Life and Times of VANOC Chairman Jack Poole

IT WAS THE ONLY MOMENT in his life when Jack Poole questioned whether the challenge he faced was simply too daunting. The one time when he needed to hear the pep talk rather than give it.

It was September 2007, and the developer and chairman of VANOC was a patient at Virginia Mason Medical Centre, a Seattle hospital. Poole had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the deadliest of all forms of the disease. The survival rate is less than five per cent. Virginia Mason is known for a treatment protocol that combines heavy blasts of radiation and chemotherapy – a therapy so radical it’s not offered in Canada. But it boasts a survival rate of 55 per cent.

“They give you radiation every day for 40 days,” says Poole, at his downtown Vancouver office overlooking Burrard Inlet. “And they give you chemo three times a week on top of it. It puts you on your knees.”

He was sick to his stomach every day, violently heaving. Halfway through his stay, he developed an infection. He lost 30 pounds. Friends who came to visit him, including his partner at Concert Properties Ltd., David Podmore, and VANOC CEO John Furlong, barely recognized the man they had come to know and care for so deeply. “After getting through the infection, I was pretty weak and I said to the oncologist, ‘Is there a case to be made here for just saying enough’s enough?’” the 76-year-old Poole recalls. “He said, ‘Listen, we’re playing for big stakes. You’ll get through this, I promise. We’re not going to quit.’”

Poole didn’t, and months later – back home in the Olympic spotlight, back in the arms of those he loved – he got the best news he could receive: he was cancer-free. If

Jack Poole is a man who’s won more often than he’s lost. Today he stands atop the Vancouver establishment, a legendary builder and businessman with some of the most impressive corporate connections in the city. His close friends are many and include everyone from Premier Gordon Campbell to Canaccord Capital chairman Peter Brown to construction magnate Hugh Magee, and he engenders a fierce loyalty among them all. Poole’s chairmanship of VANOC will likely be the final entry in one of the most impressive work resumés in the country. That is why, with the Olympics closing in, it’s a perfect time to take a closer look at what has been an extraordinary life.