Don’t let his youthful appearance fool you. Todd Severson is an Olympic
veteran. In fact he was working at the Atlanta Games in 1996 when three
terrorist pipe bombs went off in the city’s Centennial Olympic Park.
“I was sitting in the office at 1 o’clock in the morning when that
happened,” says Severson, project director for Contemporary Security,
speaking from his offices at the company’s training centre at Main and
Terminal in downtown Vancouver. From his window he can see the
athlete’s village.
When asked if he has a favourite winter sport in the Olympics, he
admits he doesn’t actually get to see the events when the Games are on.
“I’ll wait and watch the DVD,” he says with a laugh.
Severson, who, when asked his age, will only say he’s “under 40,” is an
Aussie import employed by Contemporary Security. He serves as project
director managing the 5,000-strong guard force that will assist the
RCMP’s Integrated Security Unit in carrying out screening at the
various Olympic venues in Vancouver and Whistler.
Vancouver will be Severson’s seventh Olympics. He was involved in the
planning and operations of Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000, Salt Lake 2002,
Athens 2004, Torino 2006 and Beijing 2008. He also worked on the
Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games and Rio 2007 Pan American Games, and
was an IOC Advisor on event operations.
All eyes will be on Severson as the security industry watches to see
how he pulls off the creation of a 5,000-strong guard force operation.
Critics have been taking jabs via the mainstream press about how good
the guards will be considering many of them have never done guard work
before. Where could they possibly find 5,000 guards for such short-term
work? How much training could they have really received? Are they going
to be fed, housed, paid and even dressed appropriately?
Better still, how do you pull all this off and handle the stress of a $97-million contract?
“If I gave away all my secrets I wouldn’t have a job,” Severson says, laughing.
In fact the price tag of $97 million was the total contract price but,
as Severson points out, it’s a moving target because the RCMP utilize
the workforce as they see fit for the coverage.
“As you can imagine, a lot of money goes into securing accommodation in
Whistler and buying all these uniforms and boots,” he says.
Severson answers all of the big questions about the Olympic deployment with a calm confidence.
He arrived in Vancouver in April 2009 and since July has hired 5,000
people and staff who have attended a combined 15,000 training sessions.
In the first four days it was open, the uniform distribution centre
handed out 1,000 uniforms.
“The security screening we will be doing is similar to the operations
you would see at most airports but at the entry to all venues for the
games. We don’t necessarily do accreditation control inside the venue
and we don’t do the large material inspections for deliveries, but we
focus on pedestrians walking into the venue and also pedestrians
driving into the venues — so we screen those people,” he says.
Severson says one of the other success factors for the operation is the close cooperation with the RCMP.
“It has been really crucial to this success and it’s a really great
case study of cooperation between private security industry and the
police forces of Canada – through their planning and detailed needs of
the games they were able to come up with budgets that we have all been
staying within and throughout this cooperation has made it a good
relationship in delivering a good workforce for them,” he says.
