The long and winding Pan Am road to Toronto2015
They are billed as the first fully ecologically friendly Games and the largest multi-sports Games ever held in Canada, with about twice as many athletes at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, and Hamilton will be home to its most popular event.
In most of the 41 member countries of the Pan American Sports Organization (PASO), the overseeing body of all Pan Am Games, soccer transcends sport and becomes a social and cultural identifier.
“It is our religion,” says one member of the local Hispanic community.
Sixteen soccer teams, representing a dozen different Pan Am nations, will play and stay in Hamilton during the Games, with the first kickoff at 11 a.m., Saturday, July 11.
It is somewhat fitting that a major segment of the Pan Am Games should come to Hamilton, since the city was clearly on the minds of some delegates to the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
In L.A., International Olympic Committee representatives from Latin America suggested that there be a competition for all countries in the Americas, like Hamilton’s 1930 British Empire Games had provided for the U.K. and its one-time colonies.
That was the pilot light for an Americas-only Games (which includes associated is- lands, and the Caribbean countries) and also began the Pan Am’s close association to the Olympic Games.
In Canada, for instance, bidding cities and the Pan Am/Parapan Am Games teams are vetted and approved by the Canadian Olympic Committee. And in 1988, the Pan Am Games added the five Olympic rings to its official flag. In contrast, the Commonwealth Games (née British Empire Games) has its own independent Canadian overseeing body.
As part of the 1937 Pan American Exposition in Dallas, American, Puerto Rican and Mexican athletes competed in some track and field, boxing, soccer and wrestling events and the program was called the Pan American Games. But it was small and unofficial and does not count as an official Pan Am Games.
But the participation was encouraging enough that another limited (boxing and track and field) Pan Am Games was scheduled for 1940 in Los Angeles Coliseum. It was postponed, but Olympic officials from individual countries still convened and the Pan Am Sports Conference (which eventually became PASO) was formed, and the inaugural Pan American Games were scheduled for Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1942.
The structure and charter of the Olympics was adopted and further linking the two sets of Games, the first PASC president was Avery Brundage, then International Olympic Committee vice-president, and later, the long-standing president of the IOC.
Canada and other Commonwealth countries were already at war and when the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought more countries from the Americas into the Second World War, the ’42 Games were cancelled. At the 1948 Olympics in London it was decided to reschedule the Pan Am Games’ debut to 1951 in Buenos Aires.
Twenty-one countries sent 2,513 athletes to compete in 18 different sports at Buenos Aires with host country Argentina running away with both the gold, and overall, medal standings, and the U.S. second.
Members of the Commonwealth of Nations weren’t eligible for the first Games, but Canada started competing at the second Games in 1955 at Mexico City, and has sent large teams ever since.
Canada and Mexico are the only nations to play host to the Pan Am Games three times, with Winnipeg hosting both the 1967 and 1999 Games before Toronto beat Lima, Peru and Bogota, Colombia in a November 2009 PASO vote. Seven months earlier, the Toronto bid had been formally approved on the same day by both Hamilton and Toronto city councils.
The bid for the Games for southern Ontario sprung from failed bids for the 1996 and 2008 Olympics, and the need to replace and improve Ontario’s outdated sports infrastructure. It is also regarded as a necessary part of Toronto’s CV for the next time it bids to host the Olympics.
It is a PASO rule that all 28 of the current Olympic sports can be played at the Pan Am Games, as well as optional sports that are popular throughout the Americas. The latter is how sports such as bowling get onto the roster.
Golf, which becomes an Olympic medal sport in Rio next year, will make its Pan Am Games debut here, as will C-1 canoeing events for women, women’s baseball, women’s rugby sevens and canoe slalom, the only Olympic discipline that has never been part of the Pan Ams. Men’s softball returns after being dropped in 2007 and 2011.
Despite its connection to the Olympics, the Pan Ams have suffered in recent years from larger countries not sending some of their top athletes, partly because it doesn’t fit into their training cycles for the Olympics. But Toronto2015 has been successful in negotiating with 19 sports, the most ever, to be direct or indirect qualifiers for Rio in 2016.
The Parapan Am Games did not get their official start until 1999 in Winnipeg, 39 years after the Paralympics started in Rome. They’ll run in Toronto from Aug. 8 to 15, one day longer than originally scheduled because of the increased interest in the Paralympic Movement, especially since its overwhelming success in London in 2012.
There were several attempts to form a Winter Pan Am Games but only one — at Las Lenas, Argentina in September 1990 — was ever held, and it was a disaster. It was warm, there was little snow, three (Canada, the U.S., Argentina) of the eight entering countries sent 80 per cent of the athletes, only three events, all in Alpine skiing, could be held and the Canadians and Americans won all 18 medals.
Planned Pan Am Winter Games at Buenos Aires in 1951, Lake Placid in 1959 and Santiago, Chile in 1993 were all scrubbed due to a severe lack of interest and the idea has died a quiet death.