Edmonton goes Big for event Celebration
Alberta capital goes big on everything from ziplines and ski hills to e-sports tourneys
It is around midday on the eve of the Grey Cup Festival and the prep work around the entrance looks fairly typical. People are putting up signage and scaffolding and light standards. Then a worker walks by with a couple of large inner tubes in his arms, of the type used on a ski hill.
Wait, what?
It’s for the tobogganing slope, you see. The one erected in the middle of Jasper Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares in Edmonton. The toboggan run is a little west of the bungee jump. And also the ski slope. And in between both of those is the launch tower for the zipline, which begins up on Jasper Avenue and ends way down there in Louise Mckinney Riverfront Park in the valley of the North Saskatchewan River. How long is the zipline? The organizers were not immediately sure, so I will go with this: pants-wettingly long.
This is my third Grey Cup in a professional capacity and the other two were in Ontario. The constant refrain from colleagues, fans and other CFL types was a Grey Cup could not be experienced in its entirety unless it was in the West. Fair enough. Even a Toronto-based writer is well aware the beating heart of the CFL is somewhere out there where there is wheat in the fields and oil in the ground. But even knowing that, this Grey Cup shindig is setting up to be something else. The festivities haven’t even kicked off and it is apparent the organizers are trying to throw the type of party that would blow the doors off the place, but for the fact the Grey Cup Festival mostly lacks doors.
“There hasn’t been anything like this before,” festival executive director Duane Vienneau said Tuesday. He had the same role in 2010, when the big game was last in the Alberta capital, and the site was then located a few blocks away in Sir Winston Churchill Square.
That location wasn’t available this time around due to ongoing construction and after many meetings and discussions, approval was eventually gained to hold the festival on Jasper. The zipline that had been popular in 2010 — and was itself inspired by the one that was at the Vancouver Olympics that year — wasn’t going to be repeated, as Vienneau said they wanted to come up with something new and fresh.
But Capital Power, the sponsor that presented the zipline eight years ago, had a simple requirement: more zipline, please. And so the resulting contraption is different just by virtue of its scenic, daunting location. And it’s supplemented by all the other stuff: the tube slide and ski hill, both using a slippery artificial surface that does not require snow, and the various stages and tents.
There is a “sports bar,” which is in effect a giant beer tent, with an estimated capacity of 2,000 thirsty souls. There is the Family Zone tent with a smaller version of the tube slide, a practice field and a Canadian Football Hall of Fame exhibit. This is the place you take your young kids to while looking longingly at the beer tent.
There is a gaming zone, another big tent that will, among other things, have a weekend-long e-sports tournament, which is a thing that all the young people are into, I’m often told. There’s an inflatable igloo, which marketing director Lauren Farnell informs me is “technically a chill zone, but it’s actually the opposite.” It has heaters and whatnot and it’s where you would go to warm up once standing around in the northern Alberta cold lost its appeal. (Conveniently for all involved, the forecast for the next few days is unexpectedly mild.)
The festival footprint, which covers between three and four city blocks, is more than four times the size of Edmonton’s Grey Cup Festival of eight years ago. While it’s hard to put a specific number on likely attendees since it’s not ticketed and people can wander in and out of the actual site and the surrounding commercial area at their leisure, Vienneau estimated somewhere around 30,000 to 40,000 visitors on a daily basis.
It would not surprise you to learn this is utterly unlike the festival week that took place in Toronto in 2016, where you had to look very hard to discover that the Grey Cup was, in fact, taking place. Tens of people attended the outdoor events in that city at any one time. Even last year in Ottawa, where the CFL has been a huge success in its return, the festival had a big party venue at Lansdowne Park and an outdoor stage, but the rest of the site was relatively sparsely attended.
It also rained a lot, so that didn’t help.
This year, though, they are setting up for a giant party and they expect the people of Edmonton will be happy to oblige.
“Our goal was to raise the bar,” said Vienneau. “Hopefully, it continues to be raised.”
Calgary hosts the Grey Cup in 2019. Consider the gauntlet well and truly thrown.