Big Read: Legacies from Vancouver 2010 and Toronto 2015 paying dividends, with 2030 on the horizon
Vancouver 2010 and Toronto 2015 left legacies that will last for decades to come
Former Toronto Mayor David Miller still vividly remembers his experience at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal.
He still remembers watching Finnish runner Lasse Virén winning gold in the 10,000m event, running into East German rowers on the Montreal subway, and he still gets chills when he remembers being in the stadium for the ovation that Israeli athletes got during the opening ceremony – four years after terrorists killed eleven members of the Israeli delegation and a West German police officer at the 1972 Games in Munich.
He still remembers being one of several people chosen to run alongside the torch relay, carrying a smaller torch up Mount Royal, and he still remembers the “impossibly giant television screen” at the Olympic Stadium, one of the first of its kind.
“I've got 17-year-old eyes, and there's the Olympics, and there's this stadium, and there's a velodrome, and bikes go in circles incredibly fast…,” Miller recalled. “And there was Nadia Comăneci, and Greg Joy got a medal for Canada on the last day. Those are my memories.
“At its very, very best, sports – like great art and great music – can bring out the common humanity in everyone and it's a force to bring people together.” he said. “Somehow, the experience is about you and them. It's not just as a spectator, at its best sports involves both things. You get to be part of it too.”
This is the effect that sport can have on people. There are physical legacies that come with hosting a major sporting event – things like stadiums and other infrastructure – but the way that sports can make people feel, and bring people together, can’t be measured in dollar figures or in square feet.
Faster, higher, stronger
“The International Olympic Committee has the honour of announcing that the 21st Olympic Winter Games in 2010 are awarded to the city of … Vancouver.”
Those words from then-IOC President Jacques Rogge on July 2, 2003 changed Canadian sports forever. Beating Pyeongchang, South Korea (who would end up hosting the 2018 Winter Games) by just three votes, the result was mostly met with cheers across Canada. After hosting the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal and 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada was getting another shot at welcoming the world for one of the biggest sporting events on the planet.
“I was quite excited, it would have been [announced] a year after 2002, which was my first Paralympics. I think at the time, I probably didn't necessarily appreciate the magnitude of it,” said Para alpine skier Lauren Woolstencroft. “I grew up in Calgary, so I was pretty young in 1988, only six I think, when the Games were on. I didn't remember all the details, but remember it had been a pretty fun experience.”
The then-21-year-old skier, fresh off two gold medals in Salt Lake City in 2002, had also just graduated university. She had considered retiring to focus on her career, but the prospect of a home Paralympics in 2010 was too good to pass up on.
“It was just a complicated time to figure out what was beyond, but I think having the idea that it was going to be a home Games was pretty special and definitely motivated me to keep going,” she said. “I was working as well. So it was a lot of balancing between making sure I was still employed and making money to live, but then finding hours to train, so it was quite intense. We had such a fantastic team that organised all of that and did all that. I was the one who had to show up and do the work, which is hard, but I didn't have to focus on planning it. It was definitely very busy.”
After failing to win a gold medal on home soil at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal and the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary – the only host country ever to not win a single event (they did win 25 gold medals at the 1976 Summer Paralympics in Toronto, however) – there was a lot of weight on Canadian athletes’ shoulders to finally get it done in Vancouver.
There was an external pressure, especially for the athletes deemed Canada’s best medal hopes, always looming in the leadup to the Games. Boasting some of the top winter athletes in the world, that pressure is always on Team Canada, but it was multiplied many times over to win at home. Programs like Own The Podium, created to fund athletes and do exactly as its name suggests — maximise the number of medals won at home — were launched, and were important to ensure that Canadians were able to compete at their best.
The program was a major talking point in the leadup to 2010. Created in 2004, it had an immediate positive effect. The way Own The Podium operates is that it allocates money to the different Canadian National Sport Organisations (like Canada Soccer, Hockey Canada, and Swimming Canada, etc), with the funding varying based on which sports Own The Podium decides have the best medal potential.
“The funding is not specifically earmarked for individual athletes, it's about supporting the high-performance program of the National Sport Organisations so that they can develop and implement a number of key elements that are essential for athletes to be able to eventually get on the podium,” explained Own The Podium CEO Anne Merklinger, who has been in that role for about a decade. “Those key elements include the National Sport Organisation being able to hire world leading coaches and technical staff, a world leading daily training environment, optimal competition environment, sports science and sport medicine support, and research and innovation. So it's all of those areas that are components of the sport’s high performance plan that we provide a funding recommendation for.”
The program has obvious benefits on the field of play – athletes are able to maximise their potential. But along with that increased funding comes increased pressure, especially when Canada was trying to overcome that hurdle of never winning gold at home before.
“I know there was a lot of pressure in the media about that first gold medal. I didn't feel that pressure within, I think it was just an artificial pressure that we hear from people,” said freestyle skier Alexandre Bilodeau, who would end up winning Canada’s historic first gold medal at Vancouver 2010 in the men’s moguls competition.
“The pressure of winning for me came more from me than the media. I knew I had maybe a chance for the first gold medal but it's not something you control because I was the second day, I could have been the second week and I wouldn't have any chance, so for me it's just a timing thing and I wasn't putting any energy into it.”
