I Am Panning The Games

Last week, the "Stats Canada" satirical Twitter account reported that the Pan-Am Games are 3% as impressive as the Olympic Games. If you're praise Ontario, I probably have to give you context that Toronto is hosting the Pan-Am Games this summer. And in needing to inform you of that, I've pretty big confirmed the point of the joke. I'd been meaning to write something about the Pan-Am Games, and that tweet was closely related to the point I was going to make, so here it is:

Hosting the Olympics is expensive - the summer games will cost $10 billion+, and that even if you don't have a Putin-style ego-and-corruption-fueled spending spree. We can argue ‘til the cows come home about whether that is - in any sense - "worth it" in terms of our spending priorities and value for the money. But let's acknowledge that when it comes to buying publicity, it is at least possibly worth the money: you spend through the nose, but the prize is that you get the world's undivided attention for two weeks, and get a mention in sports history forever.

If you're going to host one of the "secondary" games like the Pan-Ams (or equivalents on other continents) or the Commonwealth Games. You'll spend about a tenth as much (Toronto is spending about $2.5 billion.) So if the Olympics are close to worth it at ten-times as much, the question is, do those secondary games get you one-tenth the publicity for one tenth the money?

And the answer is clearly no. The fact is, hardly anyone who's not hosting notices these games. To put it in perspective, I tried naming the Summer Olympics host cities of the top of my head, and was able to name all of them back to Rome in 1960. But when it comes to the Pan-Am hosts, well, I remembered Winnipeg hosting it back in the 90's, and I remember Indianapolis in the 80's when I first heard of the Pan-Ams, but that's it.

The fact is, we in Canada are suckers for the lesser games like the Pan-Ams. They appeal to two of our main national characteristics: wishing the world would pay attention to us, and being cheap. So we spend big-but-not-huge bucks on these events that seem Olympicy.  It's sort of like buying off-brand products at Walmart and congratulating ourselves on saving money, not considering that they'll fall apart in a couple of months.