Although it won’t be painting the grass green, as they did in Beijing, Toronto is getting ready for the International Olympic Committee’s evaluation commission’s visit next week.
The city is hanging 500 blue “welcome” banners in select areas, including outside the Skydome and other major sports facilities, along prominent streets like Queen’s Quay, in neighbourhoods such as Yorkville and in the portlands, the centre of Toronto’s Olympic bid.
Also, litter is being picked up, streets swept and portland parking lots hosed down.
And if the unpredictable March weather takes a turn for the worse, evaluation commission members can tour the city indoors, through the magic of virtual reality.
Toronto’s Olympic bid committee, with the help of the Design Exchange, has put together a virtual reality tour of what Toronto and the venues would look like in 2008.
TO-2008’s head of venues, Doug Hamilton, said “it’s on a computer. You project the image on the screen and use a mouse to tour Toronto. It’s very sophisticated, almost like a video game.” He added, “it’s like you’re in Toronto in 2008 and you can fly around the city, looking at venues from different vantage points and right into particular venues, even through walls”.
Meanwhile, William Thorsell, president of Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum said that Toronto’s ambitions for urban greatness, marked by a revitalized waterfront and new cultural projects, should not hinge on winning the bid to host the 2008 Games.
Thorsell said “it’s kind of pathetic that we are saying to ourselves that some committee in Lausanne is going to have a veto over whether we take care of our own city”. He was referring to the International Olympic Committee.
He said that proposals to redo the waterfront, as well as dreams of an opera house and major expansion plans at the museum, should push ahead no matter what the IOC decides in July. “If we get the Olympics, we will get a lot of extra money and that would help”.
But he warned that “we can’t be dependent on it and we can’t say we are going to delegate our decision over what we’re going to do in Toronto to a committee of people running around the world who are no longer taking bribes”.
