehearsal between New Zealand and Australia at Eden Park, which is the venue for the opening match and a number of matches including the final, at the start of August and that just went fabulously. We were able to test all of our Rugby World Cup procedures – not only in the stadium but also around the city with transport and whatnot – and all went well, so yep, we’re ready to fly.

ATR: To what degree does the earthquake still impact the operations of your organizing committee? Is its aftermath something you deal with on a daily basis?

MS: The operational side of it’s done and dusted. The biggest residual challenge of the earthquake is just to make sure that the people of Christchurch feel connected to the Rugby World Cup.

Christchurch is the strongest rugby area in New Zealand, so it was a massive blow to the event to lose them as a host for matches in the tournament. What has happened as a result of the earthquake is that a considerably enhanced festival program is running in Christchurch, so somewhere between 50 and 100 festival events will be staged there throughout the tournament, some of which will be centered on a major Rugby World Cup events village that’s being built in the center of Christchurch.

ATR: Are ticket sales living up to your expectations?

MS: Ticket sales are going really well. We’re now at the stage where our target is $222 million. We’re now at $202 million, so we are 90-something percent of the way there. Once the tournament starts, that’s a fantastic marketing tool, so they’ll be a lot of tickets sold during the Cup itself. But in the last 100 days, we’ve sold something like $62 million worth of tickets, so the challenge of another $20 million in the final 50 days is definitely achievable.

ATR: What sorts of numbers are you expecting in terms of international visitors, and how long will their average stay be? This is, after all, a six-week tournament.

MS: The current estimate is about 95,000 overseas visitors, of which we’re expecting about 30,000 from Australia; 25,000 from the U.K., including Ireland; about 10,000 from France and about 10,000 from the USA and Canada.

We surveyed those people who had purchased tickets from us a few months ago, and it’s looking like the average length of stay is about 23 days. If you consider that one of the reasons the New Zealand government is providing such strong financial backing for this tournament is the potential economic impact, then those type figures are really good.

When we started the project, we expected we would get around 65,000 to 70,000 visitors, so it looks like we’re going to considerably exceed that number, so the government’s pretty happy from that point of view.

ATR: Talk to me a bit about transportation. What sorts of challenges exist for your organizing committee, especially given that the tournament is being staged across two separate islands?

MS: That has been a challenge that we’ve been working with the various transport organizations in New Zealand – the airlines and land transport and city transport – on for the last four years, and we think that by and large things are now well in place and in hand to deal with that quite comfortably.

Probably the biggest transport challenge relates to within Auckland City. Auckland’s hosting a total of 15 matches, 11 at Eden Park and another four on the North Shore. The number of visitors and the number of match attendees there will be greater than in any other region in New Zealand, so an enormous amount of work has had to go into just trying to ensure that the public transport system – particularly rail, air and bus – will work. That was one of the most pleasing outcomes of the dress rehearsal match that we had four weeks ago where public transport was able to shift about half of the attendees – about 30,000 people – both to the match and back without too much trouble, so that went well.

Public transport is free for anyone who’s holding a match ticket, so that certainly encourages people to use public transport, but there’sa very significant traffic management operation that’s in place too so we will need be to be very careful and vigilant about this, but I think it’s ultimately something that should work.

ATR: What about the time differences you’re dealing with between New Zealand and other rugby-mad markets like South Africa, Europe and the USA? How are broadcasters reconciling the desire for live coverage with the enormous time difference?

MS: That was the subject of a lot of discussion when we were settling on the match schedule and in particular the kickoff times. There are two things we’ve done to help the international market, particular the South African and the U.K./France market, and that is to make the kickoff times later, far later than what they would normally be.

Normal kickoff time in New Zealand for a night match would be 7:30 p.m. For most of the major matches in the Rugby World Cup, they will be either 8:30 p.m. or – as we get to the business end of the tournament – they’ll be 9 p.m., so that helps.

The second thing that we’ve done is when we were settling on the match schedule, we tried to ensure the European teams and the South African teams for their major matches that they were playing the latest matches on each day so as to enhance the likelihood of them being able to be broadcast into their own territories at reasonable times in the morning, so that seems to have worked well.

ATR: What’s it like running a six-week sporting event? I would imagine it presents some unique challenges that organizers of other premiere like the Olympics or perhaps even the FIFA WorldCup would never think of?

MS: It’s a long period of time. The tournament extends for 45 days, which in an ideal world is too long. It would be far preferable if a format could be found that reduced that time to somewhere in the vicinity of 30 to 35 days, which is similar to the FIFA World Cup. But the issue there is that the players need time to recover – even more so than soccer players – so you can’t squash the matches up quite as much.

The other issue is that if you want to shorten the format, you’d have to reduce the number of teams competing from 20 to probably 16, and the feeling in rugby is that the upside of shortening the tournament would not be as great as the downside of excluding some of the emerging nations and giving them what essentially is their one major opportunity each four years to have some time in the rugby spotlight.

ATR: What do you expect performance-wise from some of those "emerging nations" that aren’t within, say, the top eight rugby teams in the world? Do they stand a chance?

MS: They don’t stand a chance of winning the tournament, realistically. They’re probably really only five teams that realistically are in contention to win the Cup, those being New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, France and England.

The teams that I think are best positioned to cause the most damage to the more fancied teams are the three Pacific Island teams: Samoa, Tonga and Fiji. Each of these teams is now full of professional players who play in France or in England on a full-time basis. Each of the three teams is significantly disadvantaged between World Cups because they can’t get regular guaranteed access to their best players, so it’s only around Rugby World Cup time that they have the opportunity of having their best players available to them. I think there’s a possibility they could beat any of the top teams on a given day. None of them probably can sustain that type of form enough to have a realistic chance of winning the tournament, but I think there is just an outside possibility that for the first time we might see a Pacific Island team in the semifinals, and I think that would be something really special.

ATR: What chance are you giving the All Blacks to end their 24-year title drought?

MS: I am giving them a really good chance. I think they go into the tournament as favorites, but they also carry with them the baggage of the last five World Cups. I think the home advantage in the end far outweighs any disadvantage that’s caused by the expectations of the New Zealand public in playing at home. I just sense that this could be the All Black year.

ATR: What sort of legacy are you hoping the World Cup has for New Zealand? The country is certainly rugby-mad already.

MS: I think the legacy extends well beyond rugby.

We’ve taken on a project which is by far the biggest project our country has ever attempted. It’s a project that I think many in the international sporting world thought we were too small to cope with, and what we’ve done over the five years or so we’ve had to prepare for this tournament is significantly increase our capability levels in order to make sure we are able to deliver the standard of tournament that is quite rightly expected.

Interview conducted by Matthew Grayson.