TOareaFan, well I guess you called me on my "abandoned and derelict" stadium comment. Perhaps too dramatic, what I should have said is "underutilized and in bad shape". Although that is anecdotal experience from actually standing in front of stadiums in Montreal, Barcelona etc. Although really this counterpoint I am making is not really of importance to this thread other than the larger issue that the architectural component of the legacy of a games is fleeting and disposable. It's importance is more about how it brands the preception of a city at a particular point in history as "the place to be", or stylish, or commited to design.
Well, you hit a bit of a nerve with me as the "abandoned right after the games" stadium argument is one that gets thrown around by a lot of people and recycled by lots of people that have never been too, nor looked into, the reality of the situations in the various cities.
Your experiences in Montreal (1976 games) and Barcelona (1992) actually do more to disprove the argument than advance it (IMO). The Barcelona stadium was actually built early in the 20th century (the 1920's I think) and renovated a few times....so not the fleeting monument to sport that irks so many people. Sure, it may appear underused to the North American eye because we tend to think of stadia as things that need to be used constantly to be of value. The rest of the world not so much......as an example, I was born in Glasgow....a city that has +/- 1 million people in its entire CMA.......they think nothing of having 3 stadiums over over 50k capacity...two of which are used every other weekend by the clubs that own them and one that is used far more infrequently (it is the national football stadium). From the end of the '92 Olympics until this year, the Barcelona stadium was used by Espanyol....a Spanish soccer team and, by far, the smaller of the major Catalan teams (FCB Barcelona being the larger).
Montreal's stadium, as we know, is a particularly unique situation in that it is in a city that lost one of the major tenants that the post-game stadium was targeted for (the Expos). The other (CFL Allouettes) plays in a league that garners much smaller crowds than at the time the stadium was built so they have, for the most part, moved on......had the sporting landscape not changed so dramatically......the stadium would have been in full use for almost 100 nights per year (and was for several years)....as for its decrepit nature....bad design/architecture and corrupt building trades on one stadium should not taint all stadiums for all time.
All that being said, I would have thought the anti-mega stadium sentiment (which I understand....don't agree with but understand) would have been an argument FOR the Pan Am Games....there is a nice balance for any Canadian city in that we get a stadium that might be right for our non-games sporting scene. Other than Toronto for baseball, we don't really have a need for huge outdoor stadiums.....so we definitely would have issues with stadium use if we won the Olympics (although the potential for an NFL team...if those owners would share the cost of construction....might be an opportunity)....so minor (I prefer to think of them as less major) multi-sport games (like PanAms, Commonwealth Games, Francaphone Games) present an opportunity for us to enhance our sporting infrastructure on a scale that we have an opportunity to use later.
If life was a University, I Major in sports and Minor in the arts....but more people are, for example, into mass sports than serious arts.....yet very few (and certainly not me) ever complain about the money invested in infrastructure for the arts. I think (have nothing to back this up...just my life experiences) over a period of time, more people/Torontonians will (for example) walk through the turnstiles at BMO Field than will ever watch a performance at, say, the Four Seasons...yet the investment of public funds in BMO was, both, smaller and more controversial.
I guess what I am saying is that we readily accept (as we should) that public funds for public arts infrastructure is a valid investment yet we struggle with the same (or less) public investment in sporting infrastructure and I am not totally sure why. (although I would guess that at least part of it is the image/perception that we are building parks for millionaire "ball players" to make more millions....and I am not sure any of that is applicable to the proposed venues for the Pan Am games).
