Ottawa Cit.: TO Auto race, tourney to collide
The Beautiful Game
Sports
Toronto auto race, FIFA tourney on collision course
Richard Starnes
The Ottawa Citizen
1060 words
10 February 2007
Ottawa Citizen
Final
C6
English
Copyright © 2007 Ottawa Citizen
When a city with the international cachet of Toronto plays host to the two largest international events of the Canadian sporting year, you would think everyone there would be thrilled to death.
That's until you discover they are both taking place on exactly the same day in exactly the same place. Oh! Horrors.
The clashing heavyweights? The under-20 soccer World Cup and the Toronto Grand Prix.
The clashing date? July 8.
The clashing venue? Exhibition Place on the shore of Lake Ontario.
What's the trouble? The brand new BMO soccer stadium, where two matches are being played on race day, is encircled by the race track.
On Thursday, when I walked into the lobby of Ottawa's Lord Elgin Hotel, I expected to see steam creeping under the door of one of the conference rooms. That was the hot spot for Canadian Soccer Association national tournament director Peter Montopoli, the regional directors for each of the six sites at which the World Cup will be staged and their general managers.
They had come to town for a summit on progress towards the 24-nation event scheduled for the first three weeks of July. You know, how they were all dealing with the fussing and finicking of FIFA; how ticket sales were going; security; accommodation. All the usual suspects for such a major event.
But there was no getting away from the one really sharp thorn sticking into them: They had to solve the threatening head-on crash with the auto racers.
Let me explain the ground rules.
The Toronto GP is part of a major race circuit and the organizers have already just announced they have had to cancel the Denver GP because of conflicting events at venues in and around the through-town race track. That sounds a little familiar, don't you think? There is NO way they are going to cancel another race.
The Under-20 World Cup is run by an organization that spends most of its time vying with the Olympics to be the biggest sporting organization on the planet. FIFA simply does NOT change dates for anyone.
Besides, both organizations are way too far down the road with marketing, ticket sales and TV coverage to make any radical alterations now.
Montopoli tried to be honest. He called the situation a "logistical nightmare." He said discussions were ongoing and that compromises would have to be made by both sides. He could not explain how this could have happened in the first place, suggesting the early stuff went down before he joined the CSA. Besides, you can't look backward, was his mantra.
Montopoli says one of the two games of the July 8 double-header might be able to be moved to another location. Reading between the lines, that option could mean a different host city because they all will have the required infrastructure in place. It makes more sense to lean against one of them rather than retrofitting a different Toronto stadium for one game.
That, of course, ignores the question of seats already sold - and they are going fast even before we know for sure who will be playing at the BMO Stadium.
For us outsiders, this is very much a wait-and-see situation. We are left to wonder how on earth spectators can get into the grounds. Will they have to dodge racing cars as they cross the road? Remember, we have two soccer matches to accommodate -- and several races -- not just the Grand Prix.
As if that is not a full net of trouble, everything has to satisfy the big FIFA bosses in Zurich. CSA president Colin Linford says there are continuous reminders that this is FIFA's tournament.
"They just lend it for a week or two and tell you how to run it," he says. "They are the most pedantic, pompous people. They are in a continuous battle with the Olympics over who is the biggest and the most pompous and who has the most money in the bank."
I do not want to completely cover this event with doom and gloom. A compromise will be found and, in most of the other important areas, the sun is shining.
Take TV, where the CBC is the host station. Montopoli says almost 100 countries are taking the feed and he expects that total to pass 100. For the first time, that includes ESPN. Because of this, it is easy to predict that as many as 600 million people will get a glimpse of our country thanks to the tournament. It's not a difficult prediction when you consider the TV figure was more that 500 million with 97 countries tuning in to the last under-20 World Cup in the Netherlands.
Montopoli says he set the total ticket-sale target for all six venues -- Burnaby, Victoria, Edmonton, Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa -- at 520,000. That equals an average 10,000 tickets for each of the 52 matches. The target reached 350,000 at last count and expect somewhere well past 400,000 to be announced on March 3 when the official draw takes place in Toronto. Imagine that. All those tickets are sold without anyone knowing which teams will be playing in their city.
Marcie Morris, general manager for the Ottawa site, says the entire lower tier of Lansdowne Park's south stand is sold out and she is certain the entire stand will be full. The South stand was restricted to soccer club sales with tickets being sold in packages at $60 for all eight matches.
She has her sights set on getting past the 19,000 who showed up for a women's international between Canada and England several years ago.
Now all she wants is a big name from the draw.
