International project
BMX Supercross
T
he BMX Supercross Track Legacy Project from the 2015
Toronto Pan Am Games was designed and constructed to
the exacting standards of the Union Cycliste Internationale
(UCI) certification board. It has been certified by this group
and as such is the only track in Canada to be recognized.
This unconventional project was completed through an
unconventional process. The design team considered
various materials and researched the history of these
facilities throughout the world and in Olympic contests. It is
fairly recent, at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, that BMX racing
became a medal sport.
The site of the track, which was determined prior to the design
team being engaged, was quickly found to be a low point of the
park and its drainage catchment area was en ormous. Building a
dirt track on essentially a catchment area required an extensive
underground drainage system, influencing structural
and civil engineering interventions. These flows had to
be managed to allow the track
to be dry within 30 minutes of
a rainfall, one of the criteria for
the games,
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