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Lessons from Toronto's Pan Am Games

Lessons from Toronto's Pan Am Games

Tomorrow night Kanye West will headline the closing ceremony and the curtain will drop on the Pan Am Games. It’s the third time a Canadian city has hosted the Games and in 2015, Toronto got to absorb 51 sports played out by 7000 athletes from 41 countries. Canada will finish close to 200 medals in second place, with 72 gold, behind the U.S. with 93 gold and 240 medals in total. After 14 days of world-class competition, HOV lanes hysteria, lukewarm pre-Games hype: what did we learn from hosting the Pan Am Games in Toronto?

It was a case of wait-and-see in the lead up to the Pan Am Games. Ticket sales were lamenting at under half sold. Talks of a traffic apocalypse were never-ending. And there was little publicity about the Games and athletes; not of the world scale we’d come to expect of an Olympic-esque tournament.

It was reported that the 1.4 million tickets were to be sold for the Pan Am Games. Final ticket sales numbers haven’t been released yet, but most of the events I attended were 90 per cent full. We were warned about traffic; that and logistics proved to be the downfall of the Games. Getting anywhere, to any event, took me 90 minutes by car fueled by traffic, lack of parking (why host an international event with no parking available in a car-dominated city?) and Pan Am fences draped in signage that only confused entry and exit points.

But 14 days later, it delivered. It delivered on the spectacle. If you went to any event – the swimming, the water polo, handball – you would have been blown away by the high-quality competition, the raucous sea of red and the touching athlete-parent moments on exhibit. The multi-million dollar stadiums stacked up and are worth every penny. The Aquatic Centre was called world class by Canadian swimmers and coaches. The ATOS Centre in Markham was a flexible hub for multiple sports. The use of the Exhibition Centre for events like handball was truly inventive. Lake Ontario was the perfect home for waterskiing and some athletes likened the events to Melbourne’s world-class water skiing at the Moomba Festival. Hopefully this opens the door to more international competitions in the years to come.

Logistically, the Pan Ams was a network of sprawling stadiums. Events took place in Barrie, Oshawa, Markham and Toronto’s waterfront. It’s difficult to build city buzz when the stadiums are isolated across the GTA boundaries and communities. Being at the venues, watching the athletes, I had shivers run down my spine when Canada won gold, or, was even just competing. Imagine that kind of buzz if the Aquatic Centre was right next to the basketball stadium, that was also next to the boxing; the city would have been electric. Think London Olympics. On the flipside, a lot of communities in the GTA now have improved recreation facilities.

In a case of blind faith, Mayor John Tory has expressed interested in bidding for Toronto to host the 2024 Olympics. If anything, Pan Ams showed us all why Toronto isn’t an Olympic ready city. There are two things all Olympic hosts have in common: venues that are close together and if they aren’t close together there is reliable and efficient transit – rail mostly - to get them there. Toronto’s venues at the Pam Ams weren’t close together and it lacked a rail network to drop patrons off at venues instead using buses or cars. For the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the city built a world-class rail network that ran from the airport to the city and all of the Olympic venues. And that’s what Toronto is missing and the Pan Ams highlighted that.

The Pan Ams reminded us all that the competition is real, it counts and isn’t just some phony thing that happens every four years. Athletes were competing to qualify for Rio or using it as a warm-up for the World Championships – another qualifier for Rio. The Pan Games are also a reminder that most of the athletes are just kids. They are the future Olympic stars. They are competitors on the world stage. They reminded us all why we play sport in the first place: for the fun of it. And all those kids looked like they had loads of fun.