"We already know that Canada will play in Edmonton and Portugal in Toronto," she says. "The question is where do Argentina and Brazil go? I would be over the moon if I got one of them."
If that were the case, it would be ticket sales that went over the moon.
richard starnes' Beautiful Game column appears Saturdays. Send comments and suggestions to:
rstarnes@thecitizen.canwest.com.
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Gotta love this Linford quote about FIFA: ""They are the most pedantic, pompous people."
"They just lend it for a week or two and tell you how to run it," he says. "They are the most pedantic, pompous people. They are in a continuous battle with the Olympics over who is the biggest and the most pompous and who has the most money in the bank."
Nice one Mr. Linford.
Yeah, thats what I was thinking as well. Next time, try telling the world through the media or other medium that your bosses at work are " the most pedantic, pompous people". See how long you'll last in your job... I am not suggesting at all that what Linford said about FIFA is not true but, you have to wonder about this guy's judgement. This is guy who is now running the CSA.quote:Originally posted by loyola
"They just lend it for a week or two and tell you how to run it," he says. "They are the most pedantic, pompous people. They are in a continuous battle with the Olympics over who is the biggest and the most pompous and who has the most money in the bank."
Nice one Mr. Linford.
I guess that this is an example of what some people on this board think that this is an improvement over the previous guys.....
Like I have said numerous times. Replacing Smith with Jones (or more appropriately Macdonald with Macnamara)at the CSA accomplishes nothing. Its the whole thinking and approach that needs to change at all levels.
I'm actually quite refreshed by that quote, given the usual ass-kissing that goes on.quote:Originally posted by Free kick
Yeah, thats what I was thinking as well. Next time, try telling the world through the media or other medium that your bosses at work are " the most pedantic, pompous people". See how long you'll last in your job... I am not suggesting at all that what Linford said about FIFA is not true but, you have to wonder about this guy's judgement. This is guy who is now running the CSA.quote:Originally posted by loyola
"They just lend it for a week or two and tell you how to run it," he says. "They are the most pedantic, pompous people. They are in a continuous battle with the Olympics over who is the biggest and the most pompous and who has the most money in the bank."
Nice one Mr. Linford.
I guess that this is an example of what some people on this board think that this is an improvement over the previous guys.....
Somebody finally willing to call a spade a spade, go for it Linford!
You know what though? The scheduling conflict is 100% the CSA's fault and they need to sort it out.
Sorry. They needed to sort it out before a schedule was released months and months ago.
I mean come on. What dumb ass didn't catch this right out of the gate? It's not like this is the 1st or 10th year of the Toronto Grand Prix is it?
So if FIFA is making them sweat it then? Tough. The long and short of it is that the match(s) will just have be moved, time slot or location. And since I just don't expect Toronto to loose any matchs for another location, the events will be rescheduled. So the sooner the better.
The Grand Prix events are written in stone. They will go off as scheduled, according to schedule. They were booked 1st and not 1% of this conflict is their fault. Yeah, they'll just go out and inconvience all their plans to accomodate the CSA schedule out of the kindness of their hearts.
So if the CSA is getting the gears from FIFA they've got it coming and have no right to bitch about FIFA's rigidity.
This time.
Was this one of the nails in Kevan Pipe's proverbial coffin perhaps?
As I said long ago on another thread, the fault lies with the City of Toronto for this. I think the reasons are clear. It was their job to handle approval of schedules for transit and security reasons and someone there totally blew it. Unless the CSA and FIFA did not approve with the city before releasing the sched, which I cannot imagine, that is not how it works anywhere.
As I say, some bureacrat at City Hall missed this and did not do his job, so they should have a hand in sorting it out.
Sure. I'll agree that someone over at Toronto City Hall made an error in allowing July 8th as an available date. But in defence of that someone July 8th is an available date, but only for a late kickoff and definately not for a double header.
Besides, who the Hell wants to compete for print space and sports highlight air-time against a Grand Prix which is going to draw 5x the number of people as your little soccer game?
The CSA schedulers should have had July 8th scratched right off their calender of match dates even before City Hall released their list of available event dates for Ex Place. That the date was even available on the City's list should have been neither here nor there.
This is a real mess, as was predicted many months ago and it should have been sorted out straight away back then. Not 5 months from kick-off. And I'll repeat myself. It's the U20 schedule which has to be sorted out, not the Grand Prix. But how they're going to do that in fairness to the teams in Group C (at least according to FIFA's overseers) I've no idea.
And, just to add to the fun, the Jays play at the Rogers Centre on July 8th.
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