ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the confluence of sport development and land politics across a series of Olympic bids emerging from Toronto, Canada. It illustrates how Toronto’s engagement with sport development exposes the embedded conflict between public and private interests during the Olympic bidding process as a diversity of interests struggle to develop and respond to the shifting relationships and expectations of local and extra-local agencies. Toronto’s interest in securing the Olympic Games emerged in the mid-twentieth century when the city’s was unable to secure the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games. The chapter highlights the lingering influence of Toronto’s 2008 bid effort on the politics of waterfront development. Waterfront Toronto combines ‘public meetings with stakeholder advisory committees – that are unique to each precinct – on all of its projects’. In Toronto the creation of a new development agency sparked by the bidding process has continued to operate in the post-bid period, with echoes of the Olympic bid’s objectives periodically resurfacing.
