In 17 days all eyes will be on Thunder Bay for the 2024 Ontario Winter Games, where thousands of athletes, coaches, support staff, volunteers and fans from across the province will go for gold in 13 different sporting events.

Behind the scenes preparation work continues by members of the organizing committee.

Community Volunteer Chair Barry Strieb says the push to bring volunteers onboard last fall paid off with a thousand people signing up.

“That’s exciting because they’re actually make the event, they are the backbone, you can’t do these times of events without volunteers.”

Karen Kadolph is the Game’s Special Events Committee Chair and is leading the preparation work for the opening ceremonies.

She calls that support the commitment the city has towards success.

“We have the ability to host these kinds of events, we prove it time and time again,” she says noting they ended up suffering a little bit from success. “Even when we’re talking about those thousand volunteers. We had to cut off our volunteer recruitment because we had so many people that were excited to help us out.”

As the clock counts down to the opening ceremonies, Kadolph adds she is amazed to see all the finer details begin to come out, which has only amplified the excitement factor.

Events are slated to take place over the weekends of the 16th and 23rd of February.

The Ontario Winter Games were last held in Thunder Bay in 1974.