Over the last week my wife and I attended several events for the 2015 Pan Am Games. These Games are competitions between countries from North, Central, and South America, as well as the Caribbean. Toronto is the host city for this edition of the quadrennial event. Although Canada has hosted the Olympic Games 3 times (1976 summer, and 1988 and 2010 winter editions) these Pan Am Games are actually the largest multisport event Canada has ever hosted, so more athletes than any of those 3 Olympics (over 6100 athletes from 41 countries at these Games). So to date we have seen 4 sports and will be seeing one more later this week. We started out with tennis, and the venue was where the Rogers Cup is held each year, so at the tennis venue at York University in Toronto. We have been here many times for the Rogers Cup, so this was a familiar venue for us. I’ll get one question I’m sure will come up out of the way right off – I wore my SM300 for all the events this week, and it was great – here with the center court in the background: We saw 2 days of action at this event, so both women and men individual and doubles, as well as some mixed doubles. We saw medals won and medals awarded: Then men’s doubles team from Argentina won the gold, and they were very entertaining in their final match. He was a "try to get to any and every ball" kind of player, which I like watching. Some of the shots he got to and returned well were pretty amazing: A particular highlight was watching the Canadian women’s doubles team (Carol Zhao and Gaby Dabrowski) win the gold medal in the last match on the last day of the tennis competition: Of course being a former competitive archer, we did see the archery competition. In fact some of the people both competing for Canada and coaching the archery team at this event are close friends of ours. One perk of being a good friend of a Canadian competitor is that we were one of the few selected by them to gain access to Canada House. Canada House is something that is normally set-up by the COC (Canadian Olympic Committee) with the support of various corporate sponsors at Games that are outside of Canada. This is a “little piece of home” where families and friends of athletes, as well as the athletes themselves, can go for a little peace and quiet away from media, to relax, and to celebrate with fellow Canadians at those Games. This is the first time they have had a Canada House at any Games held in Canada, so this was a special opportunity for us to be 2 of the 4 people our friend was allowed to give passes to. To give the fellow Canadians an idea of who you would see at Canada House kicking back watching the various feeds of the competitions, we sat down to watch some swimming and Simon Whitfield (2000 Olympic triathlon gold medalist, and silver in 2008 as well) came in and sat on the couch in front of us, which I thought was pretty cool. So, here I am inside the lounge at Canada House with a poster of the friend who gave us the honour of being there – his name is Crispin Duenas. I have known Crispin for 15 years and he is, in my view, the best archer this country has ever produced. There was a time when I could beat him, but those days are long gone, and not just because I’m retired now. Not only has he smashed pretty much every Canadian record in archery, he won a bronze medal at the world championships last year, and is a 2 time Olympian. He also won 2 silver medals at the last Pan Am Games, one for team and one individual. So that sets the stage for the next photo. Every night they have a parade of medal winners at Canada House (right as happy hour ends, so everyone is extra happy!) and one night we met 1/2 the ladies doubles pair that one gold, so this is me with Carol Zhao. Here is a parade of medal winners from another night – this is held in the terrace area and the atmosphere there is amazing. The person at the podium is Marcel Aubut, who is the president of the COC, and his enthusiasm is truly over the top - every night he had the crowd very wound up (I think the free booze didn’t hurt). It was a chance to celebrate Canada’s performance at the Games, and to simply celebrate sport as a way of bringing people together. Some of my best memories of these Games are of the hours we spent at Canada House celebrating with friends and family of other athletes. So these Games, like any major Games, are somewhat controversial. The costs, the traffic congestion, the people who just love to be negative no matter what – those things are all present here. But when you are there attending the actual events it was very different. Although ticket sales were a bit slow to start with, as of a couple of days ago they are now over a million tickets sold, so that is certainly nothing to sneeze at. The only venue we attended that was not packed was the tennis actually. The good thing is that there are plenty of public spaces where people can get involved even if you don’t have a ticket to an actual event – this is Nathan Phillips Square downtown in front of City Hall, and the big Toronto sign was always attracting people. These are the “Panamania” sites... That sign will be kept after the Games are over as well, and the city is taking suggestions for a location. Here is one of the two stages at this particular site. They also had stages at Pan Am Park (at the Exhibition grounds near the lake) and in the Distillery district and they held free concerts there every night. The organizers have done a good job providing people free spaces to get involved in the spirit of the events. Also, if you did have an event ticket, it was also a free pass on the TTC (subway, bus, streetcars) for the day of your event. So after 2 days of tennis, we then moved onto what we thought of as the main event – the archery competition. I have been to more archery competitions that I can count, so we only went to the last 2 days of this one where the medals are decided. So while we walked right into the tennis venue both days with virtually no wait, when we arrived at Varsity Stadium at the University of Toronto the first day, we were surprised to see a large line-up. It took us about 20 minutes to get inside, and when we got there the stands were full...for an archery competition! I can assure you this is most unusual! First up was the team event day, so we