Two Olympians? What happened to the Pan Am Games Legacy?

It's official. An announcement this week by the High Performance Centre for Sport — Manitoba confirmed that the 1999 Pan Am Games not only hurt sport in our province, but just might have destroyed it.

This week, the head of the Centre, Randy Anderson announced that only two Manitobans, rower Janine Hanson and archer Jason Lyon had qualified for the 2008 Canadian Olympic team. That's the fewest number of Manitoba Olympians heading to a single Games in the modern era.

So what ever happened to the 1999 Pan Am Games legacy?

Oh, let me tell you, I heard a boatload of that insanity from the moment Winnipeg was awarded the Games in the early 90s until the biggest mistake in the province's history was shut down in '99. 

"It will be the greatest sports legacy in the history of the province," proclaimed the organizers, as they chased down millions in public funds in order to put on their little summer soiree.

It was a crock. And I can tell you, I took a load of abuse for arguing that it was a crock and that those Games would be the biggest waste of $130 million-plus in the history of sport of Manitoba.

My own editor at the newspaper where I worked back then called me down — he had invitations to most of the parties — and he and his deputy editor spiked more than a dozen of my reports on Games spending.

Well, sports fans, here we are 10 years later and the Pan Am Games turned out to be nothing more than a party for the richest and most influential Manitobans. As a sporting event, it was B-list, and as a legacy, it was a lie.

Here's the legacy in totality:

1. Seats at Canad Inns Stadium (back then it was still Winnipeg Stadium) are now two small to be comfortable and a football park that should have been torn down at the time should now be condemned.

2. Upgrades at Winnipeg Arena were worthless and the building was destroyed six years after the Games left town.

3. The destruction of the Velodrome (remember, the organizers used a portable Velodrome that was sold to the Dutch after the Games) left us without a cycling venue and as you can see, a sport once dominated by Manitobans no longer exists here.

That's it. That's the legacy. Nothing! No outstanding sports facilities and three Olympics later, we have virtually no Olympians.

At a cost of more than $130 million in public funds, we could have built a state of the art hockey arena and saved the Winnipeg Jets, but instead we let Mayor Susan Thompson and some of her wealthy pals convince us that the 1999 Pan Am Games was a good investment. 

As we prepare for an Olympic Games a decade later, a Games that involves only two Manitoba athletes, we are reminded that the Pan Am Games was nothing more than a waste of public funds and a party for those who had enough connections to get invited.

History now shows, it was the greatest waste of money and effort in Manitoba sport.