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Brisbane has taken two strides on its road to the 2032 Olympic Games, forging a formal partnership with 2028 host city Los Angeles while unveiling its first major corporate sponsor – within minutes of each other.
In California on Thursday morning (AEST), Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed a sister city agreement, linking the two host cities of the summer Olympic Games.
The mayors also signed a memorandum of understanding of Olympic co-operation, committing both cities to collaborate on the challenges and opportunities of hosting one of the world’s biggest sporting events.
Minutes later, at the newly opened Glasshouse Theatre, the Brisbane 2032 organising committee announced its first major sponsor, with Commonwealth Bank the first to sign on in a “sizable” but secret agreement.
Schrinner said both cities’ statuses as Olympic hosts meant there was “no better partner” for Brisbane than Los Angeles.
“Like us, Los Angeles is leveraging the Games to create a better city for its residents, investing in infrastructure and projects that will leave a positive legacy,” he said.
“We want our Games to be great, but more importantly we want the legacy for our city to be even greater. Learning from other Olympic cities like Los Angeles is absolutely critical.”
Bass said Los Angeles and Brisbane were setting a standard for how Olympic host cities could collaborate and innovate.
“This partnership with Brisbane strengthens our global relationships and ensures the Games leave a lasting legacy on our communities,” she said.
Back in Queensland, about 20 minutes later, Brisbane 2032 president Andrew Liveris announced the Commonwealth Bank had come on board as the organising committee’s founding partner.
Liveris said the International Olympic Committee had given Brisbane 2032 special permission to go to market for sponsorship early.
“Size of market is an issue – we do have to look at size of market – but we have some very big companies in this country right next to me here,” Liveris said, while standing next to Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn.
“I think this announcement today is going to activate a whole lot of other companies to say: ‘You know what, let’s get into this six-years-to-go thing as fast as we can’.”
But the size of the sponsorship remained tightly guarded.
“Under anyone’s definition, it’s a sizable investment,” Comyn said.
“We do that without any reluctance – we see the importance of being associated with an event like this, but we also think there’s commercial opportunities.”
Just where the money would go was as guarded as the amount itself, but Comyn said he expected at least some to flow through to grassroots sport.
“You can imagine there’s plenty of people in school – not just in Brisbane or in Queensland, but right around the country – that are probably dreaming about an Olympics and the home Olympics,” he said.
Olympic legend Ian Thorpe, who won three golds and two silvers at Sydney 2000, said there was an increase in sports funding in the lead-up to those Games and the results were reflective of that.
“You have to have those athletes that inspire you to be able to see it so that you can believe in it – to be able to have the pathway to be able to go out and have success,” he said.
“It’s why Australia has been as successful as we have at an Olympic Games level, because there’s been multiple generations of athletes that have inspired the next and they were inspired by the one that came before them.”
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