So:
Quebec on Monday morning confirmed that repairs to the Olympic Stadium’s roof and ring will come with a price tag of $870 million.
Without looking, let’s try to guess possible reasons for the province to be doing this for a stadium that is currently home to no sports teams at all: Montreal wanted to upgrade the stadium to play host to the 2026 World Cup? Someone struck oil on government land in St.-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! and the premier had to figure out how to spend all the windfall cash? A clause in the will of Canada’s richest person (probably a Labatt, or maybe some kind of maple syrup baron) requires Montreal to have an operable dome for it to inherit his money?
The answer is none of the above:
Tourism Minister Caroline Proulx said at a news conference that the Olympic Stadium would be ideal for large international concerts, pointing to mega-stars like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen who didn’t tour in Quebec last year.
The government predicts that, with its new roof, the stadium will attract larger events, possibly generating as much as $1.5 billion from tourism and other sources over 10 years….
Demolishing the Olympic Stadium was simply not an option as it would have to be dismantled “brick by brick” as to not damage the surrounding park and Metro line, which would cost about $2 billion, said Proulx.
So there you have it: If Quebec spends a mere $870 million on stadium upgrades, Taylor Swift will come play there, and
> ? > Profit.
Like the
original stadium itself, the roof replacement has seen its cost estimate skyrocket in just a few years, from
$250 million in 2017 to nearly three and a half times that today, assuming $870 million actually turns out to get the job done, which is never a safe bet especially with Olympic Stadium. As for that $2 billion demolition price tag, that’s soared as well — from
a mere $500-700 million in 2017 — and seems a little crazy given the
typical costs of stadium demolition, but the number must be right, as it comes from [citation needed]. (It’s also worth noting that Olympic Stadium is made of poured concrete, so “brick by brick” is a metaphor, or possibly a bad translation from French, qui peut dire?)
CBC News did find one person in Montreal to be aghast at the prospect of spending almost a billion dollars to repair a stadium that nobody likes and is almost never used, and it was economist Moshe Lander:
Moshe Lander, a professor in the economics department at Concordia University, says it would still be a better idea to “put it out of its misery and knock it down.”
Though it would cost more to do so, “it’s only once,” he said.
Lander points out that construction projects never meet their deadlines. With inflation, labour costs, delays and unexpected factors, it could take twice as long and cost twice as much to replace the roof, he said.
The Olympic Stadium also doesn’t have a tenant since major league baseball is not coming back, the Alouettes are not playing there and neither is Montreal’s MLS soccer team. As for concerts, Lander says the acoustic of the “concrete bowl” aren’t sound.
“Ask anyone who went to see Metallica there,” he said.
Oof, is the sound really that bad?
Hmm, yeah, seems to be, and
r/Metallica agrees. I’m sure it’ll be better for Taylor Swift, though, or Bruce Springsteen if he’s still touring at age 79 when the new roof is done. If not, maybe Quebec can just buy a new billion-dollar sound system.
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Nobody believes it would cost $2 billion to demolish a stadium, but let’s assume for a minute that figure is accurate. It never goes away. The stadium needs to come down eventually, so blowing close to a billion on a new roof is just a billion on top of the 2 bill it will eventually cost to demolish.
There is an amount of ‘justification of self existence’ involved with anything to do with the Olympic Installations Board, certainly.
However, they are absolutely correct about it not being anything like a ‘standard demolition’. The stadium would have to be disassembled as noted in the article, which would require a very lengthy and expensive project in which the ‘above ground’ material is removed without disturbing the below ground infrastructure (mainly, but not only, the metro).
Look closely at the (one off) Taillibert design: It was never meant to be disassembled and cannot be imploded.
And even after you disassemble it, you can’t use the site for just anything else or abandon it… so it is going to cost Montrealers (and Quebecers) money going forward either way. There is no way to limit the Olympic Stadium discussion to “committed or sunk” costs. They will go on regardless.
Bad planning, bad execution, corruption, stupidity, lack of oversight, corruption, organized crime, political incompetence, cultural hero worship, corruption, etc etc.
There are many, many things that contributed to “this problem”, but fixing it is not as easy as walking away. It is in every way that matters, the gift that keeps on taking. And, unless you want to cut off major metro lines to Montreal east – where most of the pop growth has been since the late 1970s, there’s just no way to ‘fix’ this.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that the “Big Owe” opened in 1976, but the roof wasn’t installed until 1987. So, the stadium can be used without a roof. The most prudent way to keep the stadium functional may be to just remove the roof now and focus on summer events.
From what I can tell, 2024 is the first time Metallica has played Olympic Stadium since 8/8/92 when the lead singer was set on fire during a pyrotechnic mishap. After that, Guns N Roses cancelled their set after 9 songs. A riot ensued.
Not to get all Swifty, but she played at least 11 un-domed stadiums last year. Most for 3 nights or more. It does not rain on Tay-tay.
Yeah, seems likely that the cost of insuring against bad weather for outdoor concerts would be significantly less than $780 million.
Actually, it rained on one of her shows. Can’t remember what city. Her piano misfired.
Awkward!
Is there any (still standing, one time professional)stadiums in North America despised more than Olympic? Yes, Tropicana Field, Oakland Coliseum and “New Comiskey” have their detractors, but Olympic has to be at the bottom of the list.
If I had to pick one of those venues to pay to travel and see a game at, I would pick Montreal over the other two. At least they got the tower.
That said, I would still tear it down. No way that’s the real cost of demolishing the facility.
What do you base that conclusion on?
“the olympics can no more lose money than a man can have a baby”
~ Mayor Jean Drapeau, (1974 – in the face of mounting cost overruns and a lack of progress on the build – as I recall)
You can probably guess what most of the newspaper cartoonists did with that bombastic quote from the late 1970s onward…
What’s the harm in just letting the stadium sit and rot? Wouldn’t that just increase its ruin value?
LOL. UrbEx here we come. Shouldn’t be hard to get liability insurance for a vacant 60,000 seat stadium I bet?
The stadium has a great deal of infrastructure under it for the Metro lines. It has to be maintained to some degree. It does not have to be maintained as a stadium, but the disassembly costs will be staggering, and then the site has to be maintained as a transit hub for Montreal East anyway.
I am not saying this is good value for money. It is not. But they don’t have the option of just walking away from the facility.
As Steve says above, they could simply return it to what it was when built… a stadium with a roof that has a giant hole in it. But if you ever watched a game there, it wasn’t a great experience.
About 15yrs ago someone put forward a proposal to replace the fabric/composite roof with a retractable metal structure for about $100m. I don’t know how detailed or solid their calculations and engineering were because so far as I can tell the plan wasn’t released to the public. But the idea disappeared quickly.
$870m is a ridiculous amount of money to spend on a roof. But Montreal can get a lot of heavy wet snow in a very short amount of time. And we know what ‘cheap’ options have produced in the way of results in the past.
Canada isn’t the only nation that’s importing the American model of taxpayer-subsidised sports arenas. In England, the conglomerate that’s bought into Manchester United has announced plans for turning Old Trafford into “the Wembley of the North” — and the Daily Telegraph reports those plans could include “Levelling Up” funds handed out to local governments by the central Government.
(For those not familiar with England, the Daily Telegraph is one of the “quality” dailies.)