Rachey Ivey/TPASC – AP Photo/Julio Cortez
10 years ago today, the legendaries Canadian and Canadian artists of the Cirque du Soleil offered a dazzling spectacle as part of the opening ceremony of the 2015 Panamérican Games in Toronto, launching the largest multisport international meeting in Canadian history.
Team Canada has aligned its most imposing delegation to date, achieving a good historical performance, winning a record number of 219 medals, led by emerging stars like Andre de Grasse, Ellie Black, Jamal Murray and Kia Nurse.
The events were disputed in 16 different municipalities, so as to distribute the benefits of sports infrastructure necessary in southern Ontario. This has led to major capital investments in the sports sector, including the Pan -American sports center in Scarborough (TPASC), the Pan -American Markhak Center and the Milton Vélodrome.
This velodrome, now known as the National Cycling Center Mattamy, has repeatedly welcomed editions of the track cycling World Cup as well as Olympic qualification competitions, and has seen the birth of the Olympic champions, including Kelsey Mitchell.
Ten years later, I have the opportunity to witness the unique legacy of the games during a day visit to TPASC the site which was the most important sports investment for the 2015 Games in Toronto.
When you enter the building, everything seems new and every day, the site buzzes with activities from 5 a.m. to midnight. Last year, TPASC welcomed no less than 1.73 million visitors, a record.
The Pan -American sports center in Scarborough was built at a cost of $ 205 million, of which around 60 percent of the investments were funded by the federal government, while the rest was distributed between the city of Toronto and the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto. Today, these partners share the facilities and offer a myriad of sports and physical opportunities for the local community, students from the University of Toronto as well as high performance athletes.
This site is possibly known for its Olympic swimming pool, one of the best in the world, recognized for its 50m basin, than several of the best swimmer. Olympic and paralympic in Canada now consider their main training place. The Directors of Swimming Canada also consider installation as the source of a resurgence of sport in the country. However, after a few hours spent here to discuss with people who use this site, I really understood how much the vision of offering access to sport and packaging in a formerly underdeveloped sector of Toronto has truly paid off.
Since the stands, this morning, we can see hundreds of young children in the water, several from families newly established in Canada living in the neighborhood, and who learn to swim thanks to one of the many programs offered by the city. Their parents are seated by my side, monitoring the action from the seats that overlook the swimming pool.
Arriving in Canada from Sri Lanka while she was a young girl, Sivanujah Sritharan has three children enrolled in the program and she says that this center occupies an important place in the life of her family.
Her younger son, six years old, naked in the less deep part of the swimming pool, where water arrives at his chest.
“He is still a little afraid, but he gets used to it,” says Sritharan. Her two other children, aged 8 and 10, have been part of the program for three years.
“It helped them get out of their shell and overcome their fear of swimming. After that, they enjoy it. My children now ask me if they will be enrolled in the program again. They are impatient to start again each time ”.
Sritharan adds that by seeing all the other activities practiced in TPASC, his children want to try them all, including the walking track perched above the neighboring gymnasium.
“It really opens their eyes,” she said.
On the walking track today, we meet Pearl Alexander, who uses a cane to help him complete his 10,000 steps in the morning. Alexander comes to practice three or four times a week like several other elderly people.
“It allows me to continue walking, always standing. It’s a good thing, ”says Alexander to the joke.
Alexander is also swimming and trains at the sports center.
“I think this building is superb to keep our community healthy. As we get older, we have to face arthritis and all kinds of other things, so the more we move, the better. In my case, it allows me to keep my mobility ”.
In the gymnasium located under the walking trail, Abby Pan, a second -year student in business management at the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto continues the launches in the basket. The student benefits from access to the physical packaging club and other activities since this is included in her student expenses. PAN comes to the sports center almost every day to participate in the free basketball program, while other students from the university are turning to badminton, climbing or other activities. More than 256,000 university students crossed the doors of the Pan American sports center in 2024.