Entering Vancouver as one of Canada’s medal hopes after winning the 2009 overall moguls title on the World Cup circuit, he delivered on Cypress Mountain, skiing to a final score of 26.75, beating second place by a narrow 0.17 points. The scenes of him celebrating with his older brother Frédéric, who has cerebral palsy, are one of the lasting memories from the 2010 Olympics for many people.
“It's unreal to just spend time with your family and in your own country. Just living the experience of having just won the Olympics, it's an unreal feeling to just share that with your family,” Bilodeau said.
While he didn’t know most of them personally, the more than 20,000 fans that piled into BC Place the next day for the medal ceremony, and the thousands more celebrating from coast to coast, were right there with him.
“It gives me goosebumps still to just have a flashback… [being] on that podium, walking on, and when you hear ‘Olympic champion’, it gets to you,” he added. “And then you see the Canadian flag rising with like 20,000 people singing O Canada, and at home…. It's something very special.”
Long track speed skater Christine Nesbitt, who won two gold medals at the Single Distance World Championships in Vancouver in 2009, a year ahead of the Games, felt that internal pressure, but also vividly remembers the external pressure as well.
“That was just pumped at us athletes all the time, whether people knew it or not, or whether it came from the media,” she said. “To me it felt like it was also coming internally from the Canadian Olympic Committee, but trying to make it positive like, ‘We're gonna do it.’ But it's also like ‘Freakin’ do it’, you know?”
Nesbitt would win gold for Canada in the women’s 1000m long track event, powering through after a tough start to win the Olympic title. Nesbitt had competed in the 500m event a few days earlier, which she says was a chance to get a feel for the crowd and the ice at the Richmond Olympic Oval before her preferred 1000m event.
She described the crowd at the 500m event as “insanely loud”, to the point where she had difficulty hearing the starter begin the race. Finishing in tenth place, Nesbitt was now aware of what to expect for the 1000m event, which she was undefeated in during the season heading into Vancouver 2010.
A slip on the starting line was enough to let doubts creep into her mind, but she recovered well – building up speed and closing in on Dutch skater Annette Gerritsen’s time.
“With half a lap to go, I was like, ‘I'm not on a good race here, I'm too far behind’, and I had a split second, which felt like a lifetime,” Nesbitt recalled. “I thought, ‘Well, I can either just give up and skate across the line and not win a medal … or I could finish the race, trying as hard as I could, and not win a medal, but at least I would at least know that it was what I had in the tank today.’ Luckily, I chose the latter and finished the race and somehow squeaked ahead of the leading time…. Two hundredths of a second, which is like two inches, it was apparently the closest margin in the history of that event for women.
“There was a lot going on mentally, but I guess one thing that stuck with me is that somebody once told me that you train for the Olympics to have the race of your life and to put the perfect race together, that's the goal, but ultimately, you want to be able to win on your bad days. And so as much as it wasn't a satisfying race in itself, it's really cool to think that I had been winning that race by over half a second leading into that season, which is a big margin in that race, and to know that on a bad day, I was still able to win.
“That's pretty cool. It was a weird moment to win a gold medal but with a bad race, it wasn't like everybody tells you it’s supposed to happen.”
In the end, Canada did own the podium. They walked away with a then-record of 14 gold medals, and 26 in total. Two weeks of sporting excellence later, it was clear to see that Canada had executed their plan for a successful Olympics, and followed it with a successful Paralympics, where they again finished near the top of the medal count, winning 10 golds and 19 medals overall.
Five of those gold medals came from Woolstencroft, who swept all five of the downhill standing events.
“For me, personally, performance-wise it was great,” she said. “That was obviously very rewarding to do all the work and then have a really successful outcome. It was a very exhausting, very taxing, very intense 10-day period. Probably one of the most intense 10-day periods of my life. Maybe not compared to having a child, but a very intense time period.
“Getting that first one under my belt really gave me a lot of confidence, and then the last one, being that it was over, and then also getting all five was such an accomplishment.”
Woolstencroft would be named Canada’s flag bearer for the closing ceremony.
“To be able to do that and lead the team was obviously such an honour. The experience itself was definitely unique,” she said. “The closing ceremony was in Whistler, so we had a big parade through town. A really fun experience, certainly something that only a few athletes get to do, so I feel honoured that I got to do it.”
One of the biggest victories from Vancouver, however, may have been away from the ski hills and ice rinks. The Olympics and Paralympics brought Canadians together like few things did before it. There were seas of red across Vancouver, but the celebrations stretched to all corners of the country. People were largely united by a common goal, to showcase Canada to the world, and to do it through sport.
It wasn’t uncommon for renditions of O Canada to break out in the streets, or for huge crowds of people to show up to medal ceremonies like Bilodeau's. It's impossible to forget Jon Montgomery's victory march through the streets of Whistler after winning men's skeleton gold, and him drinking from a pitcher of beer with a crowd of people walking along with him.
“My parents were on the SkyTrain travelling somewhere for one of the events, and it was after I won my gold medal,” said Nesbitt. “Someone recognized my dad from the TV and the people congratulated him and my mum, and then apparently the train burst into singing O Canada. That's the power of the Games. It was really cool to hear that it was really, really embraced in Vancouver.”
Vancouver 2010 is remembered fondly for being an event that truly drew people in from across Canada. Celebrating sports, and doing it with friends, family, and total strangers, brought people closer to one another. It was everything the Olympics should be, but an emotion it had sometimes failed to capture at some prior Games.
