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The Pan Am Games, meanwhile, have transported us into a new land of make-believe. CBC reports “several new (Pan Am) facilities … could house future Olympic competitions, such as a velodrome and multiple swimming pools.” The IOC is far more amenable to using existing venues and to less grandiose visions, we are told. An unnamed source told The Globe and Mail we might satisfy delegates with a temporary 100,000-seat Olympic Stadium “that would not cost millions of dollars.”

The risks of a last-minute bid are huge; panic is not cheap

Needless to say, there is no stadium, temporary or permanent, that doesn’t cost millions of dollars. The IOC will always prefer permanent. And Toronto has no earthly need of such a facility. The Pan Am organizers have always been frank: Their facilities are not designed for the Olympics. The 2,500-seat velodrome in Milton is half the capacity of the one planned for Rio de Janeiro in 2016. The aquatics centre in Scarborough seats 6,000; those in Rio, London and Beijing seat more than 17,000. It’s not even close.

And then there is the timeline to consider. Publicly, Mayor John Tory has been making the right noises: Let’s not go food shopping while we’re starving, as he aptly put it. But the dinner bell is ringing. When city staff reported on Toronto 2024 to the dconomic development committee, they stressed how “constrained” the timeline was. That was 19 months ago. “There is not enough time to wait until after the (2014 municipal) elections and the holding of the (Pan Am) Games in 2015 to decide whether to bid,” they warned. And here we are.