When new sports facilities were being handed out around the Greater Toronto Area for the 2015 Pan American Games, the velodrome was the building no one wanted.

Hamilton turned it down and so did Vaughan. It took Milton, a fast-growing town with one of Ontario’s longest-serving mayors, and a housing developer with a passion for cycling to make it happen at all.

That’s because velodromes with their curved Siberian wood tracks come with plenty of baggage. A good many have struggled financially before being repurposed or torn down entirely. The one Montreal built for the 1976 Olympics has long been an indoor zoo; Winnipeg’s track for the 1967 Pan Ams was eventually replaced with stores; in other countries, outdated and underused facilities are routinely torn down to make way for housing.

But Milton, which combined the cycling track with a planned community centre, hopes it has landed on a mixed-use formula that will keep the $56-million Mattamy National Cycling Centre viable over the long haul.

This week, it’s been home to badminton, basketball, pickleball and volleyball players on the infield courts as well as cyclists on the track — ranging from recreational riders to the best in the country, here for the Canadian track championships that run Saturday through Monday.

Even local councillor Rick Malboeuf, the velodrome’s biggest critic, has tempered his views and says it’s not the “white elephant” he predicted it would be.

“It’s a pale grey right now,” he said, acknowledging that staff reports show usage has exceeded predictions.

He still has considerable concerns about the velodrome becoming an increasing financial burden, with more than $1 million in local, provincial and federal tax dollars going towards its annual operating budget.

“We’re still in the honeymoon stage. . . . It takes time before the impact is really felt. I hope it works out. I hope, three years from now, I’ll say I was wrong.”

For Canadian cyclists, the impact has already been felt.

When Kirsti Lay, a bronze medallist in team pursuit at the Rio Olympics, first walked into the building to train ahead of the 2015 Pan Am Games she was stunned: “This is really our own?”

After years of living out of suitcases and travelling the world to rent track space, Canada’s national team had a velodrome of its own. “Everyone thought it was Christmas,” she said.

It’s not just the track, but also the high-performance hub that Cycling Canada and the Canadian Sport Institute Ontario created that has made such a difference, Lay added.

For the first time in their careers, Lay and her teammates had coaching, strength training, physiotherapy, performance analysis, nutrition and sport psychology under one roof.

“Everything in one location . . . really brought our level up a notch, and the track gave us consistency in our training,” said Lay, who is competing in Milton this weekend.

To win the Rio medal, the team of four riders had to drop four seconds off their best time in the four-kilometre distance, to keep up with the world in this increasingly competitive women’s discipline.

“We wouldn’t have won the medal without the velodrome,” Cycling Canada’s chief executive Greg Mathieu said.

Another big part of what makes the velodrome so exciting for Canadian cycling is happening well below the Olympic level. Learn-to-ride programs for youth and club-level development and racing feed into provincial high-performance initiatives and bolsters the ranks of Ontario team riders. From there, promising riders can move into the national next-generation program, run out of the velodrome, and junior world teams.

“We have the entire pathway in the velodrome, and that’s where we’re starting to see these little bolts of lightning,” Mathieu said.

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Steve Bauer, Canada’s 1984 Olympic silver medallist in the road race, has been building much of that pathway by running cycling programs for the town and now with the National Cycling Institute Milton, which is focusing on higher performance youth and racing.

“We’re all focused on making a significant difference in Canada,” Bauer said of the efforts to ensure the Milton facility succeeds.

He knows history hasn’t been kind to velodromes in Canada, but says times have changed.

“Cycling is well established, not just as a recreational sport but as a competitive sport in many disciplines. We’ve done fairly well on the international stage for a small cycling nation, compared to the European nations, and I think the geographic location of the velodrome is perfect,” he said. “It’s within a one-hour drive for eight million people in Canada, so that’s important.”