Toronto doesn’t need Olympics to improve itself
Tory made the sensible choice, maybe the only choice, in not chasing the 2024 Games
So in the end, a Toronto Olympic bid was the shimmer of heat on a summer highway, crammed with cars staring mournfully at an empty HOV lane. It was a daydream, a pipe dream, a fantasy. You know, like a comprehensive subway system in Toronto, or a house near the subway that young people can afford.
Toronto mayor John Tory closed the door on a 2024 Olympic bid on Tuesday, and frankly, it didn’t sound like he had a lot of choice. The sight of a Toronto mayor being sensible is still a little strange, but Tory did it. Not today, he said, but maybe in the future.
“I would rule nothing out,” said Tory, standing in front of City Hall. “I mean, there are lots of other world championships we should be taking a look at now that we’ve got a much better aquatic centre and a velodrome and so on . . . why couldn’t Toronto and Canada host a (men’s) World Cup of soccer? Why not?”
Well, we have no grass soccer fields to speak of, to start. Tory also announced that he would form an advisory group “to look at the merits of competing for future events, such as a Winter or Summer Olympics.” As we don’t currently have a mountain handy, discussing a Winter Olympics seems like a short day’s work, unless you’re really planning to spread this sucker out.
Look, even a Quebec City bid has always been stalled by the size of the mountain called Le Massif, which isn’t massif enough for downhill. But it beats anything Toronto has handy.
It’s little things like that — let’s consider a bid for a Winter Olympics! The World Cup! Something involving cricket! — that tells you a little about why Toronto shouldn’t have put together a bid, this time. We weren’t, as a city, prepared and focused. We once lost to Atlanta, to our everlasting shame. This time, Los Angeles and Paris and Rome are out front, so Toronto ceded the field.
“In our case we were quite a bit behind, because while we were preparing to make Pan Am a success, we didn’t have a group here that was putting together those building blocks, and asking individual corporations, would you be part of a bid?” said Tory. That seems important, no? Toronto, of course, has a long history of either bidding for global events, or grumbling about bidding for global events. But this time, Tory made it sound like there was almost no there, there. There wasn’t adequate support from Toronto’s business community to finance the cost of the bid itself. (“Nobody was rushing forward with their chequebooks to hand me big cheques.”) The federal party leaders were receptive, but nobody knows who will actually be in charge until October. The province kept saying there remained unanswered questions.
And at the ground level, where John Tory lives, city council voted not to consider an Olympic bid as recently as 2014, and was far from united this time around.
Tory didn’t mention Rob and Doug Ford barking like dogs in what may be the unofficial beginning of a 2018 mayoral race, but it hung in the air.
“I’m just not into declaring that there should be a Ferris wheel somewhere, or that kind of stuff,” said Tory, in a dig at Doug. In fairness, he didn’t rule out a monorail.
Still, if this was a victory for prudence in Toronto, it was a defeat for the Canadian Olympic Committee. COC president Marcel Aubut wanted this, and felt the Pan Am Games would provide the feel-good surge to do it.
There are some close to the COC who believed there were, in fact, corporate partners lined up, but that Tory got cold feet; there are others who think the COC failed in part because it decamped Toronto staff to Montreal for the splashy opening of a new headquarters, rather than working on lobbying politicians and business interests in Toronto.
Either way, the winning conditions weren’t in place, and that’s for the best. The only thing worse than a half-assed bid would be the prospect of accidentally winning. But as for a 2028 bid, that’s no given. Postmedia’s Vicki Hall is reporting that Calgary groups have been meeting for 18 months to discuss a bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics, and Quebec City is still pining. Given that the bidding for the 2022 Winter Games came down to Beijing without snow and Kazakhstan without infrastructure, Calgary sounds pretty good.
“The Canadian Olympic Committee is determined to have the Olympics back in the country at the earli- est opportunity, especially in the context of the new Olympic Agenda 2020,” said Aubut in a statement.
As for Toronto, we sit, sensible but not always competent, as a city. Tory said that if Toronto wants to build desperately-needed transit and affordable housing, it should just do it, without an Olympics. Well, go for it, and the pressure’s on you, now. The Olympics themselves are the least important part of an Olympics for a city; what is left behind is. This city can’t rely on the deus ex machina of a Games to save it from the problems it faces.
If you’re going to bid for the Olympics, you’d better do it right. But Toronto needs to get on with being a city, one way or the other.