“It was magical. It really connected the community, it brought people together. I think that's what sport does,” added Kyle Shewfelt, who won an Olympic gold medal in gymnastics for Canada in Athens in 2004. Shewfelt was in Vancouver doing some work with sponsors, and took in a lot of the atmosphere. “I think when people are together at that moment when Sidney Crosby scores that goal, and everybody jumps up and screams simultaneously, everybody at home is watching it on TV at that exact same time doing the same thing. There's a power in that, there's an energy and a momentum.
“You could walk down the street and make 10 new friends so easily, because people were wearing Canadian flags, and people were happy. There's value to that – people never forget those moments.”
Even more than a decade later, the pride that some Canadians feel from those Games remains strong. Volunteers are crucial to any major event, and the Vancouver 2010 memories are still visible.
“The volunteers are so kind and nice. I still see people wearing their Vancouver 2010 jackets when I walk into Shoppers Drug Mart, there's people wearing that in pride,” said Shewfelt. “The Olympics is something that brings people together. It's a commonality, no matter where you're from, no matter what your values are, no matter what your religion is. Sport is something that breaks down those barriers and brings us together.”
Seeing positive role models, like Montgomery for example, can have a profound effect on the athletes of tomorrow. Seeing people compete, be celebrated, and – if you’re lucky – win, can inspire people to take part in sports. At both the elite level and just recreationally, taking part in sports can have a number of benefits.
Over the years since Calgary 1988, there have been a large number of athletes coming through the city, and just 12 years since Vancouver 2010, the effects of hosting an Olympics and Paralympics have been felt, especially in communities like Whistler which can now benefit from having a state-of-the-art sliding track in their backyard.
One of the athletes inspired by Vancouver 2010 is Grace Dafoe. After watching Jon Montgomery win gold in Vancouver, the Calgary native decided to try the sport for herself, and in the years since has become a member of Canada’s national skeleton team.
“I grew up watching the Olympics. I was a figure skater, so for Vancouver 2010 I was heavily focused on watching figure skating, but I definitely was starting to have my eyes open to what other sports were really out there besides hockey and the quintessential Canadian sports,” said Dafoe, who was a teenager during Vancouver 2010. “I really don't remember knowing what skeleton was until Jon Montgomery won the gold medal in Vancouver 2010. I don't remember exactly the moment watching the event, but I remember watching the medal ceremony for skeleton and I'm sure I watched it like I watched every event in Vancouver 2010.
“I was interested in trying skeleton or bobsled, but it turns out bobsledders are six feet tall and I'm only like 5’7, so skeleton seemed like a better fit, and so I went that direction and reached out to try in Calgary, and got that information through someone my dad knew – their son was on the Olympic team. He had not qualified for 2010 but was on the national team and was gearing up for 2014, so I got the information on how the sport works and how to get into it and stuff like that.”
The Calgary sliding track closed indefinitely in March 2019 due to a lack of funding for necessary upgrades on the aging track, leaving the newer track in Whistler as the only facility in Canada for Canadian bobsleigh, skeleton and luge athletes.
“I spend a ton of time in Whistler. I spent about 10 weeks out there last year, I call it my second home because if I'm not in Europe or at one of the two American tracks, or resting at home, I'm definitely out in Whistler training,” said Dafoe, who is yet to make it to the Olympics, but has been competing for Canada on the developmental circuit for several years now. “[I take] daily walks to the village, you look at the medal plaza with the Olympic rings, and I think it's so cool to think that all the Whistler events, that's where the medal ceremonies are held.
“I was actually out there for the 10 year anniversary in February of 2020, I was out there training and we held a little mini-watch party and stuff up at the Whistler Sliding Centre as well. It's definitely cool to be to now also have spent so much time in stuff that has directly benefited because of the Olympic legacy. I fell into it in Calgary, obviously, which was the ’88 legacy. But what's continued on in my career is the 2010 legacy.”
Infrastructure legacies from Vancouver
The Whistler Sliding Centre is one of several examples of a legacy from Vancouver 2010 that has continued to benefit athletes and the communities they’re from.
After achieving its goals at Vancouver 2010, the success of Own The Podium was recognized. It has kept on funding Canadian athletes with the best medal potential, and been extended to help summer athletes as well.
“The host organising committee and partners involved in Vancouver 2010 knew that the games would only be successful if the team was successful,” added Merklinger. “That was really the beginning of Own The Podium. When the government of Canada saw the success of the team in Vancouver, they sustained the funding, and also added funding for summer sports as well. And so since then the funding has really been stable. There's even been incremental funding available for summer team sports. And for the next gen, which is really athletes with evidence of medal potential eight years out.
“Up until 2014 It was only focused on athletes with medal potential four years out. So that was a significant boost in our mandate as an organisation to work with national sport organisations that had athletes with evidence of medal potential in the zero- to eight-year horizon.”
Innovation is at the heart of the program, and it is constantly evolving. As new technology and equipment is available, OTP tries to ensure that the best Canadian athletes have the best access to realise their potential. Things like data analytics are also helping them come up with new ways of deciding who may be an athlete with medal potential.
