Canada made a superb start to the Games when taekwondo star Ivett Gonda (pictured left) claimed the country's first gold medal, with a comfortable 13-6 victory over Lizbeth Julissa Diez Canseco (right) of Peru in the women's 49-kilogram event.


The Canadian team will be hoping to follow Gonda's lead and better the tally of 39 gold medals, which they secured at the last Pan American Games in Rio in 2007 where they finished fourth on the medal table.

But Cardyn said that one of the biggest objectives for Canada at the competition was to use the event to help finalise their preparations for the London 2012 Olympics where they are targeting their highest position in the medals table at a Summer Games for 20 years.

"We have different objectives for all of the teams and sports here because for some sports this is an Olympic qualifying event and for others it is not," Cardyn told insidethegames.

"But one of the keys is using the event to prepare for London 2012 and in that respect this is a major test event for the Olympics.

"We are using this event to test everything from coaches, to medical staff, to transport, to media communications and all of our other Games-time operations.

"So this is fantastic opportunity for us to fine tune our preparations.

"But this competition itself has taken on added significance for Canada because we are hosting the next Pan American Games in 2015.

"Toronto 2015 will be the first major multisport event we will host since the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympics so the interest in the competition is starting to rise in Canada because of that.

"Achieving a good finish on the medal table here would be an important building block to a strong performance in Toronto in four years' time."


Cardyn, a former fencer who competed in the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics, added that Canada has also bought a large team to the 2011 Pan American Games to learn from the competition ahead of Toronto.

"We have a big delegation from the Toronto 2015 team here led by Organising Committee chief executive Ian Troop to observe and learn about what is going on here," he said.

"They will look at strong points and the weak ones and make sure that they can take the best possible aspects of these Games and translate them to Toronto."

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