The unloved Games

In just a couple of months, the Pan Am Games will be staged in the Toronto area -- and the city can barely conceal its indifference.

The Pan Ams are a third- or fourth-rate sporting extravaganza.  Most of the top performers in the various sports won't even show up, in part because the games clash with much more prestigious events -- the tennis players will be at Wimbledon, the women soccer players at the World Cup, Usain Bolt at a party someplace, and so on.  Generally it's smaller cities that host the Pan Ams, and it's a sign of Toronto's desperate quest to be noticed that it even bid for the event.

The buildup to the Games hasn't been helped by some very odd marketing decisions by the organizing committee.  The slogan for the Games is "EPIC IS ON" -- good English, apparently, isn't. I think the ON is meant to make you think of Ontario, which will certainly be helpful if you were about to book a plane ticket to the Toronto in County Durham, England (yes, there is one), but otherwise the slogan has nothing to commend it.

The slogan was introduced by way of a TV commercial featuring athletes doing their thing in various Toronto locales (baseball on Bay Street, kayaking in the harbour and so on), over a song whose main lyric was "ready or not, here I come".  Given that many of the venues had not been completed at the time, a distinctly risky choice.

That ad has now been replaced by one aimed at chivvying the locals into buying tickets, and the organizers have managed to come up with yet another unfortunate tagline: "Now or Never". Given that most locals can't wait for the Games, and the inevitable chaos on Toronto's already gridlocked streets, to be over and done with, it's all but certain that most people will be taking the second option.

Here's an odd thing, though: the Games themselves may be unloved and forgettable, but for once the legacy may actually be worthwhile.  After decades of shilly-shallying, a train linking downtown to the airport will open in June; wouldn't have happened without the Games. A huge derelict area east of downtown Toronto that has defied attempts at development for many years has been transformed into an athletes village, and will be converted into housing when the circus leaves town; wouldn't have happened without the Games.  And there will be some modest but usable sports venues left behind, including a velodrome, a track and field stadium and a new football stadium in Hamilton.

The Pan Am games will be either ignored (most of the time) or resented (if you're trying to get around) while they're on, and soon forgotten once they're over. As for the legacy items, they may not be fully worth the money that's being spent, but in a city that finds it as hard to get things done as Toronto does, they're something to be thankful for.