The superfan
> DYLAN NAZARETH
The big score came in a flat, rectangular box last December. Dylan Nazareth had the package pegged as clothing, but when he pulled the gift from underneath the Christmas tree it felt curiously light.
Inside he found tickets to a Pan Am Games Canadian men’s basketball match — his third and most coveted pair of passes for what will be the biggest multi-sport event Canada has ever seen.
“I think I screamed a bit,” Dylan recalls. “And I hugged my parents.”
Dylan, 14, has been glued to the television for every summer and winter Olympic Games he can remember. He has followed the careers of amateur athletes who inspire him. He has watched them take the podium and bend their heads to accept bronze, silver and gold medals.
During Sochi 2014 he recorded the events that took place while he was sleeping and woke up at 5 a.m. to watch them before school. But that was all on TV. Now the self-proclaimed Pan Am Games superfan is eagerly awaiting his chance to see everything up close.
“I think it’s going to be a really exciting time to be in the city,” he says recently at his midtown Toronto home after returning from a school track and field match, at which he competed in a relay race (he also plays badminton and soccer).
Dylan, who just completed Grade 8 at Glenview Public School, knows that not everyone shares his enthusiasm. For years, critics of the Games have been grumbling about traffic chaos, construction and cost overruns. Some citizens have planned to escape the fuss and put their homes on the short-term rental market, though demand is reportedly low on Airbnb, and several dozen listings advertised as Games-handy rentals still sat unwanted on Craigslist in June. In a recent poll on thestar.com, readers who were asked what they are most looking forward to during the Games overwhelmingly chose the response “Nothing. Nothing at all!”
Dylan and other superfans are pretty blasé about this sort of attitude. Suzanne Sewell, a Toronto sport enthusiast who runs the Olympic Games fan site OHCanada Sports, sees the Pam Am Games as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“These aren’t just our up-and-comers; these are our Olympians,” says Sewell, 50. “You get to see how good someone could be. You could end up seeing the future Usain Bolt.”
Dylan, meanwhile, in addition to basketball, has tickets to Pan Am handball and badminton games, events he chose because they were interesting “but also affordable,” he says.
Dylan has a wealth of practical knowledge to offer about the Games. He knows you have to be 16 to volunteer, because he found out the hard way. (“Next event,” he says.) He knows about some of the more obscure and quirky events, such as roller figure skating.
Dylan is happy with the Pan Am itinerary he has chosen, but has one more wish: to see a Canadian women’s soccer match at the Games. He and a friend are planning to run a lemonade stand to raise their own money for tickets.
If it doesn’t work out, “I won’t be devastated or anything,” he says. “But if I get to see it, that would be pretty exciting.”