LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH BIG OWE
Olympic Stadium has a special place in our hearts, but enough is enough
It is part vision and part curse, part boondoggle and part object d’art, part headache and part of our identity.
By now, 40 years after its debut at the opening ceremony for the 1976 Olympics, the Olympic Stadium is so much a part of our consciousness that if the praying-mantis tower and the vast, turtleshell hulk of the stadium below it were torn down, it would leave a yawning gap on the eastern skyline — the urban equivalent of a hockey player surrendering three teeth to an errant puck.
Former mayor Jean Drapeau’s billion-dollar baby is, dollar-fordollar, one of the most ruinously expensive stadiums ever built, the catastrophe on Pierre-deCoubertin. Mention the Olympics to any Montrealer and it’s the first thing that comes to mind: the Big Owe. While there were problems with the lesser projects surrounding it, from the Velodrome to the ziggurat design of the Olympic Village, it was the Big O itself that sucked up most of the dollars and became a never-ending source of controversy.
Never-ending, as in right up to the present, with a committee chaired by Lise Bissonnette even suggesting that architect Roger Taillibert’s original design for a retractable roof might be feasible because of technological improvements and the OIB proposing to spend another $300 million for yet another roof on this fiasco.
And why would we do that? Because, the Olympic Installations Board claimed, it would cost $700 million to tear the whole thing down. That absurd figure has been widely debunked, but the new roof idea won’t go away, even though the cost would be almost that of a new, downtown ballpark for a reborn Expos baseball team.
Like most Montrealers, I suspect, I have a love-hate relationship with the Olympic Stadium. Deep inside, we all know that the logical, reasonable thing to do would be to tear it down, to make it disintegrate into confetti-sized bits of concrete and metal, to truck the remnants away and try to forget that it ever happened. But by now, the Big O has become like that obnoxious family member: After all these years, you’d almost be sorry to see him go.
I’ve seen the Big O in most of it incarnations, good and bad. After spending a good part of my youth with the solitary goal of winning Olympic gold as a high jumper for the U.S. team, I thought I would console myself in 1976 by buying a ticket to watch the high jump event at the Big O. I made my first trip out to the stadium, settled into my seat staring up at the overhanging roof in awe and tingling with anticipation — until I glanced at the schedule and discovered that I had purchased a ticket for the wrong day.
It was a bittersweet experience, like most interactions with the stadium. I’ve sat in former Expos manager Felipe Alou’s office and had some of the most interesting conversations of my life and I’ve covered baseball games with 4,000 fans in the cavernous stadium.
I’ve attended Sunday doubleheaders for the Expos when there were 50,000 screaming fans in attendance, when you could bring your own beer and build beer-can pyramids in the bleachers. I’ve covered Grey Cups and Impact openers, soccer’s Women’s World Cup and pennant races. I’ve watched (on a tiny black-andwhite television) as Rick Monday’s home run off Steve Rogers sailed over the fence, the beginning of the end for the Expos.
I’ve watched the Rolling Stones from a vantage point so far back that Mick Jagger looked like an exotic species of hyperactive grasshopper and the acoustics made it all sound like mud. And for the past three springs, I’ve attended Blue Jays news conferences in the bowels of the stadium and tried to figure out how the temperature and humidity down there could reach sauna levels in early April.
If the stadium seems almost like a living thing, it’s probably because we’ve watched since the stadium was a gleam in Drapeau’s eye, the love child of his passion for Taillibert’s innovative, sometimes grandiose designs.
The Olympic Stadium was born in secrecy, with Drapeau reaching a pact with Taillibert and work on the design beginning shortly after Montreal’s winning bid to host the 1976 Games — and long before the deal was made public. Drapeau feared (with reason) that Canadians would be outraged that he had hired a French architect over all the available Canadian architects without any form of public consultation or competition.
The secret deal with Taillibert did not come to light until 1972 — but that was Drapeau’s style, at once autocratic and secretive. Montreal should have had plenty of time to build the stadium, but work at the Olympic Park did not begin until April 28, 1973 — almost three years after the city’s winning bid in Amsterdam.
Construction began with a Big Dig: 2.3 million cubic metres of clay and limestone were removed and hauled away and by August 1974, the first support columns, cast on-site, were beginning to appear. But with the cost of materials escalating, Taillibert refused to compromise on his design. Winter weather slowed the construction even further and the powerful labour unions, sensing they had Drapeau where they wanted him, walked out in May 1975 and did not return to work until Oct. 26.
The province created the OIB, Taillibert was fired, the roof design was scrapped for the time being and construction was completed in a final rush of overtime bills. Once the Olympics were over, artificial turf was installed for baseball and football, and the Expos played their first game in their new home on April 15, 1977.
The tower (at 165 metres, the world’s tallest inclined tower) was finally finished in 1987 and the original Kevlar roof, which looked like a giant orange prophylactic, was installed.
In June 1989, the roof ripped during a tractor pull event and 8,000 people had to leave the stadium. In June 1991, a 30x15metre hole tore open during a windstorm. In January 1998, ice and snow tore another hole in the roof, forcing the cancellation of two Rolling Stones concerts.
In 1991, a 55-tonne beam fell from above a walkway inside the stadium. Officials were quick to reassure the public that no one was underneath it, leading to Albert Nerenberg’s immortal line in the defunct Daily News: “How do they know?”
The Kevlar roof was sold and replaced with a fixed roof. In January 1999, sections of that roof tore and pieces of roof, along with ice and snow, rained down on 200 people below who were preparing for an auto show. The auto show moved elsewhere.
In 2004, the Expos finally gave up the ghost and moved to Washington, D.C.
In November 2006, the tab for the stadium was finally paid off at a total official cost of $1.47 billion — far in excess of the original estimate, which said that the total cost of the Montreal Olympics would be $310 million, with $134 million allocated for the stadium.
Things haven’t improved. The 2015 report from the OIB says that the roof was torn in 6,776 places and cost $454,000 to repair, down from $1.4 million in 2014 — this for a stadium that hasn’t had a permanent tenant since the Expos left 12 years ago.
The design has been hailed as a masterpiece of Organic Modern architecture and panned as early Space Age neo-fascist. The truest thing you can say about the design is that it’s good from far, but far from good — the stadium looks quite attractive from the lookout on Mount Royal, say, but the closer you are, the uglier it gets.
Taillibert, still active at 91, insists that his was a wonderful design. And aside from the fact that it was ruinously expensive and the retractable roof didn’t work, perhaps it was.
But enough is enough. The only sensible thing to do is to tear it down. We’ll miss it sometimes but once the Olympic Stadium is no more, it will be like that old Roy Clark country song: Thank God and Greyhound She’s Gone.
If the stadium seems almost like a living thing, it’s probably because we’ve watched since the stadium was a gleam in Drapeau’s eye, the love child of his passion for Taillibert’s innovative, sometimes grandiose designs.