Toronto’s a hard city to love

Toronto’s always been a city deeply uncomfortable with its entrenched contradictions. The city supports an NHL team that, despite being the centre of the hockey universe, perpetually fails to make the post-season. It’s led by a drug-addled mayor, who, though stripped of power, remains in charge. Perhaps more puzzling, it’s a city that fought to land the 2016 Pan Am Games and yet, if you believe the 55 per cent tallied in a recent Toronto Star survey, is angry at the traffic delays caused by mass participation events like marathons.

To those who have endured the unique chaos that is race day in Hogtown, the fact that residents would rather see them run a perpetual 2.4K loop in Downsview Park isn’t exactly breaking news.

Toronto’s hard to love, but this may be as much fuelled by a race culture that sees its best efforts lead to confused outcomes as often as anything else. Race day mishaps read like a litany of how not to organize a race: warm-up clothes that take two hours to get to the end of a half-marathon, 10K races that require athletes to line up in order to cross the finish line, inaccurate markers and timing, runners perennially taken off course and, until recently, two marathons that follow almost exactly the same course and occur mere weeks apart. My personal favourite: a TTC streetcar that parked in the middle of a marathon course.

Leaving aside the flaws in the Star survey, claims that events like the GoodLife Marathon and Sporting Life 10K bring in tourist dollars while encouraging people to greater levels of fitness may be overstated.

Economic benefit is notoriously hard to pin down with any degree of accuracy; at best it’s a guess. Economists estimate the number of people that would not be in the city without the event. They then approximate how much they will spend, but according to Patrick Rishe, in a December 2012 piece in Forbes magazine, most analyses incorrectly include people who already reside in the area, which, in Toronto, is the vast majority of participants.

Rishe pegged the actual economic benefit of the NYC Marathon closer to USD$140 million, less than half of the $340 million that proponents had projected. Consequently, any economic projections made regarding Toronto distance events, races that have nowhere near the cache or draw of majors like New York and Boston, need to come with some serious caveats.

The impact on fitness is also overstated.

Distance events — particularly the half- and full-marathon — are not the domain of the young. Filled instead by predominantly middle-aged runners suffering through an off-the-couch feat of endurance, suggest that, while these races may encourage participation, they undermine the ideal that marathons promote fitness. With marathon finishes averaging closer to five hours than three hours, the connection between racing and a steady running program is also unclear.

But one fact stands out.

The last competitor in the 2014 Scotia Waterfront Marathon crossed the line five-and-a-half hours after the winner. Marathons take up a lot of time, real estate and cause significant delays. The majority has a point; seven odd hours of road closures may not be worth it.

But questions concerning the benefits of large-scale athletic events miss the point. Collective gatherings that assemble large crowds of like-minded people are fun. Cities like Ottawa and Vancouver are happy to put their streets on hold for a day. If the citizens of Toronto need the intrinsic benefits explained it’s unlikely they’re going to get it. Runners should take the hint and decamp to locales that welcome them.