Lack of funds dooms track event
Annual meet cancelled as government grants dry up; troubling omen for Pan Ams
The Toronto International Track and Field Games have run out of money and out of time.
Meet officials confirmed Wednesday that this year’s edition of the event, scheduled for June 11 at Varsity Stadium, had been cancelled because of a shortage of financial support from both the provincial government and corporate sponsors.
Staging the meet last year cost $400,000, with roughly $125,000 of that money coming from the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport, says Athletics Ontario managing director John Craig.
But Craig says the provincial grant was paid under a program that provided three years of funding, and helped sustain the meet between 2011 and last year. With the Pan Am Games a year away, Athletics Ontario hoped the ministry would make an exception and approve an additional year of funding — but that never happened, leaving organizers with a budget gap they struggled to fill with additional corporate sponsorship.
“We were looking for some sustained funding to give us another year or two so that we could attract the kind of corporate sponsorship that would make the meet sustainable without government funding,” Craig said. “There’s not a lot of corporate dollars around, and Athletics Ontario has never had a property that was strong enough to put us in the same boardrooms with corporate Canada.”
In an email to the Star, the ministry said it had provided the meet with $375,000 over three years, the maximum duration allowable under the International Sport Hosting Program. The ministry says it encouraged Athletics Ontario to apply for grants under other ministry programs, but that the group decided not to pursue them.
Athletics Ontario established the meet in 2011 as part of Athletics Canada’s National Track League, a five-
“Toronto is a great market, but for some reason track and field has difficulty surviving there.” MAT GENTES ATHLETICS CANADA
meet series in cities from Halifax to Victoria, featuring athletes from Canada and abroad. While there was no formal partnership with the Pan Am Games, organizers hoped to create synergies with the event, using the growing buzz around the games to promote the track meet, then using the meet to gain exposure for Canadian athletes competing in Toronto next summer. Instead, after three moderately successful years, the meet fizzled. Its collapse might seem like a troubling omen for Pan Am organizers, who next summer will need track and field, set to take place in a new 12,500-seat stadium at York University, to anchor the second week of the games in terms of TV viewership and ticket sales. Pan Am officials declined to comment on the cancellation of the Toronto meet. But Athletics Canada spokesperson Mat Gentes feels the frustration of trying to keep the sport commercially viable in the nation’s largest city. Athletics Canada will issue a request for proposals later this year, hoping another city will step up and provide a fifth meet for the National Track League schedule, but he says Toronto was the ideal spot. “Toronto is a great market, but for some reason track and field has difficulty surviving there,” Gentes says. “Things get lost in Toronto. There’s a lot of pro sports, a lot of options for people and it’s hard to differentiate yourself.” In 2009 a newly-rebuilt and soldout Varsity Stadium hosted The Festival of Excellence, a nationally televised meet featuring several highwattage track stars, headlined by Jamaican sprint sensation Usain Bolt. But that meet was not organized by Athletics Ontario, which, aside from the NTL’s Toronto Meet, organizes and administers events at the club level.