watched our men’s and women’s team shoot, and unfortunately they were both eliminated before they had a chance at a medal. These are photos during that day, before the rain started. The left side of the field have the tents for the archers, for the officials, and the shooting line, and 70 m away on the right are the targets. The stands were pretty full even though the weather wasn’t great and it rained pretty hard most of that day. Archers keep shooting in rain – as long as the target can be seen and there is no lightning, we shoot in pouring rain if that’s what the weather is that day. I eventually went under the stands with a bunch of others to escape the rain for a while... I actually had a pretty good view of the targets from under there. So the targets are divided into 10 rings (2 rings per colour), with the middle ring counting as 10 points, and on out to one point for the outermost white ring. To give some perspective, the 10 ring is the size of a compact disk. The second day was the individual elimination finals, and we had one archer left in the draw – Jay Lyon. I’ve known Jay for a few years and he is also a very good archer – came 10th in the 2008 Olympics. He also won a silver in the team event at the last Pan Am Games. It was a much nicer day, and again the lines were quite long. We found a spot near the targets, in the middle of a large Mexican contingent, who were quite loud and supportive of their athletes. They had good reason, taking the bronze medal in the women’s competition, and in the men’s they won the gold. For my friend Jay, his semi-final match was against Brady Ellison of the US, who is the number 2 ranked male archer in the world, so he was in tough. But rankings don’t always mean a lot on the day, and you still have to perform. On this day Brady beat Jay and went on to shoot for the gold medal, losing to the Mexican. Jay went on to compete for the bronze medal against Zach Garrett of the USA. So before I show the video, I need to explain some of the details of how an archery competition is done. The system used takes what is a simple goal (hitting a close to the middle as often as you can) and makes it somewhat complex. Rules are always evolving, and the current method of deciding an archery competition is to have a ranking round, then pair off archers shooting at match play round against each other (at targets, not each other!). The top ranked archer shoots against the bottom ranked, the second best archer shoots against the second lowest ranked, etc. The format is single elimination, so one loss and you are out, and the field is cut in half each round as you progress through the event. The head to head portion of the match has the following elements: 1 – A match consists of five sets of three arrows per set. 2 – The archer who scores the highest in each set is awarded 2 set points (the other archer gets zero points). 3 - If archer tie in a set, they each are awarded one point. 4 – The first archer to reach 6 set points wins the match. 5 – If the match is tied after 5 sets, there is a one arrow shoot off, and the archer with the arrow closest to the middle of the target is the winner. So the match opened with Jay winning the first set with a score of 28 to 27, so he took a 2 to 0 lead in set points. In the second set the score was 29 to 27 for Jay, so now he had a 4 to 0 lead in set points. Then came the last 3 arrows...Jay needed 2 more set points to win in straight sets...Zach is on the left target here and Jay is on the right...yes that’s me yelling “Come on Jay!”... Sorry for the shaky video, but as you can imagine I was a bit excited. It's hard to see but Jay shot a perfect 30 with his last 3 arrows, so not a bad way to close out a match! So back at Canada House that night I congratulated my friend on his medal... And the remainder of the medalists that night as well – and we certainly had some fun celebrating! So the next day we were up and out early to the beach volleyball venue. It was the hottest day so far with temps hitting 30 and with the humidity feeling close to 40. Even in the morning it was quite warm sitting on metal stands for 4 hours...but the volleyball was good. So after that we headed back to the hotel and cleaned off all the layers of sun screen, and then had a bite to eat before heading back out to another event – the trampoline finals. The arena was packed... We had 2 athletes in both the men’s and women’s competition, and the women went first. This video shows Canadian Rosie MacLennan’s gold medal winning routine. Rosie won the gold at the last Pan Am Games, and also at the London 2012 Olympics. Her team mate Karen Cockburn (a 3 time Olympic medalist) won the bronze. Then the men were up and this video shows the final competitor, Canada’s Keegan Soehn. An American was in first place when Keegan took to the trampoline... His routine was very clean, and he won the gold medal. US second, and Columbia third (the Columbian had the highest degree of difficulty and we thought he had won it after his routine!). So we are back there again later this week to see some fencing, so hopefully that will be good. Overall it was great to see all the events and also watch our friends compete. If anyone here is in Toronto, you should really make an effort to see some of these Games. Cheers, Al
Great write up, Al. Looks a lot of fun and you're clearly in a relaxed mood. Suppose the occasional beer was helpful for that... Interesting about the archery and quite a cool video. You certainly captured the excitement which clearly got to you as well! Three shots in a CD sized target from 70m seems pretty impressive especially when the pressure is on. Enjoy the rest of the games. Cheers, Chris
Great share, Al. Carol plays tennis at stanford. i watch her play during home matches. amazing talent.
Thoroughly enjoyed the commentary on the events and really enjoyed the videos. Thanks for posting Al. Mike
So a huuuuuge post and only ONE picture of the beach volley tourney. And that was the male competition. I mean - good effort and all, but you really lost me there.
My wife is volunteering at the soccer venue in Hamilton. Went and saw the Canada Brazil womans match. Great place to watch soccer.
Thanks for the post Al! some great coverage here. Maybe you missed your calling. I hear CBC may be hiring (or NOT)!
