Chatter growing over possible Olympic bid
There was a moment right before the end of the Canadian women’s volleyball match Thursday that in a way epitomized the team’s entire tournament.
It was a game the Canadians never wanted to play. They came into the Pan Am Games aiming for a top four finish. Instead, after a disappointing round robin, they were fighting Peru for seventh place in an eight-team field.
Women’s volleyball is not one of Canada’s glory sports at the Pan Am Games. Not this year, anyway. The team isn’t highly ranked. The players aren’t well known. But the big question of these games, the question that hangs over every large sporting event — will they, in some nebulous but definitive way, be considered a success? — runs as much through their court as any other.
That question has taken on increasing freight over the last two weeks, as the chatter over a potential Toronto Olympic bid has grown. It now seems increasingly likely that, should those who matter deem these Pan Am Games a success, Toronto will at the very least take the first step in the bid process for the 2024 Summer Olympics
To do so, the city must formally indicate its interest to the International Olympic Committee by Sept. 15. Toronto city council is not scheduled to meet before then, but Bob Richardson, who chaired Toronto’s last Olympic bid, doesn’t think that will matter. All the IOC needs by Sept. 15, he said, are letters from the mayor and the Canadian Olympic Committee. “The mayor doesn’t have to go to council or anything,” he said. “All he’s saying is we’re interested and we’re going to have a look at this.”
Keerthana Kamalavasan, a spokeswoman for Mayor John Tory, agreed. “To preserve the right to bid, the mayor would need to submit a letter by Sept. 15 with the caveat that council approval is ultimately required to proceed,” she wrote in an email. To proceed to the second stage of bidding, Toronto would also need the approval of the federal and provincial governments, by Jan. 8, 2016.
Tory himself hasn’t yet said if he supports an Olympic bid. “The mayor is focused on putting on a great Pan/Parapan Am Games,” Kamalavasan said Friday. But he has said in the past he supports major events, like the Olympics, as a way to spur and set deadlines for municipal investment.
At this point, Toronto’s Olympic bid exists at the mercy of narrative. If the story coming out of the final weekend of the Pan Am Games and next month’s Parapan Am Games is positive, Tory will likely push the bid forward, if not, not. So what’s the story? Well, it’s complicated, as the women’s volleyball team can attest.
Their match, the one that would effectively determine last place, opened Thursday afternoon at the Exhibition Centre in Pan Am Park. There was a large crowd — not sold out, but busy, loud and decked out in red. The Canadians looked the better team early on. They absorbed Peru’s power game, run mostly through their 18-year-old star, Angela Layva, and fought back with their own bal- anced attack. Canada won the first set 25-22. They lost the second 24-26, then easily took the third 25-17.
At that point, Canada looked set for a win and a little consolation. But every time they seemed about to pull away, the Peruvians kept crawling back in. Layva, who plays with astounding power, cut through Canadian blocks. The Canadians made a series of simple gaffes. And like that, the fourth set was over — 25-21 Peru — and the fifth was on.
The moment — the one that seemed to sum up the team’s entire up and down tournament — came late in that deciding set. The ball squirted over the net from the Peru side and looked sure to drop into a hole in the Canadian defence. But then a Canadian player leaped forward from the backcourt, slid and dug the ball up just before it hit the court. Another Canadian kept it alive and then Canada’s libero (defensive specialist) had only to bump it over to keep the point going. She squared up. She swivelled. And ... she shanked it, popping it over the net and out of bounds. Moments later, the match was over. Peru won the final set 15-13 and the match 3 sets to 2.
You could see the pain and frustration in the Canadians’ faces afterward. As they walked through the media area, several appeared close to tears. Most of them, though, just looked pissed off. “We’ve been really angry for two days,” ever since the end of the round robin, said middle blocker Jaime Thibeault. “We really wanted to use that anger in a posi- tive way and go through today and I think we weren’t able to do that. You can just tell we had a lot of ups and downs.”
Thibeault, like her teammates, looked tired and upset. But when asked about the Pan Am Games themselves and her experience here, she brightened. “Honestly, it’s amazing,” she said. “This is the best Canadian crowd I’ve ever, ever played in my entire career. It’s sad we didn’t show them how we can actually play .... But Pan Am itself has been just amazing. And we’re just going to keep going, keep fighting.”
For the Pan Am Games, success is both abstract and not. There are results, of course, concrete ones. And by that measure, the Canadian women’s volleyball team did not succeed. Not by their own standards. “Not even close,” said Thibeault. But many other Canadians did. Team Canada had 187 medals as of Friday afternoon, 69 of them gold. That’s good enough for second place in both categories, behind only the United States.
But success for the Pan Am Games is about more than medals. It’s about the event itself — money and traffic and venues, and an ethereal sense of whether and how much people cared. For the women’s volleyball team, the event seemed successful: 4,000 people watched them play an eighth-place game at an eight-team tournament at 1:30 p.m. on a Thursday. They cheered and stomped and groaned. They lived and died with every serve, spike and dig. Many seemed as heartbroken as the team when Canada lost.
Overall more than one million Pan Am tickets have been sold heading into the final weekend. Richardson, who helped bring the games to Toronto, thinks the final tally will be closer to 1.1 million — “which is huge,” he said. The opening ceremony drew 1.9 million viewers on CBC, while prime-time coverage averaged 900,000 viewers a night according to The Canadian Press. “I think the games have been an unqualified success,” Richardson said.
But how do measure success for something like the Pan Am Games? How do you gauge a single outcome for something that isn’t singular, something so sprawling and complex?
Pan Am’s chief executive officer, Saad Rafi, thinks there are tangible measures — revenue targets, operating budgets — and intangible ones, like pride and spectator experience. “I know, certainly, anecdotally, from dozens and dozens of athletes and officials, their measure of what we put on here — and we hope to finish strong — was of an Olympic calibre, better than they’ve seen at any Pan Am Games,” he said.
The key word there, of course, is “Olympic.” Because, if nothing else, the Pan Am Games have become a kind of underground audition for those larger, more prominent ones.
Arnd Ludwig, head coach of the women’s volleyball team, summed up his Pan Am experience with a heavy sigh. “The whole Games situation was really, really good,” he said. “I just wish we could have done a little better.”
This is the best Canadian crowd I’ve ever, ever played in my entire career