“We're very fortunate to have a strong partnership with Canadian Tire bank,” said Merklinger. “They are a credit-card risk company and data analytics is the core of their business, and we partnered with them five years ago. They have created a sport data analytics team that works with our technical team. And so they do two things: they work individually with the National Sport Organisations to help those sports identify which athletes have evidence of medal potential, and to track their progress as they prepare for the games that they're preparing for.
“And then secondly, they help us identify across all sports, how are we doing as we prepare for games, where do we rank relative to other countries, and then individually on a sport-by-sport basis, validating those athletes that that we have identified as having evidence of medal potential, and they give us that evidence. They give us the opportunity to make really evidence-informed decisions, so that partnership has been extremely valuable and we have extended that for another few years.”
That is just one example of how a legacy of innovation has come out of Vancouver 2010. The Games also had an emphasis on being environmentally friendly and innovative to create lasting impacts that some other Olympic and Paralympic hosts had very much failed to do.
The Richmond Olympic Oval is the prime example of that. The site of the long track speed skating events, the oval wasn’t built to host two weeks of competition and lay dormant for years to come, something that has been a major criticism of the Games for decades. Built in Richmond, BC, just outside Vancouver, the venue was built with the future use in mind, rather than building it to specifically be a speed skating oval.
The facility is now a community centre, home to multiple hockey rinks, basketball and volleyball courts and running tracks, among other things. It’s used by local amateur athletes and people wanting to stay fit, but is also used as a facility for elite athletes, including Tokyo 2020 bronze medallist racewalker Evan Dunfee and members of the women’s volleyball and men’s field hockey teams, among others. It is also accessible and wheelchair rugby is among several sports played regularly at the venue.
Christine Nesbitt, who won her aforementioned 1000m gold medal at the venue, now sits on the board of directors for the facility.
“You plan it for its long-term use, and you transition it to that two or three week use, and then go back so that’s amazing, the impact that makes on the design and the planning and the team, you end up building around that facility,” said Nesbitt. “Honestly, speed skating facilities for the Olympics have been a bit of a disaster in a lot of places. Torino, from my understanding, has not been well utilised after the games, Sochi I don't know if there's been a single international competition there after those games, maybe the year right after. I know Nagano we still raced in the ’98 Games oval, but it's a behemoth to heat, it's this giant cement building. And I think there has been a struggle to maintain that and to fund it properly.
“It's a really smart move to ensure that such a large building actually doesn't stay a speed skating oval, we already have a national training centre. Canada doesn't have the popularity of the sport or the volume of people to necessarily justify an oval so close to the Calgary one. It just seems like they made good decisions to make the best use of that space long term.”
The facility was also smartly designed to have the ability to retrofit it and bring back the ice skating track, should it ever be needed for another Olympics or major speed skating event, although it has yet to be done.
“Once the games ended in 2010, they removed a lot of the bleachers and the stadium seating that they had installed for the Olympics, the floor that is the official long track speed skating course is still there today,” said Greg Huzar, the program manager of the Olympic Experience museum at the oval. “In the event we are ever successful in having another bid for the Olympic Games, the oval is ready to go as an existing venue, all we would have to do is convert the floor back to an ice skating surface.
“The Olympic Games coming to Vancouver allowed local governments to really take on some large-scale infrastructure projects that otherwise may not necessarily have come to light if the games weren't coming. Projects like the Richmond Olympic Oval, where we may not have otherwise had a five-acre venue in Richmond, and that planning process really allowed us to not only contribute to the games, but also plan for a legacy impact for our local communities.”
Huzar’s Olympic Experience exhibit, located in the Richmond Oval, is a space where people can get up close and personal with artefacts from Vancouver 2010 and countless other Olympics. There are torches and medals from a number of Olympics, as well as interactive areas where people can sit inside a bobsleigh or a Paralympic sit-ski, hold a shot put, or walk on a balance beam.
The exhibit is especially popular among school children, who can learn about sports and the legacy of a major event in their community in a way that the generations before them couldn’t.
“Kids are often visual learners, and so having artefacts from the Olympics that you can actually put in front of children, it really makes the experience so much more real and it allows us to connect the games right to the local community,” explained Huzar. “When you're watching the Olympics on TV, for example, they're in Tokyo or they're in Beijing, they can seem very far away, and that Olympic dream can seem somewhat intangible. Having the Olympic museum right in our community and speaking directly to students, we can plant that seed in their minds that you too can be an Olympian if you're dedicated, if you put in the effort, you can find yourself on that world stage as well.
“It's extremely popular with teachers and students coming to see the rings and hold the torches. The Olympic rings are really one of those images that stand out in everyone's mind, you can read them in any language because it's such a strong symbol. So no matter what language you're speaking, you understand what those rings stand for.”
Those rings, and the event that comes along with them, helped facilitate a number of other infrastructure projects that the city needed as well. The Sea to Sky highway that connects Vancouver with Whistler was an important one, as was the Canada Line, a new line on the SkyTrain transit system. Like the Richmond Oval, the Hillcrest Centre – site of the curling events during the Olympics and wheelchair curling during the Paralympics – has also been turned into a community centre for people in the city.
British Columbia hosted a successful Olympics and Paralympics, and they had done it the right way – leaving a lasting legacy on athletes and the host communities for years to come, both sporting and otherwise. Vancouver 2010 set a precedent for future multi-sport events around the world, including a rapidly approaching one a few provinces over.
