The Morningside Avenue/Military Trail area is bustling with activity, as crews are hard at work, preparing to build an athletics facility for the 2015 Pan/Parapan American Games. Actual construction is scheduled to begin in late summer 2012 for the athletics complex—comprised of the Pan American Aquatics Centre, Field House and Canadian Sport Institute Ontario—which will be built on lands owned jointly by the City of Toronto and the University of Toronto.
The massive clearing work hints at the scale of the project. The Aquatics Centre will seat 6,000 and feature two 10-lane, 52-metre-long pools and a 5.5-metre-deep diving tank. The Field House will seat 2,000 and provide an indoor recreational track, fitness facilities and gymnasium space for training and competition. The Canadian Sport Institute Ontario will become a national high-performance sports centre, which will offer coaching and training facilities, along with sports-science and sports-medicine services.
After the Games, the facility will serve the local community as a much-needed recreation centre, as well as a hub for high-performance and university sports events and activities.
In August 2011, Infrastructure Ontario—a crown corporation wholly owned by the provincial government—invited three short-listed consortiums to submit proposals to design, build and finance the complex. The selected consortium will be announced in summer 2012 (for further details, visit www.infrastuctureontario.ca).