When the recent Gay Pride Celebration ended, the organizers – as they have for years – announced that a million people attended the parade on the last day. Many media outlets reported this, even though a million is impossible.

Same thing with next weekend’s Caribana Festival. Radio and TV reporters, in particular, will casually mention a million people will either attend, or have attended, the big parade without having any idea what they’re talking about.

But, like it or not, we live in a world of attendance figures. The media want to know – or be able to say – how many people showed up for whatever event they’re reporting on, be it a Blue Jays game, an Argos game, Taste of the Danforth or the Santa Claus parade.

It is what it is and the owners and promoters of the Honda Indy Toronto – Kim Green and Kevin Savoree – are playing with fire by continuing to refuse to put a number on attendance.

Despite some reports, there was a good, healthy crowd on hand for last Sunday’s race. But some in the media – and reporters are usually skeptical about many things but their antennae really start buzzing when people won’t answer questions directly – got suspicious about the true number when the owners wouldn’t say.

So, it would be in the event’s best interests to come clean, starting in 2011.

Here’s why: one of these years, somebody is going to call their bluff and they could wind up being burned.

Example: The Indianapolis Motor Speedway has never released attendance figures for the Indianapolis 500, preferring to let reporters do the estimating. So, for years, 300,000 was the accepted attendance. Then it started to creep up and, for awhile, it was routinely reported that 400,000 were there.

Indianapolis Star reporter Curt Cavin decided to find out for sure. It took him six months, but he counted all the seats in the grandstands and the suites. He found out how many tickets, credentials and passes were handed out to police, racing drivers, crew members, food-service people, ticket-takers, doctors and nurses, infield standees and so-on and reported that if the event was sold out, there would be 267,925 people on the grounds.

That’s a huge crowd, but it’s not 300,000 or 400,000.

Example: Does anybody remember the first public service union demonstration against the Mike Harris government back in 1995? It started at the CNE and went up University Avenue to Queen’s Park. The number of people who took part, as estimated by organizers and reported by most media, was 100,000.

But a newspaper had taken aerial photographs of the demonstration. It took a few days, but they “blew up” all the photos and counted all the heads in the pictures and discovered the demonstration had, in fact, been attended by just over 14,000 people.

So it’s best to ‘fess up because, sooner or later, somebody – if they really want to – is going to find out the truth. And because public money is involved – a million dollars a year from the provincial government, a pledge of more than $700,000 for infrastructure improvements from Ottawa – an attendance figure will become imperative, at some point.

Having said the above, I want to stress that much of the cynicism about the Honda Indy is misdirected and the criticism is unfair. You can’t compare the 2009 or 2010 Honda Indy Toronto to the Molson Indys of days gone by. They are apples and oranges.

•� There was no race in 2008, which made the 2009 edition brand-new – new owners of the event, new series, new drivers. The Blue Jays saw their attendance plummet after the 1994 players’ strike wiped out baseball for a season but at least they had the same product. The Honda Indy owners had to literally start from scratch when they revived the race.

•� Molson owned that race for 20 years (1986 through 1985) and poured millions and millions of dollars into it. So did Player’s. People forget that the cigarette companies were driven out of the sport in the early 2000s. There is a direct correlation between promotion and attendance up to and including 2003 when Player’s was involved and the decline in interest and attendance that culminated in 2008 when the event was cancelled altogether.

•� When Molson and Player’s were involved, they could afford to fund the promotion for 50 weeks of the year. The full-time staff of the Molson Indy – up to a dozen people – would take two weeks off after that year’s race and then start working on the buildup to the next one. Like the Jays and the Leafs now, the off-season public relations never stopped.

•� When Molson was involved, they gave away the beer. Yes, they had to charge something because the LLBO insisted on it, but you could purchase a 16-oz. cup of beer for $2. I know people who would take the TTC to the Indy and never leave the beer gardens because the suds were so cheap.

(It’s sure not that way any more. The non-brewery-connected vendors were dinging people $8.50 for a 12-oz. bottle last weekend and that, as much as anything else, was why the beer gardens were empty.)

•� Then, of course, there is The Show itself. Prior to 1996, when the IRL triggered the Indy car civil war, the best of the best – the cream of the crop – showed up to race in Toronto. By 2003, with the exception of a couple of teams – Forsythe and Newman-Haas – the best teams and the best drivers had left. The on-track product suffered greatly after that and attendance plunged, as a result.

And let’s face it: while the calibre of racing drivers is improving, the 2010 crop is still not what it was back in the 1980s to mid-90s. The bashing and crashing that went on last Sunday would just not have happened in the “glory years.” Yes, there were accidents back then, but not the large number of purely careless incidents we’re witnessing today.

And people in Toronto aren’t suckers: they just won’t pay to go to a major-league event, only to see minor-leaguers like Mario Moraes, Milka Duno and at least a half-dozen others pretending to be capable racing drivers.

When you put all this together, the Honda Indy owners have got a monumental task ahead of them.

But they could also borrow a page from the Blue Jays, who point to television ratings to support their contention that although the Rogers Centre is more than half empty most nights they play, baseball is still very popular.

My colleague, Chris Zelkovich, who’s the Star’s media expert, emailed me that 186,000 households in Canada watched the race last Sunday, which was carried on the cable channel TSN2 (which has significantly fewer subscribers than the main TSN channel).

And about one million households watched it on ABC in the United States, which – according to Chris – is about the same number the average regular-season NHL game gets on NBC.

Those are pretty good numbers – all public – to build on.