Toronto 2015: smaller scale, but similar results
In November 2009, David Miller is one of the members of a Canadian delegation in Guadalajara, Mexico. The group, led by the Ontario provincial government and the City of Toronto, is awaiting the result of their bid to host the 2015 Pan Am Games and Parapan Am Games.
They were up against Lima, Peru and Bogota, Colombia in the final round of the bidding process. Toronto had missed out on several opportunities to host the Olympics previously, including official bids to host the 1996 and 2008 Summer Games – while the Pan Ams were not as big of an event, they provided as big of an opportunity.
“The night before, there was a formal dinner, and I was seated at one side of the head of the Pan Am Games organisation, and the Premier on the other side,” recalled Miller, who was the Mayor of Toronto from December 2003 to November 2010. “I was chatting to him and he said to me, ‘Look David, you've won. Don't tell anybody. You don't need to lobby me. But I need to talk to the guy on my right because he's got all the money.’
“So that was how I found out we’d won, the night before. I had to bite my tongue and not tell anyone in the delegation, the next day, when it was announced, there was a lot of jubilation. We respected a lot of things that you should respect in a bid of that sort – inclusion, reuse of facilities so that they're not wasted, lots and lots of things, it was a very good bid.”
Toronto had won fairly comfortably in the end, with 33 of the 51 votes. Lima, who went on to host in 2019, was second with 11 votes and Bogota finished third with seven.
There were now just five and a half years for Toronto to prepare for the Games. It would be the first major summer multi-sport games held in Canada since the 1999 Pan Am Games in Winnipeg, and the first one ever held in Canada’s largest city.
“Athletes loved it, they really, really loved it. This is one of the reasons to do a bid like this, for an event like the Pan Am Games, which is world standard, but doesn't require all the skullduggery that goes into an Olympic bid, and doesn't leave the white elephants behind that the Olympics sometimes does,” Miller said. “The athletes were thrilled because they were going to get to perform at a world standard in front of their family and friends, it mattered so much to them. It just really mattered to their hearts, and their motivation, and their souls. That was really, really moving.
“There was lots of excitement in Toronto in certain quarters, the Star and the Sun newspapers were really behind it. I'd say most people were probably like, ‘Oh, we're gonna have the Pan Am Games? Okay, what time are we having dinner?’, but the day we won it in Guadalajara was incredibly exciting. There was a ton of media, we were actually doing media over early versions of something like Zoom back to Toronto, because people were really, really keen for that moment.”
Toronto, like Vancouver, needed some upgrades to its infrastructure. A new streetcar line, housing that would begin as the athlete’s village before being sold, and a train link from Pearson International Airport to downtown Toronto were all on the cards, and would be built over the next few years.
Holding a major sporting event is a good chance to unlock some extra money from the various levels of government. It’s not ideal for municipal politicians or the people who are affected by the infrastructure, but having a deadline, and pressure to succeed with the world watching, can twist people’s arms.
“Infrastructure matters, regardless of whether you have a major event, and you need to build it. What matters is are you building the right infrastructure for the people of the city, are you doing that in a way that is fast enough to meet their needs, and in a way that's financially affordable,” Miller said. “I think most infrastructure that is lasting and meaningful is built for that reason, not for an event. However, it is true to say that when there's a deadline, like an event, it does bring people's attention to it.”
Many people agree with Miller that countries, provinces, or cities shouldn’t need to host such a huge event if a city needs it. It was true in Calgary in 1988, however, just as it was in Vancouver in the decade prior.
“I'm not saying it's right, I would argue that it's probably not right, this is the way it is. But if you look at examples, like Calgary, and Vancouver 2010 especially, they were very effective at getting stuff built, and also getting stuff built quickly,” added Matt Elliott, publisher of the City Hall Watcher newsletter in Toronto. “The cities can be very, very slow when it comes to building stuff. Transit is a great example. In Toronto we've been talking about the Scarborough subway or Scarborough transit for the entire time I've been covering City Hall, and I still don't think we're quite at the point where a shovel has actually gotten in the ground for the Scarborough transit project, so that's 10 plus years.
“If you look at the transit that was built for Vancouver 2010, that would probably go down as one of the fastest builds that we've seen for transit in Canada, and that was entirely because they wanted to make sure it was done in time for that opening ceremony that they could say when the world came to Vancouver, ‘Hey look, our transit isn't objectively terrible, we got this shiny new thing’.”
The advantage of hosting a Pan Am Games instead of an Olympics is the smaller scale. Instead of needing to build a new Olympic Stadium, Toronto was able to re-use a lot of existing venues for the Pan Am Games. The Rogers Centre was the site of the opening and closing ceremonies, the Mattamy Athletic Centre at the former Maple Leaf Gardens was used for basketball, and the rugby sevens competition was played at BMO Field, to use a few examples. This was a cost-effective, environmentally friendly way of hosting the Games, and rejuvenated some facilities that needed a facelift.
“I think we did a good job to set a good precedent on the new things that were built, like the housing was repurposed for people's housing, so that was very positive,” said Miller, who is also passionate about stopping climate change, having since worked as the president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund Canada and a director at the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. “I believe it's increasingly important, several of the most recent Olympic bids like Los Angeles, Paris, and so forth, have made very strong green commitments. I hope they address things like reusing something is much more green than building a new thing, and giving it new life by improving it.