“I like this center. It’s like my house. I like the gymnasium here. I like the light that shines there. I like the view, I like everything about this building, ”says Pan.
On the other basketball field of the same gymnasium, members of the Canadian Basketball in wheelchair basketball compete an improvised game.
Scarborough’s Pan -American Sports Center is the home of the Canada wheelchair National Basketball Academy and serves as a training ground for the best athletes of this sport. Tamara Steeves has been a member of the national women’s team since the 2012 Paralympic Games in London.
“It means a lot for us to take advantage of this site. We train here every day. It’s not just a superb basketball field. There is a training room, a treadmill so that we work on our physical conditioning and everything we need to be at the top of our form. ”
Steeves says there is an additional advantage to train in this place.
“It is magnificent to be able to make our sport known to people who do not live with a handicap. The people who walk around the track see us playing basketball in a wheelchair and tell us ‘you are so incredible’ “.
The Pan -American sports center also houses the Ontario Canadian Sport Institute (ICSO), which gives access to all high performance athletes patented nationally in Canada access to a training room with advanced equipment, hot and cold massages, the best scientists in the sport, massage therapists and several other services.
Debbie Low is the president and chief executive officer of ICSO and she says that there have been several failed attempts to open a center like this in Ontario as in several other regions of the country. She assures that the center would not exist without the holding of the Toronto Games in 2015.
“Toronto 2015 was a transformer event for us,” says Low.
She adds that this event was also very important for Canadian sport and especially for Ontario athletes.
“The performance of Ontario athletes have been more raised and better than ever.”
The ICSO supported almost half of the team Canada athletes who participated in the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris 2024. The athletes supported by the ICSO won an impressive number of 17 medals at the 2024 Olympic Games and 11 medals at the Paralympic Games of 2024.
Lifting weights under the colorful banners of the ICSO displaying the face of several of these Paris medalists, we find the beach volleyball player Sam Schachter.
Toronto 2015 was the first multisport game experience in Schachter. He has since represented team Canada at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio and 2024 in Paris. He is very happy to see the heritage of the Pan -American Games in his city of attachment.
“It is wonderful because the Pan -American sports center is an installation so that everyone does exercise and is in movement together. Normally, high performance athletes are found together in private gymnasiums or installations reserved for them. Finding us in a place accessible to all is a magnificent way for us to be in contact with the community ”.
Schachter recalls the recent joint marketing campaign of the Canadian Olympic Committee and the Canadian Paralympic Committee entitled “We are all team Canada”. The Pan -American sports center is really a beautiful representation in his eyes.
“This building perfectly illustrates the principle that we are all Canadians, gathered together for a cause [le sport]. You can see all types of athletes, people from various environments and having different skills, regardless of their skill level or athletic qualities. This is the most Canadian thing I can think of, a place where everyone can come together [pour le sport et le mieux-être] ».
Last spring, the unique side of these installations found itself at the forefront after a fire in Montreal forced the relocation at the last minute of the Olympic and paralympic swimming tests at the Panamanian sports center of Scarborough.
Rafael Torre is the director of sports and leisure at the Pan -American sports center and he worked with the city to see if we could find a way to host the tests without canceling the municipal swimming programs provided for in the same period.
“During the tests, we had sessions where we had Olympian and Olympic hopes that trained on one side of the partition. On the other side, there were community swimming lessons with mothers and their toddlers in the water. The conditions were not necessarily what was most ideal for high performance athletes, but it was very special for the community that we have managed to organize this. ”
The building was built thanks to an investment intended for a high -performance sporting event, but Torre affirms that the secret sauce of its inheritance ten years after the 2015 games in Toronto, is the way in which it was planned from the start to incorporate health and physical conditioning activities for the community, university and high -level athletes.
Teddy Katz played a key role in communications management for the 2015 Pan American Games in Toronto after working for almost two decades for CBC. He is currently working as a communications consultant for various organizations, including COC.