Pan Am official hoping for last-minute sales

1.4 million tickets still available for Games

• Hours before the opening day of competition, organizers for the Pan American Games were downplaying the fact hundreds of thousands of tickets remained unsold, one executive saying the expectation is “a lot” of fans are waiting until the last minute to buy.

Allen Vansen, an executive vice-president with the local organizing committee, said that nearly 800,000 tickets had been sold as of Monday morning. There are 1.4 million tickets available for the Pan Am Games, with the Opening Ceremony set for Friday, in Toronto.

The competitive schedule begins earlier, with water polo opening on Tuesday morning, as the Venezuelan women’s team meets Puerto Rico.

“Of course, we’d like to have some more ticket sales,” Vansen said at a news conference. “Those are happening every single day, in the thousands.”

The Pan Am Games are a quadrennial multi-sport event open to athletes in 41 competing countries across the Americas, with close to 7,000 athletes expected to participate. This is Canada’s third turn as host, with Winnipeg having staged the event in 1967 and in 1999.

Ontario won the right to stage the Games six years ago, and organizers have struggled to build much excitement. Congested highways have been made worse, with lanes reserved for high occupancy vehicles in an effort to help athletes and Games officials move around the gridlocked city. Interest, especially inside Toronto, has been difficult to detect.

A similar story unfolded around the Games four years ago in Guadalajara, with concerns over cost overruns dominating discussion before the athletes arrived. As interest swelled, long lines snaked outside a temporary box office in the city.

It remains to be seen whether the pattern will repeat in Toronto.

Vansen said some of the larger venues will be the most difficult to fill, especially for the preliminary matches. The new stadium in Hamilton — the new home for the Tiger-Cats — will feature plenty of empty seats for early-round soccer games not featuring Canada.

There are 16 days of soccer in Hamilton, he said, with almost 20,000 tickets available at every session.

“That’s a lot of tickets,” Vansen said. “And without team Canada playing, or some of the more notable teams, we’re not expecting to have a full stadium every single time.”

The same will likely be true in suburban Ajax, he said, which will host baseball.

Organizers have said almost 75 medal events have been sold out. On Monday, blocks of tickets to so-called “high-demand events” were put on sale — to the Opening Ceremony, equestrian, basketball, soccer, diving and track and field.

Vansen said organizers are “exceptionally pleased” with how many tickets have already been sold. He said they expect more will be moved as the Games progress. There are 1.4 million tickets available in all, including the Parapan Am Games, which open next month.

“I think that the general public will come out, and they’ll buy up the rest of those tickets,” he said. “Quite frankly, we did not expect to sell all 1.4 million tickets. Would we be over the moon if we did? Of course.”