Brazil's Arthur Zanetti performs on the floor exercise during an artistic gymnastics training session for the Pan Am Games in Toronto, Wednesday, July 8, 2015. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)Gregory Bull/The Associated Press
No one these days willingly spends $2.5-billion just so 7,000 athletes from across the hemisphere have a new place to play for a few weeks.
With all deference to the mountain bikers, wakeboarders, trampolinists and roller skaters who are giving their all this month, Toronto's Pan Am Games have become a convenient excuse to spend a dazzling amount of money – at a pace and with a largesse you normally can't achieve when it's politics as usual.
Fiscal responsibility gets boring after a while, not least for the politicians who long to cut ribbons. Events like the Pan Ams have been seized on as a cure for the civic inertia of budget-paring and remade into excuses for (badly needed) new transit and rail links alongside (more questionable) stadiums and aquatics centres.
Even the people who promoted the Pan Ams to the tax-paying public know that the sports themselves are a hard sell – why try to appeal to a spectator's patriotism when NBA star Andrew Wiggins can't be bothered playing for Canada?
Instead, it's all about the infrastructure, a word that turns every trinket into an expenditure for the ages – that isn't just a velodrome hidden away in Milton, Ont., it's a "lasting legacy."
We've been here before, and yes, there is reason to be skeptical. Greece is still groaning under its spending for Athens 2004, the Bird's Nest in Beijing is a white elephant, and Sochi created a money-losing resort that costs Russian taxpayers millions in upkeep.
But there is also Barcelona, a city that used the 1992 Olympics as an excuse to remake itself with a creative flair that was as practical as it was exuberant.
The Pan Ams, notwithstanding the $239-million security budget, are more modest in scale. But Toronto 2015 could turn out to be a model for how large public projects manage to get accomplished – inefficiently, maybe, with overly generous severance packages for dismissed executives and dispersed venues based on regionalized politics, but accomplished all the same. Dreaming big isn't a bad thing – provided these athletic spectacles become an opportunity to spur necessities like public transit that, without the excuse of having to impress our foreign guests, might never get built.