Five rings? Sure. But, first, our demands
So, let’s sum up. Canadians won big. The HOV lanes were not a catastrophe. The cost was momentarily forgotten, a summer daydream, a haze. The mayor thought Kanye West was Canadian. Nobody was impaled on the mascot. Good job, everyone.
Naturally, this has led Canadian Olympic Committee president Marcel Aubut to admit what everyone knew: He is going to push Canada to bid for the 2024 Olympics, against Paris and Rome and Hamburg and Budapest and probably Doha and Los Angeles. Mayor John Tory had said he was going to see how the Games proceeded before deciding, and presto, nobody died. Momentum, as people like to say, is building.
Partly, this is because Canada won so many medals that you couldn’t possibly keep track. We won medals with guns and bows and javelins and epees. We won medals that involved kayaks, canoes, pools, trampolines, wakeboards, water skis, roller skates, bikes, horses and sailboats.
We did this, of course, because we sent nearly 100 more athletes than the United States, who sent a B team, and Canada didn’t fool around. This Pan Am team included athletes responsible for 15 medals at the London Olympics, and remember, we only won 18 medals at the London Olympics. It was wonderful that all these Canadian athletes got to experience joy and victory at home. That doesn’t come around often. That’s awesome.
Some of them are headed for bigger
An Olympics is only worth it if it leaves your city better off than it found it, for a reasonable enough price.
things. Twenty-year-old Andre De Grasse won two golds, still hasn’t figured out how to start a race, and became the first Canadian to run a sub-10-second 100 and a sub-20-second 200. The baseball team won a weird, wonderful goldmedal final over the Americans. Canada’s women’s basketball team won the nation’s first gold medal in international basketball, ever, and 19-year-old Kia Nurse is a superstar. Canada’s men’s basketball team, missing the nation’s biggest stars, was a delightful band of silver-medal-winning misfit treasures, led by 18-year-old Kentucky commit Jamal Murray. Jamal Murray is gonna be a problem.
And people wanted to watch. CBC had to expand its television coverage, and was pilloried for not anticipating the demand. (If only their budget hadn’t been eviscerated by the government, right?) It turns out Canadians love to watch Canadians win, and the Pan Am Games were set up for Canadians to win. So between that, and traffic not being cataclysmic — or so I was told, because to be honest, like many too-sensible Torontonians I left town to spend time with my family — the feelings seem positive, just now.
So . . . after the indignity of losing to Atlanta and the inevitability of losing to Beijing, an Olympic bid could happen here again, people. And if this thing is going to creak and groan and somehow lift itself off the ground, we, as a city, are going to need a list of demands.
OK, first: The Downtown Relief Line. That subway project has been designated as a priority since Rob Ford was walking face-first into cameras.
If we get the Olympics, that should be a thing. Ernst & Young did a feasibility study on a 2024 Olympic bid last year, and this was infrastructure ask No. 1. Good.
(God forbid Toronto builds something we need without a global sports festival that would cost between $8.7-billion and $17.1-billion, per a 2013 city feasibility study, attached to it. Every Olympics goes over budget, and we would still need a true Olympic stadium, which as my colleague Dave Feschuk notes, sounds like an invitation to a publicly funded backdoor NFL stadium. Oh, and the true costs of the Pan Ams won’t be added up by the Sept. 15 bid deadline, apparently.)
Second: A data-driven transit system comprised of LRTs and subways that isn’t so simple that a dizzy 10-year-old could draw it from memory. Some projections have Toronto at nine million people by 2036. Even if you make every lane an HOV lane, this is going to be an issue.
Third: better food trucks. Why can’t I easily buy fish tacos from a truck on a downtown street? Pulled pork sandwiches? Japanese hot dogs? What is this, Atlanta?
While we’re at it: Better sports teams, a way for the Rogers Centre roof not to feel like an oppressive overarching industrial prison, fewer howling loons at city council, sane liquor regulations, and more fun. Toronto needs to loosen up, everywhere but in terms of Olympic bid projections.
Oh, and let’s not spend $400,000 on the mascot this time. Dead Raccoon, IKEA Monkey, Mike Myers playing three different characters, and throw the porcupine thing into the lake. Done.
But seriously: Olympics go wrong with bad leadership, and the Pan Ams were far from a perfect Games, budget-wise. An Olympics is only worth it if it leaves your city better off than it found it, for a reasonable enough price. If there’s a relevant level of government you trust not to screw that idea up, do tell.
We’re not winning 200 medals in 2024, and it would be insane to bid on an Olympics just because the COC heavily funded a giant Pan Am team, the thing wasn’t an organizational nightmare, and the golden afterglow seduced us. So give us what we want, or no deal. If Toronto’s going to go big, let’s try not to regret it. I mean, more than we usually do.