West threw his microphone up in the air, with it smashing on the floor, before exiting the stage. I guess they only paid him till 10pm.
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Mr Kardashian was reportedly facing technical difficulties while performing a medley of hits at the closing ceremony.
In a continuing trend when it comes to booking Kanye for music events, 50,000 people signed a petition ahead of the Games to lobby against his billing.
Much as we were enjoying the sport three days into the Pan American Games, we just felt it needed a story to spark it into life, something really interesting to get our journalistic juices flowing.
Next came the flag bearers, with Kia Nurse doing the honour for Canada.
Most of the Pan Am Games’ $2.5-billion budget comes from the federal, provincial and Toronto governments, with ticket sales expected to cover about $40 million. Purves and McKelvie were part of a group of eight women who play together on a volleyball team in Sarnia and travelled together to Toronto to watch the Pan Am games.
There was the handover ceremony – the symbolic transfer of Pan Am responsibility to 2019 host city Lima – which was followed by a creative segment during which a little Peruvian boy journeyed around the world with his alpaca (or this was how the plot was explained in the show’s companion literature).
Cheering fans packed the stands over the 16 days of competition, Canadian athletes reached new heights on home soil, and widespread fears that the city would grind to a standstill never fully materialized.
The crowd at Toronto’s Rogers Centre had already cheered on athletes from 41 nations, and performances by Pitbull and Serena Ryder.
The finale saw fireworks explode off the CN Tower on screen.
Hamilton cyclist Sean MacKinnon thought the brouhaha over West’s Pan Am gig was “funny”, and looks forward to seeing him perform Sunday. The relative smallness of some of the venues no doubt helped to enhance this feeling, but it was clear Torontonians were fully embracing these Games and just walking around the Exhibition Park revived memories of similar feelings at London 2012.
The mayor said he would wait until the August. 7-15 ParaPan Games are completed, before he dives into planning for an Olympic bid that would require widespread support from all three levels of government: Toronto city council, provincial and federal governments which will have to provide financial guarantees.
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Canada finished second to the United States in the Pan Am Games medal count and won a record number.