“It's clear from our experience with the Pan Ams that you can do things in a way that creates that legacy. On the other hand, there are some pretty bad examples of Olympics and World Cups with white elephants, and you just think, you know, what a waste of money. Why was this necessary?”
Some sporting venues were built as Toronto needed to meet the requirements to host, and cities in southern Ontario built new state-of-the-art facilities to house several sports. What separates Toronto 2015 from events like the 2016 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro, however, was a plan and a commitment to ensuring that anything built would be used for years to come, and not just by elite athletes.
There are two key examples from the Toronto Pan Am and Parapan Am Games that have backed up this idea: the Mattamy National Cycling Centre, a velodrome in Milton, and the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre in Scarborough. Both filled a void – Toronto didn’t have a velodrome or an elite international-grade swimming pool.
The pool was based in a place that Miller described as an area that “had well below desirable access to public facilities.” The pool, used as a competition venue for a few weeks, has since hosted major events like the Swimming Canada Olympic trials, and in between has been a training centre for elite swimmers, as well as a community centre for the general public.
“It was an area with a lot of people living in low-income neighbourhoods where the kids deserve the chance and really needed facilities,” said Miller. “So we fought really, really hard. That facility was needed somewhere for the Pan Am Games, and to have it there where it was most needed, I'd say that's an example of something that was really successful.
“I'm a bit proud of that, because I had to personally fight for it, because several times we almost lost it to being built outside of Toronto, and I had to use all the weight of the mayor's office to make sure it happened. I think that's the most important thing, I should be prouder of the legacy of the pool in Scarborough than BMO Field (which was built during Miller’s tenure as mayor for the 2007 FIFA U-20 World Cup and since used by Toronto FC), because it's going to be a legacy for generations of young people and older people who are recreational athletes or just using recreation facilities for the health benefits.
“The original agreement (for BMO Field) required the field to be used for community use during the offseason, and MLSE was required to put a bubble on it because it was originally artificial turf. I think that was a really good inclusion, we were thinking, ‘How do we ensure the community gets benefit from this, not just elite athletes.’”
One swimmer with fond memories of the pool in Scarborough is Paralympic superstar Aurélie Rivard. The Quebec native, two years after winning five medals (three silvers and two bronze) at the 2013 IPC Swimming World Championships in Montreal, followed it up with a huge performance in Toronto.
“In 2013, we had worlds in Montreal, and I put a ton of pressure on myself because I wanted to win a race. All my family, half my hometown, was there, it was a big deal,” recalled Rivard. “But I put so much pressure on my shoulders and ended up failing. I didn't actually fail in the eyes of the public, but to me, I had so much expectations of myself, and I didn't manage the pressure well, so when the Pan Ams came around, I wanted to switch that mentality.”
The Parapan Am Games weren’t even the priority for Rivard that summer, the 2015 World Championships in Glasgow were, where she won four medals, two of them gold. Heading into Toronto 2015, she had entered races she never even swam competitively before, but walked away with an incredible seven medals, six of them gold and the other silver in home waters.
“My job was done, whatever I had to prove, the pressure that I put on myself for that summer was over, it was for Worlds,” she added. “Pan Ams came around and it was just kind of like a bonus, an extra meet, an experience. I was heading there and me and my coaches were like, ‘It would be kind of cool if we medal in each event.’ Like I swam events that I've never swam in my life.
“And it was the first and last time, like the 100m fly, the 100m breast, I just wanted to really make the most of it and try to see what I could do after a full summer of racing. I just removed the pressure on my shoulders and I was like ‘just have fun with this’, and I ended up having really good races, plus the gold medals, my first world record as well on the last day. Canadians were there, it was just so much fun.”
Rivard had one Paralympic medal before Toronto 2015, a silver medal at London 2012 as a teenager, and since then she’s won nine more – four at Rio 2016 and five at Tokyo 2020 – increasing her tally to five gold, three silver and two bronze.
She says that the awareness that hosting Para sport competitions can bring to a country is crucial. Rivard herself is one of Canada’s top Paralympians, and should be for years to come.
“I feel like nobody really knew what the Paralympics were before in Canada. To me there was a before and there was an after – before we got mixed up with the Special Olympics a lot, with paraplegic, people didn't actually quite know what it was,” said Rivard. “They knew it was different, but that’s it. I feel like it just helped for the general public to put faces on the movement to see what we could do and what we could accomplish. They realised that in the end, we're athletes, we're doing the same thing as our Olympian or able-bodied colleagues.
“I had so much attention, I think that's kind of where it started from the media, local media. I remember walking outside the pool and people stopping me to get pictures and wanting to see my medals. It was like the first time we were really seen as Canadian athletes, not disabled people who tried to compete in the sport, and ever since. I feel like we just got people interested and just aware that we are here and what we do.”
That was a continuation of the successes in the same regard from Vancouver 2010 a few years prior. Representation matters, especially for young people who can see people like them on TV or in the media. The Paralympics and Parapan Am Games did a lot for that movement in Canada in an area that was lacking before.
Woolstencroft, who after retiring has done some television analysis during the Winter Olympics, has been on all sides of the TV screen.
