Unimpressive work by Big O panel

Group did not leverage goodwill and credibility into recommendations to get the white elephant back onto the scene

How can the uninviting, underused Olympic Stadium become less of a white elephant? Such was the excellent question that the stadium’s landlord, the provincial government’s Olympic Installations Board, asked an advisory committee to answer a year and a half ago.

The panel has enjoyed good credibility. Heading it was an outsider, Lise Bissonnette, the former all-star journalist who had gone on to win plaudits as the first director of the very inviting and greatly used Bibliothèque nationale. With her rare combination of imagination and pragmatism, she seemed as able as anyone to make the case — if that case exists — that critics are wrong to want the stadium’s demolition.

Her panel’s eagerly awaited final report came out this week, and it’s unimpressive. Here are its main recommendations:

The committee proposes turning the stadium into an “ecosystem of physical activity, recreation and sports for people of all ages and at all levels” — including school sports, amateur sports, elite-level sports and professional sports. Quibbles over the word “ecosystem” aside, this general concept makes sense. After all, what could be more logical than using an athletic facility for athletics?

Indeed, this had been mayor Jean Drapeau’s intention when he conceived the stadium in the 1960s, and a post-Olympics committee headed by urban expert Jean-Claude Marsan a decade later reached the same conclusion.

But there’s the thing: A useful report would try to push beyond this bromide generality and provide specifics. For example, it would give a rough idea of which schools or sports organizations might actually want to use the facility for training and competing. The report does not do that. Nor does it identify for what sports there might be demand.

Swimming? Baseball? Soccer? Football? Tennis? No clue.

That’s surprising. Without presenting some information on the degree of demand, it’s naive to propose turning the colossal facility into a comprehensive centre — excuse me, ecosystem — for sport. You can’t just assume that enough demand exists. That’s what Drapeau did, and look where that got us.

It’s worth noting that the Bissonnette panel published a preliminary report last December that synthesized non-judgmentally the ideas that it had received at public consultations. Many of these were precise and intriguing.

Examples: Some of Canada’s Olympic teams might train at the Big O, including those for basketball, swimming and volleyball; international events such as the Jeux de la francophonie or the Universiades (for university athletes) might use it and top-level hockey, skating and curling teams might train at a new indoor arena — if it were built.

Yet the final report does not follow up to see if such ideas are realistic. It shouldn’t have taken much work to, say, write to sports authorities to ask they’d even consider moving their training operations to Montreal.

Some 40 years after Drapeau first lofted it, then, the idea of the stadium as a sports centre remains as pie in the sky as ever.

The panel proposes making room somewhere in the Parc Olympique for a museum on the history of sport.

The problem: Museums cost a pretty sum to set up and run, and Montreal is already practically crawling with publicly funded museums that focus on history (see list). Do we need another one?

Granted, Montreal doesn’t have one on the history of sport per se. Yet hockey is the sport most identified with this city, and the Canadiens’ Hall of Fame (privately funded) at the Bell Centre qualifies as a museum. Other museums, including the McCord, sometimes feature expositions on sports history.

Bissonnette also addresses the ever-thorny question of a roof for the stadium. For many years, three options have been under consideration: a retractable roof, a fixed roof and no roof. Bissonnette wants a retractable model.

The SNC-Lavalin version of such a roof has been estimated at $300 million. Bissonnette, however, opts for re-examining the original design by Roger Taillibert. Her report says new materials and engineering techniques — neither of which it identifies — justify this.

Meanwhile, the financially pressed provincial government this month slashed $124 million from this fiscal year’s budgets for universities and another $50 million for ... surgeries.

Time and again, this report asks for more study. Experts, it says, would have to ponder the roof, the museum concept, other tourism possibilities, the problematic adaptability of the tower’s interior to new uses, the conversion of the OIB to new autonomous status, etc.

Sounds like the Bissonnette committee has unwittingly found a surefire vocation for the Big O: Make it an ecosystem for consult

ants.