A TALE of TWO cities

Will Toronto’s Pan Am Games be remembered as costly and an Olympicsized mistake, or will the legacy be one of medal successes that inspired a generation

On the first Sunday of the Pan American Games, Olivia Harnett, 8, was getting anxious. Her father, Curt, a three-time Olympic medallist in cycling, is chef de mission for the Canadian team, and her mother, Victoria Winter, a lawyer, is on the board of directors for the Toronto host committee, and all three were at equestrian.

Olivia really, really wanted to be at rugby.

She kept an eye on the time. The stadium was an hour’s drive south. Olivia was adamant, and they left. They made it in time to see the women’s rugby sevens team win in a romp, as was expected. The Canadian men were the surprise, an underdog team who drew strength from the home crowd in several scrappy games. They won the gold medal, too.

“I looked over at my daughter, and there she is with her Canada hat on and a Canada flag draped around her, sobbing,” Harnett said. “I’ve never witnessed that kind of emotion out of my daughter before.

“That’s the story of this,” he said. “That’s what this is.”

The Pan Am Games had largely been written off before they began, with fears of a traffic apocalypse, hotel managers complaining about unused inventory and a pervasive sense of apathy within the city. Nobody wanted the Games, nobody seemed to care.

And then the circus arrived, and the noise drew attention. Canadians were standing on top of the podium, and other Canadians came out to watch. Organizers had sold barely half of the available 1.2 million tickets in the week before the Games, but at the beginning of the second week of competition, they announced they had hit the one million mark in sales.

So what is the story of these Games, and how will they be remembered?

There are two stories. One will be about the cost — with the budget of $2.57 billion, and the chance that number could still move north — and the increasing likelihood that those in power will seek to leverage that commitment into another, more expensive bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics. That is the complicated story.

The other story is the one with the happy ending, with the smiling young athletes and the fans like the eightyear-old weeping with joy after a rugby match. Canada sent its largest team to the Pan Am Games, including many of its top athletes, with the goal of finishing in one of the top two positions on the overall medal table, something it had not managed to accomplish in five decades.

As of Friday afternoon, Canada seemed certain of finishing second, to the United States.

“It’s not Canadian to crow,” said Toronto host committee chief executive Saad Rafi. “I don’t think it serves a purpose, because I think the only people who should crow should be the people of the region, who came out and supported the athletes.”

In the end, nobody seemed bothered by the fact many countries — including the U.S. — did not send their top athletes. There was no Usain Bolt, no Michael Phelps. Many of the athletes who competed in Toronto will not be seen on the Olympic stage next summer.

That only helped the Canadians, who had a deluge of medals to celebrate. Ellie Black, the 19-year-old gymnast from Halifax, entered five events and won five medals, and three of them were gold. Kia Nurse, another 19-year-old, had 33 points in the women’s basketball gold medal game, helping Canada win its first title in a major international event.

The basketball team played in front of a packed arena. Gymnastics was sold out. Even the artistic roller-skating — yes, that is a medal sport — sold out two nights of competition at Exhibition Place: “This is the surrealest experience for me,” American skater Courtney Donovan said.

“It increases the profile of athletes that are high-performance athletes, not professional athletes,” said Caroline Assalian, the chief sport officer at the Canadian Olympic Committee. “And it increases, hopefully, the profile of sport.”

Some venues, though, seemed to have a lower profile. Surprisingly, the first major night at track and field unfolded in front of a stadium that was only half-full. Nikkita Holder, a Canadian hurdler, was dismayed: “The crowd isn’t as big as I would have wanted.”

There were other missteps, especially with internal transportation. A shuttle scheduled to return journalists from a venue in Barrie, Ont., seemed to vanish. Organizers scrambled a small fleet of vehicles to retrieve the stranded. A second bus, scheduled for a late-night departure after a baseball game in Ajax, never materialized, and some local reporters had to call in friends and favours to get home.

“I think this has been a very good test to see whether massive logistics can work in a city like Toronto, where people on a day-to-day basis are challenged by transportation,” said John Furlong, the former chief executive of the Vancouver Olympics host committee. “And it’s worked beautifully.”

That sentiment has prompted renewed speculation over Toronto’s potential aspirations as a candidate to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. Toronto Mayor John Tory has conceded in an interview with The Associated Press that a decision would have to be made “very quickly” on whether to join Boston, Paris, Rome, Budapest and Hamburg as a bid city.

The International Olympic Committee will announce the host for 2024 Games in 2017.

“No one in the IOC would doubt the city’s ability to host the Olympics, no one,” Furlong said this week, in an interview with National Post. “They never have. But whether they’ll give it to you is another question.”

An Olympic bid would be one obvious legacy of the Pan Am Games. The usefulness of facilities built for the Games — organizers built 10 venues, and they renovated 15 more — will be another. A third legacy might prove more difficult to monitor, unless it comes up around the breakfast table.

Olivia Harnett rides horses. Her mother, Victoria, took a bronze medal in dressage at the 1995 Pan Am Games. And still, rugby became a favourite. After the gold-medal games, Olivia attended a celebration at Canada House, which is a temporary white tent erected near the pool deck of a downtown Toronto hotel.

“There was about five or six of the guys,” her father said. “All five or six of them put their medals around her neck and stood there and took a picture with her. As a parent, that’s such a significant moment that you know has inspired somebody.”