Olympic Stadium executives hope to bring more concerts to the venue. (Courtesy Olympic Park)
Olympic Stadium has been the punchline of its share of jokes — it’s known as The Big O, for instance, but it’s also been called The Big Owe because of its cost.
For Montreal residents, however, it remains an iconic structure, an international symbol built for the 1976 Summer Olympics and linked in the city’s memory to the gold-medal exploits of the Games’ track and field and gymnastics stars.
Forty-two years later, the stadium, which with a little over 56,000 seats has among the largest capacities of any Canadian venue, remains the centerpiece of the Olympic Park district, though it’s not as busy as when it was home to Major League Baseball’s Montreal Expos (see related story).
The Expos left the stadium for Washington, D.C., after the 2004 season and became the Nationals.
In 1998, the Canadian Football League’s Montreal Alouettes moved their home games to Percival Molson Memorial Stadium, a smaller outdoor facility. Major League Soccer’s Montreal Impact play occasional games at Olympic Stadium, especially when they’re expecting a crowd bigger than the 20,801 that their home field, Saputo Stadium, can hold.
Olympic Stadium also plays host to a pair of annual Toronto Blue Jays exhibitions before the regular season and will welcome the Dream Hack esports competition this month. Pollstar data shows only a handful of concerts during the last five years, influenced in part by roof issues at the facility. Over the years, two separate roofs have torn repeatedly under heavy snows and ice storms, canceling several events such as a pair of Rolling Stones concerts in 1998. As a result, the fear of similar problems basically shuts the building down from November through March because no event promoter wants to assume the liability risk.
But things are looking up. In December, the province of Quebec, which owns the facility, committed to paying for a new roof at a cost of about $230 million. The plan is to install it by 2023, three years ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, to be hosted jointly by Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Olympic Stadium is among the three Canadian facilities that will host the 10 matches played in Canada.
In addition to helping attract the World Cup, the new roof should enable stadium officials to book the building 12 months a year and boost the number of annual events. Madonna, AC/DC and Pink Floyd were among the stadium acts that drew big crowds to Montreal, and officials hope a fully functional facility would lure back some of those lucrative concerts.
“There’s a business case to be built around the roof project,” said Maurice Landry, Olympic Park’s vice president of construction and maintenance. “We could book at least double the number of events every year.”
To develop a stronger roof to withstand snow loads and prevent tears, architects and engineers have designed a specialized structure that can be removed for World Cup to comply with FIFA’s requirements for open-air competition.
“We decided to have a central part of (the new roof) that we can remove easily for the few times we can open it,” Landry said.
It’s hoped that the new engineering features will resolve the roof issues, which have plagued Olympic Stadium over the past 30 years.
“In 1987, the first roof we got was retractable but not very good. … We decided to keep it closed until 1998, when it was replaced with the [fixed] roof we have now,” Landry said. “It’s made of fiberglass and Teflon, and we’ve had problems since its installation in 1999.”
Plans also call for an upgrade to the stadium’s lighting and sound systems and the installation of all new seats, Landry said. Those improvements follow renovations made over the past few years. Most recently, the province invested $76 million to renovate the exterior of the tower.
Construction of the tower was completed in 1987, the same year the first roof was installed and 11 years after the stadium first opened.
Standing 540 feet tall and bent at a 45-degree angle, the tower is the highest inclined structure in the world per the Guinness Book of World Records, Landry said.
Last year the tower, whose cables support 75 percent of the stadium’s roof, had new floor-to-ceiling windows installed to replace concrete panels that were part of the original construction. The aesthetic upgrades accommodate Desjardins Bank, Quebec’s largest financial institution, which is now the tower’s primary tenant after signing a 15-year lease.
An additional $34 million was spent to remodel the tower’s interior spaces for 1,000 bank employees who moved in last month across seven floors, Landry said.
“We’re happy to fill the space,” he said.
The tower itself has been a tourist attraction over the years, drawing 250,000 annually to the observatory at the top of the structure, he said.
The stadium is far from the only piece of Olympic Park. An indoor multisports center was renovated in 2015 and stays busy with elite athletes training and competing in Olympic sports. The public has access to those facilities, which include seven swimming pools and a speed skating rink, plus boxing and gymnastics venues, among other high-performance spaces.
About 270,000 patrons used the sports center in 2017 and this year the aquatic facilities will play host to roughly seven to 10 competitive swimming and diving events, Olympic Park spokesman Cedric Essiminy said.
In addition, the esplanade, a large outdoor area next to the stadium, remains active over the summer with action sports events, local orchestras and festivals.
Olympic Stadium has always been a work in progress, with the tower and original roof finished long after the 1976 Games and final construction costs that ballooned from an initial projection of $100 million to a final figure of almost $1.5 billion.
But unlike some sports facilities half its age that have been demolished over the past decade, Olympic Stadium isn’t going anywhere. The cost of tearing it down would exceed $500 million to clear the site, and officials said it’s less expensive to operate and give it a facelift.
Now with renovation plans in place, Montreal looks to write another chapter for the building.
“We just want to say to the market that we’re ready to book concerts and other events,” Landry said. “With 56,000 seats, there are a lot of things we can do. We’ve got flexibility.”