The 30th anniversary celebration of the 1994 Commonwealth Games drew a direct line over three decades to the recently completed 2024 Paris Olympics and next week’s start of the 2024 Paris Paralympics.
That’s due to the legacy programs of the Victoria Games, administered through the Pacific Institute for Sport Education on the Camosun College Interurban campus, Canadian Sport Institute-Pacific and 94 Forward.
The programs helped train several of the athletes who competed for Canada in the Olympics and who will be competing in the Paralympics, which begin Wednesday.
“We punched well above our weight to stage the 1994 Games and now the legacy and the spirit from those Games carries on,” said PISE CEO Robert Bettauer, at a ceremony held Thursday at PISE to commemorate the 30th anniversary.
“A big part of what happens in the Olympics and Paralympics for Canada comes through here. It’s one-stop shopping here for Canadian athletes. We are a living legacy of the wonderful 1994 Games.”
A key component of that is 94 Forward, which administers the Victoria Commonwealth Games legacy fund now capitalized at close to $25 million, and which helps train Canadian Olympians and Paralympians.
“We were able to fund 3,500 hours of training in Victoria for 160 athletes in the last year in rowing, rugby, swimming, diving, triathlon, cycling, track, boxing and skateboarding,” said 94 Forward president John MacMillan.
“Paralympic athletes who will be making headlines over the next two weeks in Paris trained here, about 150 feet from where I am standing.”
The Victoria Games legacy programs have produced champions.
“I been able to take advantage of the sports structures and facilities that have come out of those Games,” said Dom Seiterle, who won a gold medal with the Island-based Canadian men’s rowing eight at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
“The programs that have come out of the legacy fund, it’s only gotten better,” Seiterle said.
The intangibles of what transpired 30 years ago are not forgotten, either, as the Victoria Games welcomed back South Africa and bade farewell to Hong Kong, as the pageant of history continued to unfold.
“I remember being exhausted at the opening ceremony because it took six years to get there,” said Murray Coell, the mayor of Saanich at the time.
“It was worth it because it changed my community for the better,” added Coell, who spoke at the anniversary event Thursday.
“I have such tremendous memories because of the coming together of the community to put on a tremendous Games — probably the best-ever Games. The 14,000 volunteers changed Victoria in itself.”
Unlike past public anniversaries of the Victoria Games, such as the 20th and 25th, the 30th Thursday was mostly for the sports community and officials.
Among the initiatives announced to commemorate the 30th anniversary is the Gift of Potential program that will give youth 13 to 18 more opportunity to participate in PISE sporting services to keep them active through those crucial years.
Also to mark the occasion of the three-decade anniversary, 94 Forward has digitized and is placing on YouTube all 11 programs of the Spirit of the Games, a local cable TV series produced by Rob Lowrie that ran on Rogers during the 1994 Commonwealth Games, and was separate from the wider CBC Games coverage of the sporting events.
The half-hour programs are being loaded on to YouTube daily in order from Aug. 18-28, the dates the 1994 Games ran. The entire series will then reside on YouTube.
