Sports in Toronto Summer Olympic Games five times: 1960, 1964, 1976, 1996 and 2008. The closest it came to winning the games was in 2008, when it finished second to Beijing by a vote of 56-22. Varsity Stadium on the campus of the University of Toronto, hosted some of the matches of the Olympic football tournament of the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. The first major multi-sport event that the city of Toronto hosted was the 1976 Summer Paralympics. It was the fifth edition of the Paralympic Games and the first time it was hosted in Canada. In 2009, Toronto submitted a bid
Olympic Games Evangelos Zappas, a wealthy Greek-Romanian philanthropist, first wrote to King Otto of Greece, in 1856, offering to fund a permanent revival of the Olympic Games. Zappas sponsored the first Olympic Games in 1859, which was held in an Athens city square. Athletes participated from Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Zappas funded the restoration of the ancient Panathenaic Stadium so that it could host all future Olympic Games. The stadium hosted Olympics in 1870 and 1875. Thirty thousand spectators attended that Games in 1870, though no official attendance records are available for the 1875 Games. In 1890, after attending the Olympian