Pan Am Games

The Pan-Am Games held in Guadalajara, Mexico ended yesterday.

What this means is that Toronto is now the official Pan-Am Games host. At the closing ceremonies (that I watched today), the Pan-Am flag was passed to our city.

There was a beautiful rendition of O Canada performed by Quebec artist Florence K followed by an eight minute dance and acrobatic performance to showcase Canada as the next host.

Eight athletes (or teams) earned a spot for Canada at the London 2012 Olympics by winning gold according to a news report. However, I am counting nine. Either one of these had already qualified or one is there in error. The ones I am seeing include :

• Closing Ceremonies flag bearer Mary Spencer in women's boxing
• Ryan Cochrane and Hughes Fournel in 200m kayak (K2)
• Steven Joren and Richard Dober in 1000m kayak (K2)
• women's kayak 500m (K4)
• Richard Dalton in canoeing (C1 200m)
• synchronized swimming team
• synchronized swimming duet of Elise Marcotte and Marie-Pier Boudreau Gagnon
• Zhang Mo in table tennis
• Dorothy Ludwig in shooting

[The kayak/canoe Olympic spots are for the team and not the racers from the Pan Am Games]

Other highlights from the games included a gold medal by world #1 ranked Dylan Armstrong in the shotput.

Led by Opening Ceremonies flagbearer, Christine Sinclair, the women's soccer team won gold beating Brazil in the final.

Canada won gold in men's baseball beating the U.S. in the final. Unfortunately, baseball is no longer an Olympic sport so this was our team's Olympics.

Richard Weinberger won the 10k swimming marathon. He won the test event in London this summer but still hasn't qualified for London 2012 (the qualifying race had been the previous month). He'll hopefully qualify in June in Portugal at the final Olympic qualifying event.

Carol Huynh won the gold medal in wrestling. I will never forget her reaction to O Canada at the 2008 Olympics when she won Canada's first (of three) gold medals at the Games.



Although I didn't watch as much of the Pan-Am games as I would have liked mostly because I'm not used to watching "television" on my computer yet (not much television coverage), I am still excited about Toronto (and surrounding cities) hosting the 2015 Pan Am Games. Hopefully tickets will be fairly affordable so that I can attend a few different events.