Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee chairman John Furlong said Friday, “We’re no longer second in line. In a few days, we’ll be first in line.”

The hosts of the 2010 Winter Olympics are feeling the uptick in interest. Communications Vice President Renee Smith-Valade said traffic to the VANOC Web site has increased fivefold since Aug. 8, when the Beijing Games began.

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Corporate sponsorships worth $730 million (Canadian) have been locked up, just short of the organizing committee’s goal of $760 million, said executive vice president Dave Cobb. That’s set off against an operating budget of $1.6 billion (Canadian). The Games’ capital budget for facilities is $580 million.

Cobb said VANOC has already doubled the corporate backing that 2004 Winter Games host Torino garnered and is closing in on Salt Lake City’s sponsorship program. Cobb added that VANOC is now focusing on potential professional services partners, such as accounting and law firms.

“Most are non-traditional marketing categories for sports properties,” Cobb said. “We’ve had success breaking into categories that typically haven’t been involved with the Games.”

Among them: Workopolis, Canada’s biggest help-wanted job site.

Meanwhile, VANOC also is working on establishing an authorized secondary ticket market so that tickets sold will be used. The non-usage of tickets has dogged the IOC and organizers here as well as in Torino and Athens.

There’s also going to be a “strategic allocation of high-demand tickets within the Olympic family.” Officials noted that not every National Olympic Committee will be getting, say, 200 tickets to the men’s gold medal hockey game. Only those nations with hockey affinity will.

For the record: 70 percent of tickets will go to the public and 30 percent to the IOC family. Sixty percent of that public sale will go to Canadians.

Tickets go on sale on Oct. 3.

London Already Rolling In Dough Four Years Out

Four years out, the London Olympic Organizing Committee has raised 400 million British pounds, or roughly $740 million, of its domestic target of 700 million pounds, or close to $1.3 billion.

LOCOG’s operating budget is set for 2 billion GBP, or $3.7 billion.

Exactly how far ahead is London of previous Summer Games’ sponsorship sales?

“If you look at past Games, the answer is they were somewhere near zero at this point, and most (sponsorship funding) gets raised between 36 and 12 months out,” LOCOG CEO Paul Deighton told SportsBusiness Journal’s Beijing Bureau. “I feel like we’ve got a lot of money in the bank already, which allows us to work on the activation with the existing sponsors and allows us to focus on the details.”

LOCOG has signed six so-called “Tier One” sponsors, including Lloyds, EDF Energy, Adidas, British Airways, BT (British Telecom) and BP.

The threshold for Tier One is at least 40 million GBP, or $74 million.

Sunday’s “handover” of the Olympic flag and responsibility at the closing ceremony will be accompanied in London and around the United Kingdom by handover parties. TOP sponsor Visa is sponsoring the London handover party, which will be held at Buckingham Palace. About 40,000 people have been invited, and American swimming hero Michael Phelps will be there.

Said Deighton: “It’s the first time there’s been more than the segment in the closing ceremony. This is part of our commitment to inspire people back home.”

Two Tier One sponsors Lloyds and BT are sponsoring handover parties in other cities around the UK.

Phelps And The Closing Ceremony

The U.S. Olympic team’s prime asset of these Games is Phelps. But he won’t be part of the closing ceremony on Sunday, instead being in London as part of the Visa-sponsored “handover” celebration at Buckingham Palace.

USOC Executive Director Jim Scherr said he’s OK with that.

“Athletes are free to leave if they want to and not attend the closing ceremony. Michael’s [stayed] in the past. We hope athletes stay and enjoy the experience, but many do not. We have no concerns that he will not be there. It’s for the enjoyment of the athletes and their celebration. In terms of Michael’s future and what he’s done in the past, he’ll do well and represent our country well.”

Scherr was asked, though, if Phelps could get overexposed with all of his various endorsement deals and post-Olympic activities.

“I don’t think that I would be concerned about over-exposure and Michael Phelps,” Scherr said. “The kind of person that he is and the career that he’s had, I think he deserves the exposure he gets. I can’t see the possibility for over-exposure damaging the [Olympic] movement or even him commercially.”

Shawn Johnson Books “Ellen”

Shawn Johnson, the American gymnast from Iowa who won individual gold in the balance beam and was the silver medalist in the women’s all-around behind teammate Nastia Liukin, is set to appear on “Ellen” on Sept. 4.

Ueberroth Points To Chicago’s Corporate Base

USOC Chairman Peter Ueberroth linked the 2016 Chicago bid to that city’s large corporate community.

In touting Chicago, which is competing with Tokyo, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Summer Games, Ueberroth said: “We think that Chicago has many attributes, and that it’s a great time to reconnect for the whole Olympic movement with a major corporate center to revitalize and reorganize the TOP program. We’ve never had an Olympic Games in a really major company center in the United States.”

As for any discussions with the IOC on revenue sharing with the USOC, Ueberroth said there was one informal meeting in a hotel lobby. “This is a matter to take up at another time,” he said.

Nautica Congratulates Misty May-Treanor

Nautica on Friday ran a half-page ad in the Olympics section of the New York Times and USA Today congratulating U.S. beach volleyball player Misty May-Treanor on winning a gold medal in Beijing. Nautica is May-Treanor’s apparel sponsor.