I'm being realistic. Have you, or anybody that you know ever talked about or even acknowledged the existence of the Pan Am games before Toronto 'won' the bid? Nobody gives a shit about this sideshow - especially in North America. It will attract practically zero television revenue, and that's what sporting events rely upon. Not only that, but none of the facilities are even Olympic-worthy, which is presumably why this boondoggle was bid upon in the first place: to support a future Olympic bid. This is going to be such a huge financial fail that it will set back any potential Olympic bid by decades, if not permanently. And there's absolutely no prestige involved in hosting the Pan Am games. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and Winnipeg hosted this shitshow FFS!!
Sure, we can poke fun at the Pan Am games by linking to a comedy show in Melbourne making fun of how hard it is to get rid of badminton and lawn bowling tickets (guess what, these events are tough sells in Olympic cities too) or we could link to the KPMG report showing a $2.9B economic impact of the games (split roughly half and half between pre games construction type impact and during/post games tourism type impact).......I will let you pick which is the more credible source but if you like the KPMG report you might want these games to have as much impact as the 2006 Commonwealth games.
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/research/bitstream/handle/10453/19802/econ_impact_report.pdf?sequence=1
You could, also, poke fun at the fact that Winnipeg and Santo Domingo are previous hosts leaving out that Rio, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Chicago have also hosted. That is kinda like saying why would we want to host the summer olympics....Helsinki and Antwerp have done that?
The Pan Ams are what they are, the real boost we will get is that they really matter to countries in central and south america. They matter, in part, because these are sporting nations that have national pride and these games are where they are most competitive. Toronto, I believe, has a pretty good reputation as a summer (by our calender) holiday destination for those countries and I expect you are going to hear a lot of Spanish being spoken in the streets of Toronto in 2015....and I think Torontonians will rise, late, to that fervour/passion from the south and show up to events.
EDIT: Hamilton, in particular, will get a big summer boost......it was a sort of fumble and dribble way of getting there but after all the fits and starts and changes to what they would get/host....they ended up with "just" all of the soccer games.......it won't be the full international teams but a tournament of pretty good Argentinians, Uruguayans, Brazilians, etc will turn downtown Hamilton into the place to be for a few weeks!