When the olympic flame arrives in B.C. Place on Feb. 12 for the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Games, nobody will breathe a bigger sigh of relief, and simultaneously jump for joy, than Rusty Goepel.

Goepel, senior vice president with Ray-mond James Ltd. in Vancouver, is also chairman of the Vancouver Olympic Games organizing committee. He has been heavily invested in the 11-year journey to bring the Games to British Columbia, starting with his stint as director of the Olympic bid corporation in 1998. But Goepel’s joy will be tempered by sadness over the absence of his long time friend Jack Poole: Goepel stepped in to fill Poole’s leadership role at VANOC after Poole lost his battle with cancer last year.

“We’ve been a team for seven years, this group,” Goepel says. “The train is very close to the station. We’re hopefully going to steer it in there successfully and end up with an event Canadians will be proud of and also one that will honour Jack’s memory.”

While the Vancouver Olympic Games might seem like a monster — with a construction budget of $590 million, an expected $1.8 billion in revenue, 3,000 employees, 5,000 athletes, 20,000 volunteers and 10,000 accredited media — Goepel is no stranger to starting from scratch. In fact, building organizations from the ground up has been one of his main activities since he got into the financial services business more than 40 years ago. He started at London Life in 1966, selling group insurance out of Toronto, and moved to Vancouver two years later as an institutional equities sales trainee at the former Ryan Investments.

Goepel has stayed in B.C. ever since. In 1974, Ryan merged with Pemberton Securities Inc., which became the largest regional investment-grade broker in Western Canada. Goepel spent most of his time there as the head of the institutional sales department, with a three-year stint as head of retail operations. By the time Pemberton went public in 1986, it had grown to more than 1,000 employees, a tenfold increase in just 12 years. After Dominion Securities Inc. made a successful bid for Pemberton in 1989, Goepel headed back out on the building path, co-founding Goepel Shields and Partners. In 1997, that firm merged with McDermid St. Lawrence, a retail firm with strong Vancouver roots, to become Goepel McDermid Inc. Four years later, after hitting the 500-employee mark — up from just 18 when it started — that firm was acquired by Raymond James.

“I’ve been involved in a number of situations that were quite small at the start and grew exponentially,” Goepel says. “In every company I’ve worked for, the employees were almost all shareholders. We believe in people having some equity in the game, really feeling part of the team and being happy when somebody else is doing well because that means we’re all doing well.

“We don’t sell shares in VANOC,” he adds, “but every employee is very important to the success of the venture and they each take a lot of pride in it. It’s not like working for a big, multinational firm, where you’re one person out of 75,000. It’s very personal.”

Goepel believes the Olympics will be an “absolutely unique experience” for Vancouver and he’s glad to see the city starting to rally around it. “It will be a once-in-a-lifetime event. I have very high hopes,” he says. “Many of my friends in Calgary in 1988 say it was one of the great things in their lives. I hope it will be the same for Vancouver.”

Although Goepel’s formal title at Raymond James is senior vice president, he refers to himself as the firm’s “elder statesman.” Because he stepped back from day-to-day activities after the Raymond James deal, he says, he was able to devote more time to community issues, such as the Olympic bid.

He supposes some goodwill will flow back to the firm as a result of his involvement. But that was never part of his motivation. In fact, had he known how much time and effort was involved in landing the Olympics, he says, he is not sure he would have started.

“We went in wide-eyed and excited: ‘OK, what do we do?’” he recalls. “You don’t have a lot of people with experience in running an Olympic Games. It’s a whole new world. The challenges over the years have been pretty tough.”

@page_break@Goepel says he got involved in the bid simply because he loved sports and the Olympic bid looked like a fun project that would be good for the province. Many others at Raymond James have given back to the community in recent years, Goepel says; his involvement just happened to be very high-profile. “You don’t go into these things because you want to increase your business,” he says. “That’s the absolute worst motivation — and not a particularly healthy one. The nice thing when you do get involved in the community is that it often comes back to help you in ways you never would have anticipated.”

Goepel says that unlike many previous Olympics, in which spectators risked sitting in wet paint because construction was well past deadline, the venues for the Vancouver games were completed well ahead of time. “All the venues have been used [by athletes],” Goepel says. “It’s a first in modern Olympics history. We’ve had the opportunity to run World Cup events at basically all of our venues. Our volunteers have had the chance to be on the sites. The athletes have been able to practise on them, too. Hopefully, that will provide a home-field advantage.”

When the Games begin, Goepel hopes to spend as much time as possible as a fan, cheering on Canada’s athletes. He will, however, have to press the flesh with dignitaries from around the world, too. “We know a lot of heads of state are coming,” he says. “Those plans are [being] kept pretty quiet.”

Goepel says he has met Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip before so he’s not worried about getting tongue-tied in the presence of the rich and famous. “If they’re coming to the Games, they’re sports fans. I’m sure we’ll have things in common,” he says. Princess Anne and Prince Albert of Monaco, both members of the International Olympic Committee, are expected to attend.

While never a broker, Goepel has always managed some money for friends as well as handling his own affairs. He had some good training on that side of the business early in his career, but he’s now trying to steer his group of clients to others at the firm who are more active in managing accounts.

Goepel and his wife of 43 years, Lindy, love to golf and travel in their spare time. They have a home near Palm Springs, Calif., adjacent to a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus. The couple have hit the links in countries such as Ireland, Scotland, New Zealand, Germany, France, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. They also have three grown children and four grandchildren. IE