With all the pomp and circumstance a person can have while stretching to untie a giant grey tarp yesterday, Jean-Paul Deveau unveiled the new 2011 Canada Games Centre sign on the Mainland Common in Clayton Park.
Blue-and-white stick people flip, swim and wield rackets across the bottom, showing the centre’s three uses: Artistic gymnastics, synchronized swimming and badminton.
“I’m so pleased that the big, beautiful $40.5-million facility being built right across the street will hence forth be known as — drum roll — the Canada Games Centre,” Deveau, the Canada Games Committee chair for the 2011 Games in Halifax, announced during a press conference across from the construction site.
Slated to be open in November 2010, the 176,000-square-foot centre will boast a field house complete with a 200-metre running track, a youth centre, a training pool, a leisure pool and even a spiral water slide. The site is currently home to boulders, a giant crane and the first beams of a steel skeleton.
Halifax will host the 2011 Canada Winter Games from Feb. 11 to 27.