“I think we saw in 2010 people were understanding what the Paralympics were, understanding what accessibility means,” she said. “I think it does a lot for just general awareness, and then for people with disabilities, having that venue to look up to people having success in sport, is really important. It’s a big deal and media coverage now is so much better than it was.
“We had great media coverage in 2010, but in the years prior to that, when it wasn't a home Games, we had minimal media coverage, whereas if you look now at the Games in Beijing, you can catch the sports live on the web. None of that stuff was available back then, so it makes a big difference for sure. For the athletes and for just the sport in general.”
The velodrome in Milton is another legacy venue from Toronto 2015 that stands out, and has greatly altered the future of the sport of track cycling in this country. It has become the central base for Cycling Canada’s track program, and has hosted UCI (the global governing body) track cycling World Cup and World Championships events. It’s the first, and currently only, UCI-regulated class-1 indoor velodrome in the country.
In short, it’s a world class facility in a country that didn’t previously have one.
Perhaps more importantly, it has become a community centre in Milton, and regularly hosts local, non-cycling events. “It's important to recognize that high performance sports facilities are the same as community facilities,” said Adam van Koeverden, the Olympic kayaking champion turned Milton MP. “The Velodrome is a very good example. Sure, it is a high-performance cycling track. But there's also a walking track where seniors, and new parents with strollers, regularly walk for exercise. There's a gathering space in the middle where in better times when you could gather in large numbers convocations would occur for some of the high schools and big banquets would happen there.
“There's pickleball tournaments. I was at one of the biggest Special Olympics festivals ever at the Velodrome. So good sports facilities are for everybody and everything, not even exclusively just for physical activity and recreation. But they are there as an asset for everybody in the community to benefit from.”
Van Koeverden competed at Toronto 2015, winning a bronze medal in the K-1 1000m event. As someone who grew up in Oakville, getting the chance to compete at home in the twilight of his career was something he looks back on fondly.
“I was living in Toronto at the time and I got to walk home from the opening ceremonies, which is a pretty cool experience,” he said. Racing at a racecourse in Welland where I've been racing since I was a kid in an international competition was really special. I look back on that as being a real gift to Southwestern Ontario, in the sense that so many facilities got purpose built for the 2015 Pan Am's, but not just sports facilities.”
A local athlete that has benefitted from the velodrome in Milton is Michael Foley. The He competed for Canada at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics in track cycling, finishing fifth in the team pursuit event, but had never ridden a bike around a velodrome prior to the track in Milton being built.
“I had a friend whose dad was into cycling. So I've done a little bit of mountain biking before, like a lot of kids,” recalled Foley. “We knew the velodrome was being built, I watched it go up. There’s actually a picture of me and my friend in front of it when it was still just a pile of dirt basically. I think at first the prospect of having a velodrome got us really excited about it, and then once it was built it just opened up so many connections for me and opportunities.
“I met my first coach, Steve Bauer, who’s a bit of a legend in Canadian cycling. All the things that I've been able to achieve wouldn't have happened without the velodrome being built. Seeing athletes at the Pan Am Games is sort of what lit the fire for me, because I said to myself that I could do that as well. I'm not sure how it works for everybody, but anecdotally for me, seeing people race is what brought me into the track and focused on setting goals and stuff like that. So I think it's hard to try to put a value on it.”
The track is also the home training base to Kelsey Mitchell and Lauriane Genest, who won gold and bronze medals, respectively, at the most recent Olympics in Japan. Foley says that Canada’s recent surge in track cycling success is “almost entirely” attributed to the velodrome being built.
“Obviously there's lots of people working hard in the background, but for example, the team that did so well in Rio and came away with a bronze, those girls have been working hard at it for many years,” added Foley. “All the performances since then, since we've had time to establish a training base and work from a centralised location for a while now…. I think that's what made whatever we achieved in Tokyo possible as well.”
Since 2015, the question has again been asked. Is Toronto ready to bid again for the Summer Olympics? Maybe a joint bid between Toronto and Montreal?
“I think it's possible. I think the IOC needs to change the way that they expect this bidding process to go, and the budget stuff needs to be worked out, because if you look at what it takes right now to host a Summer Olympics, it is just such an enormous expense,” said Elliott. “I think if Toronto could get to the point where they're not demanding that the city build a 70,000-person stadium somewhere, but just saying we can just use the renovated Rogers Centre for the opening ceremonies or something like that.”
Former Toronto mayor Miller also said it's possible. “The legacy of the Pan Am Games, the legacy of the Women's World Cup, and the legacy of the Under-20 World Cup in Toronto is to demonstrate that Toronto can hold international sporting events and multi-sport events and do it exceptionally well,” he said. “Canada has a good reputation, because Calgary and Vancouver Olympics were considered to be successes. You will have to build, you'll have to put a few billion dollars in, and whether people decide that's worth it or not, that'll be up to the people in Toronto. If the people wanted to spend billions on new facilities, we'd be in with a chance.”
That bid, should it ever happen, likely wouldn’t be for many years to come. The Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Committees, and other stakeholders across the country have a potential bid for the 2030 Winter Olympics to worry about.
Lessons learned from Calgary’s 2026 bid, and the potential 2030 bid
A few days before the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics kicked off in February, the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) and Canadian Paralympic Committee (CPC) announced that they will be exploring the possibility of hosting the 2030 Winter Games, again in Vancouver.