Super post Al. Thanks for featuring some of our own athletes-they are having a fantastic games!! Hope you have fun at the remaining events.
Great job thanks for writing and explaining all that. As soon as I heard you are an archer, I thought...that kinda might explain the account name you use! Can you use your skills to remove some of the pesky troublesome squirrels infesting the forum???
I live near the baseball and softball venue but didn't make it out to any of the games Tickets sold pretty well for the ball games and I could've gone to the venue the day of to see if any tickets were available, but didn't bother
Now I know why it's been quiet on the Archer front lately, it looks like you had a great time. I was well impressed with the three tens in the video clip, that was a fair distance these arrows had to fly. As a matter of interest, what is the longest range for archery competition?
Now that you say that I was chatting with a representative from Tennis Canada back at Canada House one night and she mentioned that's where Carol played. She also told me that Carol was not originally on the team, but another player had dropped out with an ankle injury, so she was called up for this event - not bad considering she ended up with a gold medal! I agree she is a great player and really hustles on the court. It was interesting talking not just to athletes, but to the sport administrators and coaches. One thing I haven't mentioned before here I think is that not only did I compete, but I was involved in the administration of the sport for a number of years, serving on the High Performance Committee for Archery Canada (the national governing body for archery) and for a few years serving as the chair of that committee. We developed team selection criteria, allocated funds for teams, developed long terms goals, developed and implemented the long term athlete development plan, etc. It was a lot of work, but it all helps propel our sport forward. Yes this is all a big celebration of sport and individual talent, but there is also a tremendous amount of pressure on these athletes to perform. Coaches and admin people are always looking for new ideas to help performance. We are sort of in our own sport bubble most of the time, so the great thing about events like the Pan Am Games, and being at a place like Canada House is that for most athletes and coaches, as well as admin people, this gives us a chance to talk to people from other sports. We talk about how they are developing a talent pool, spending/raising their money, running training camps, funding national training centers, etc. Tennis in Canada has made such a lot of progress in the last few years, and we now have some very talented players in the pro ranks, so myself and the archery coach for the Canadian team (a very close friend and former team mate of mine - I gifted him a Speedmaster earlier this year if some remember that thread) spent a bit of time talking with the Tennis Canada rep about what we could learn from their success. Of course we always struggle to find money, and they have more than they know what to do with, so there are limitations... Anyway, glad you appreciate Carol as the talented player she is. Cheers, Al
Glad you saw some of the soccer - not my sport personally, but I do understand it's a popular one. The volunteers have been amazing at these Games - they number something like 23,000 from what I have heard and everywhere we went they were always helpful.
I would have loved to see the baseball gold medal match....they way the US lost to us was pretty crazy in the 10th inning from the footage I saw! We bought most of our tickets ahead of time (using probably the poorest designed ticketing web site I've ever seen - very convoluted system), but we were able to buy tickets for the beach volleyball just 2 days before the event. They have ticketing booths at NPS and at the Pan Am Park.
There are different types of archery competitions. What is contested at events like Pan Am Games and the Olympics is called Target Archery. The goal is accuracy and these days all competitions (outdoors) have been standardized to 70 meters. This is quite recent, and just a decade ago when I was still competing (although slowing down) we shot up to 90 meters...I've posted this before but here is a shot in practice at 90 I did back then... While I was warming up in a training session one night I told my wife I felt that the next shot would be a 10, and she said I was full of it (a common occurrence) so I told her to shoot a video of it through the spotting scope. That's why she chuckles when the arrow lands... There are two other types of archery that use a longer distance than 70 or 90 meters. Clout archery is what you see in movies with old English longbows, where arrows rain down on the enemy. The target is actually drawn on the ground and is 165 meters away, and arrows are shot up at extreme angles to land almost vertically in the rings. Clout competitions are typically done as a fun event during a target archery event if enough distance can be found for the range and safety margins. However the carbon/aluminum arrows I used to shoot are about $700 per dozen assembled arrows, so I wasn't going to shoot them into the dirt, so I've never shot this round... The other type of archery is called Flight, and the sole purpose is to see how far you can shoot the arrow. These competitions include bows shot like a traditional bow using your arms, but also foot bows that are shot using your feet. There are different weight classes so how much tension is on the bow string, which influences how far the arrow can go. Some of these bows shoot arrows close to 2 kms in distance...
Many thanks for taking the time to explain so much and post the video, I really do appreciate it. I thought there would be a lot of different disciplines much like shooting in generaI. For many years I used to shoot full bore rifle and pistol competitively in UK, before pistols were banned and life made generally difficult by the government. I shot to a reasonably high standard, but found I was more skilled at tuning and building revolvers than shooting them. Many years ago I was involved in a joint shoot that involved our pistol club and a local archery club. The idea was they shot our disciplines with pistols, then we shot theirs. The winning score was an aggregate of the combined scores. Pistol was shot first and needless to say we were ahead by a huge margin, to the point that we already thought the trophy was ours. Then came the archery and our huge winning margin suddenly shrunk to and abysmal loss. Having experienced that, I now have the greatest respect for ancient skill of archery and those who participate.
