Perkins: New Hamilton stadium won’t have Pan Am track events
Published On Wed Jul 28 2010Email PrintRepublishAdd to Favourites Report an error
http://www.thestar.com/sports/panamgames/article/841577
By Dave Perkins
Sports Columnist
The good news for fans of Canadian football in and around Hamilton is that the new stadium proposed for the Tiger-Cats will be just that, a football stadium.
Where it will be built, or even whether Hamilton will choke away the project in a clash of political wills, remains to be seen. City council there is scheduled to vote Aug. 12 on either the downtown or East Mountain proposal and enough of that for now.
Whatever site prevails, track and field is not going to be part of the Hamilton experience for the 2015 Pan Am Games. Backers of both sites recognize that a multi-lane track around a CFL field, which the Ticats want no part of because of the attendant lack of intimacy, is a non-starter. (There also is the matter of finding land for the required warmup track.)
Instead, soccer will be the Games tenant for the facility that later will be inherited by the Ticats. The field basically converts with a can of paint. This all means track and field will be moved back to Toronto and York University remains the leading candidate. There or Downsview. Either place a new, small, stadium is required.
The University of Toronto has an outstanding athletics facility costing $16 million built at the old Varsity Stadium on Bloor Street. It is one of only four approved international facilities in Canada, but U of T opposes Pan Am track there. One reason is the lack of warmup facility.
Track, soccer, possibly swimming — away from the U of T’s Scarborough campus, where soil remediation alone could cost upward of $150 million — and cycling are among sports facing venue changes for the Pan Ams. The International Sport Federations, which control all technical aspects of international athletic events, need to approve facilities before granting status as Olympic qualifiers, which the 2015 people are hoping to achieve for a number of sports.
The international track body is said to be adamantly opposed to its performers needing to travel upward of an hour from the athletes’ village, basically at the foot of the Don River, to a Hamilton stadium. That opposition is the kicker in shifting track out of Hamilton.
Similarly, swimming is unlikely to end up in Scarborough, where there is no rapid transit to the facility (and won’t be by 2015) because of the international federation’s disapproval of travel times, among other things.
These Games have been ballyhooed, in the trendy jargon, as “green Games’’ but it’s tough to see how “green’’ anything is going to be when there isn’t a single venue within walking or cycling distance of the athletes’ village. Right now, everything is a commute and sometimes a long one.
The viability and expense of these Games is going to play a major role in the coming civic elections, both in Toronto and, given the way the stadium issue has lit rhetorical fires, in Hamilton. Both cities urgently require new leadership to make sense of the mess it has all become, with opening ceremonies less than five years away and the two main events still awaiting final location approval.
It’s going to be a tight squeeze to get everything built and ready for a test event in 2014, which was the plan all along.
Vancouver 2010 ran 86 events and had seven years to prepare and pre-built mountains. The Pan Ams have 310 events and are less than five years out. Yikes.