The bid for the Games would be led by the four First Nations in the area – the Lil̓wat7úl (Líl̓wat), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations, the first Indigenous-led bid of its kind. Plans for the potential bid are in its infancy, but Vancouver is expected to be a strong contender due to its modern facilities that can still be reused, as well as its commitment to being an environmentally friendly and socially conscious bid.
The fact that the bid in Indigenous-led, although what exactly that means is still unclear, is being received well. With anything related to an Olympic bid, there must also be an importance placed on waiting until more information is available, and also treating information with a level of positive scepticism.
“I think, and I hope, that the International Olympic Committee would see that as quite a unique approach and see the value in that and I hope that the four nations are able to, in their own way, express that to the importance and the significance of them leading this bid to the IOC and all their delegates,” said Nesbitt. “There's a huge gap between reconciliation in sport, and I think that there can be a lot of tokenism in the Canadian sports system.
“I'm glad that the COC and the CPC are on board, but I hope that a deepened understanding and appreciation of reconciliation really impacts those organisations, and in turn that they challenge the rest of high-performance sport in Canada, all the national sport federations and the provincial level and the club level as well.”
The idea for a 2030 bid comes just a few years after a bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics was shut down by the public in Calgary. Mixed signals in the communication about the bid, and doubts about funding threatened and ultimately derailed the bid. A plebiscite in November 2018 gave Calgarians the final say. The question was simple – do you support the 2026 bid, or are you against it? The “no” side won, with 56.4% of the votes compared to the 43.6% who supported it.
Those who benefitted from the 1988 legacy believe that it was a missed opportunity to host the world, and rejuvenate the facilities that benefitted them. “It still stings, and a lot of us put a lot of effort into trying to do it. It got sidetracked and it got derailed by politics, which is really unfortunate, because I really feel that Calgary could have done an amazing job of hosting the Games,” said Shewfelt, a Calgarian who benefitted from the 1988 Olympic legacy by attending the city’s National Sport School.
“The reason why I say it's a missed opportunity is because there's some things that needed to happen in Calgary, that are still going to happen, but Calgarians and Calgary taxpayers are going to be on the hook for actually more than we would have if we actually would have had the Games. We would have gotten more from the Games for less financially, we would have had investment directly into our city from the Alberta provincial government and from the feds, so there would have been money coming in to help us build the fieldhouse, to help us upgrade and update the Olympic Oval, the bobsled track, some infrastructure projects.
“There were some flaws in the plan and the communications, and they went to a plebiscite because of politics, and there was half the city council that didn't want it and half that did and there's internal fighting, and it just got messy. People got to do an early vote in the plebiscite, and then throughout the two weeks after that early vote was when the message really got flipped, and people started to see the positive side that this could have been, but the negative rhetoric had already planted itself.”
When the bid failed, it had a catastrophic effect on some of those 1988 venues. Some of the ski jumps at Canada Olympic Park were abandoned, as was the sliding track at the site. There’s a fear that letting the facilities in Calgary go unused for years will eventually make the temporary closure permanent.
“A good example of this is Milano Cortina 2026,” Dafoe, the Calgarian skeleton athlete, explained. “They let that track lay dormant for 15-20 years or so, so now it's costing them like $50 million to completely overhaul it. It's cheaper to keep investing in it and keeping it up then to completely let it go. I worry, that's what we're facing in Calgary and I was a big proponent of Calgary 2026.
“Olympic bids are very complicated,I learned a lot about that during Calgary 2026. But gearing up for Whistler 2030 I think the Western tracks have been kept up really well. The facilities are really great, but anytime that they're thinking about hosting another big event, the upgrades are only going to make it that much better and bring more people to also learn about our sport.”
Those 1988 facilities set the standard for what kind of impact good facilities can have on a country. The hope is that the facilities in Vancouver and Toronto will have a similar effect.
“We're more than 30 years past the Calgary Games and it's still a part of our legacy, still a part of our history, and there's still money kind of being drawn into the city because of that,” added Shewfelt.
We will never know what the 2026 Games at home may have looked like, they’ll take place in Italy instead. It will be 20 years after they last hosted a Winter Olympics, the same time frame that Canada’s next hope – the potential Vancouver 2030 Games – will have four years later. If those 2030 Games go ahead, the comparisons between the two are inevitable, and they will show that Vancouver is very much setting the precedent among recent Winter Games.
One thing is for certain: those who benefitted from Vancouver 2010 are putting their support behind the potential 2030 bid from an emotional perspective.
“I certainly hope that it does happen,” said Woolstencroft. “I'm perhaps biased, but I think Vancouver hosted a fantastic Games. I think it would be fantastic to do it again.”
Bilodeau is also fully behind another bid in the same place where he made Canadian sports history. “I really deeply believe Vancouver had a great legacy for Canadians,” he said. “Personally, I haven't seen Canada as excited as they were in 2009-2010 with the Olympics in Vancouver coming up, and I felt like in 2011 there was that huge hangover after the Vancouver Olympics.
“From what I've talked with multiple athletes from different generations, Americans weren't the same way in Salt Lake City, Italians were definitely not the same way in Torino. It brought Canada closer together, and I think right now with all that we've been through in the last two years with the pandemic, Canada is more divided than ever. I think sport brings people together.
“There's nothing better than bringing a whole country together with the Olympics.