Pan Am Games planners worried for months that the unfinished concrete floors in the athletes’ village that is now housing international competitors would garner bad press and complaints, according to documents obtained by the Star.

One organizer told his colleagues the finish standards were below those of the 2011 Games in Guadalajara, Mexico, as officials worked to remedy the problem at a cost of $1.4 million.

To avoid the feared international embarrassment, pitted, stained and scuffed floors were ultimately covered over with a dark grey skim coat — a smoother, more polished finish — and matching baseboards, while hallways and some common areas were carpeted.

But not before officials fretted over the floors in a months-long back-and-forth, questioning whether they would be acceptable to governing bodies and incoming teams, and scrambling for solutions to avoid delaying completion of the living quarters — as revealed in emails and internal documents obtained through a freedom of information request.

The state of an athletes’ village can be a perilous issue for the host country’s reputation; the Sochi Winter Olympics last year was mocked for poorly designed athletes’ quarters, including strange toilet setups.

The TO2015 organizing committee, which is overseeing the Games and construction of facilities, had always planned to leave the Pan Am athlete suites partially finished, in partnership with construction firm EllisDon and developer Dundee Kilmer. When the last athletes fly home after the Parapan Am Games in August, the buildings will be completed as condominiums — with hardwood floors — and a student residence for George Brown College.

TO2015 spokesperson Teddy Katz said adequate flooring was an important consideration to reduce noise, meet Paralympic standards and not degrade the city’s reputation.

“Unfinished floors and ragged walls without baseboards would reflect poorly on our region’s reputation as hosts. Quite simply, the village wouldn’t look finished,” he wrote in an email.

He said the costs — $1.2 million for the sealing and baseboards and $200,000 for carpeting — was largely made up in other cost savings and covered by the overall budget for the village, which was fully financed by the province. He added that organizers decided on the most “cost-effective” solution and that a vinyl alternative would have cost $1.4 million — or $200,000 more.

Katz insisted the village was completed “on budget” and referred follow-up questions on how exactly the budget was balanced to the province.

On its website, developer Dundee Kilmer described the spaces to house 7,500 athletes and games officials as just “bare bones ‘shells.’” The finishing touches — including new wood floors — will be added after the Games.

An October 2013 review of one suite finished to look like an athlete’s room signaled the beginning of internal concerns about the lack of finishes, according to the documents.

The review found the concrete floor had “pits, holes, blemishes, stains and scuff marks, resulting in an unclean, unfinished appearance.”

The following month, a Games contractor for the village, Mark Cutler, told provincial Infrastructure Ontario official Denise McNally in an email that the floor was “unacceptable” and that it would be “reputationally damaging.”

McNally responded that the concrete would be clean, but a floor clear of splatter marks was “something we can’t enforce.”

“Call it a faux finish,” she said.

The issue flared up again months later when representatives from the Canadian Olympic Committee toured the village and were less than impressed with the state of the flooring.

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In an email to his colleagues in March 2014, Allen Vansen, the executive vice president of operations, sport and venue management for TO2015, noted the COC’s concerns, saying that they had “‘never’ encountered the level of flooring finish being proposed in any past Games village” and that it was of “significant concern.”

By then a “skim coat upgrade” was already being applied, but the COC officials had apparently toured through the wrong suite — one that didn’t have the dark covering.

Regardless, Vansen warned his colleagues that the COC officials felt the other National Olympic Committees “would absolutely view this as being unfinished suites (and) that this would be a story by many media about the Village not being finished.”

Vansen said: “The level of finish we are providing is significantly below what Guadalajara provided,” and that Games village, by comparison, had marble or carpet throughout, according to the documents.

Earlier, Vansen assured his colleagues that the coating would be “applied in a fashion that presents a ‘finished flooring’ appearance.”

He told Games CEO Saad Rafi that the skim coat was a cheaper option than laminate. He put the coating at $700,000, below an estimated $1.25 million for the laminate.

“Let’s not accept substandard, as that will be the focus and it need not be, as we can tackle it before athletes arrive,” Rafi told Vansen.

Though in emails it appears the COC later conceded to the dark grey floor covering, issues over not having baseboards remained. Those, too, were eventually resolved by shelling out for the added finish.

A spokesperson for the COC told the Star they were invited to provide feedback on the flooring.

“The COC feels that the final option chosen meets the standards of the NOCs living in the (Pan Am Athletes’ Village),” Cherry Ye wrote in an email.

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