Toronto to learn Friday if it will host 2015 Pan Am Games

Around dinnertime Friday, the Toronto region will find out whether it has finally overcome the stigma of past failed Olympic bids to host its first major international sporting event since the 1930s: the 2015 Pan American Games.

Premier Dalton McGuinty, Mayor David Miller, federal sports minister Gary Lunn and bid committee chair David Peterson are part of a 20-member delegation in Guadalajara, Mexico, where delegates from the Pan American Sports Organization will cast their votes Friday afternoon.

In Toronto, Deputy Premier George Smitherman and other dignitaries will gather on Queen’s Quay to watch a live feed of the announcement – and kick off the party here in the event of victory.

“I would say we’re confident,” Bob Richardson, a senior advisor of the Toronto bid committee, said from Guadalajara on Thursday. “You never know how these things are going to turn out. We feel that we’ve put our best foot forward and we’ve done all the things that we could do. Now it’s in the hands of the voters.”

If Toronto wins, the bid committee charged with securing the games will be dissolved and a new committee in charge of staging the $1.4-billion games in 17 cities around the region will be struck to put the plan into action.

But first Toronto has to make one final presentation to win the hearts and minds of the members of national Olympic committee members from 42 countries in the Americas and the Caribbean.

Toronto, which is competing against Bogota, Colombia, and Lima, Peru, will be last up to deliver its presentation shortly after 11 a.m.

Mr. Richardson said there have already been two run-throughs of the sales pitch on site, after countless rehearsals and revisions at home.

“We feel great about our presentation,” he said. “We have stuff that conveys the city and the friendly nature of the city. We’ll give them a sense of what our village and our venue plan is and we have a passion video, if I can call it that, at the back end of the presentation, that is particularly good.”

A total of 52 ballots will be cast, since 10 of the 42 PASO countries who have previously hosted Pan Am Games are allotted two votes. A total of 27 are needed to win and a second ballot may be required to secure a majority support.

The three-day PASO general assembly has offered ample opportunity to woo delegates, Mr. Richardson said.

Toronto hosted a buffet lunch at the Guadalajara Hilton that he said was as much about fun as food, he said.

“It’s a spirit-of-Toronto lunch,” Mr. Richardson said. “Our focus is more fun and sport. We have a trampolinist in the middle of the lunch bouncing up and down. We have some fencers, so it has a little bit of an athletic fun feel to it. We’ll have music and it is a buffet-style event.”

Lima and Bogota hosted similar meals. Thursday night, Toronto, like all the bid cities, put on a hospitality suite with hors d’oeuvres, drinks and entertainment.

“We had a great Latin singer from Toronto join us for the last two days. Her name is Amanda Martinez. She was terrific. People really liked her. She actually came down with her one-year-old baby. It was kind of cool,” Mr. Richardson said.

Toronto has models of its proposed venue sites set up in a room adjacent to its suite, a combination business-social affair that allowed for some final persuasion of voting delegates.