Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Olympic Stadium sits in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district of Montreal, its doughnut-shaped roof giving it the nickname the Big O. Locals also call it the Big Owe, a jab at the staggering cost of building it for the 1976 Summer Olympics. Why did a stadium meant for a single summer of competition take decades to finish and pay off? Why did its leaning tower and retractable roof sit unfinished for years after the opening ceremony? And how did a building known mostly for its debt end up hosting a pope, world championships, and a stadium riot? This is the story of a building that never quite finished becoming itself.

• 2. Three Decades In Debt

  ›

  In May 1976, Quebec introduced a special tobacco tax to help recoup the money spent building the stadium. Initial projections from 1970 had promised a far smaller price tag, but strikes and construction delays pushed spending well beyond those early estimates. By 2006, the funds funneled to the stadium's owner, the Olympic Installations Board, equaled 8 percent of all provincial tax revenue from cigarette sales. The 1976 tax law included one condition: once the debt was cleared, ownership of the stadium would pass to the City of Montreal.

  Payment finally came in mid-November 2006, more than 30 years after the Olympics opened at the stadium. Counting repairs, renovations, construction, interest and inflation, the total bill reached C$1.61 billion. At the moment it was paid off, that made Olympic Stadium the second most expensive stadium ever built, trailing only Wembley Stadium in London. An indoor smoking ban introduced in May 2006 cut into the tobacco tax revenue. That delayed the payoff past its original October 2006 target.

  By 2014, newer venues like MetLife Stadium, AT&T Stadium and the rebuilt Yankee Stadium had pushed Olympic Stadium down to fifth on that expensive-stadiums list. Even after the debt was cleared, the building kept generating income. A single large-scale event such as the Grey Cup can bring in as much as $50 million in revenue for the venue. None of that money came from the tower rising off the stadium's north side, a structure with its own decade-long story.

• 3. The Tallest Leaning Tower

  ›

  At 165 meters tall and tilted 45 degrees from vertical, the Montreal Tower took a full decade longer to finish than the stadium itself. It is the world's tallest inclined tower, rising from the stadium's north base. Cables meant to open and close a retractable roof were designed to hang from it. Beneath the tower sits the Olympic swimming pool, next to the building that once held the Olympic velodrome and later became the Montreal Biodome, an indoor nature museum.

  An inclined elevator, opened in 1987, carries visitors 266 meters up the tower's curved spine to a multi-storey observatory added once construction resumed. The cabin climbs in under two minutes at 2.8 meters per second. It holds up to 76 people at a time and can move as many as 500 people every hour. Engineered to stay level throughout the climb, the cabin gives passengers a steady view rather than a tilted one.

  Facing north-east, the elevator's route passes views of the Olympic Village, the Biodome, the Botanical Gardens and Saputo Stadium. At the top, a south-west-facing observatory looks out over Olympic Park, the stadium's suspended roof and downtown Montreal. That same roof, hanging from the tower's cables, would go on to cause the stadium far more trouble than the tower ever did.

• 4. A Fight Over A Vision

  ›

  As early as 1963, Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau began pushing for a covered stadium in the city. Drapeau wanted to lure a Major League Baseball franchise to Montreal. A roof was seen as essential given the cold that can strike the city in April, October and sometimes even September. When the National League granted Montreal an expansion franchise for 1969, Drapeau wrote a letter in 1967 promising a covered stadium by 1971, despite lacking the authority to guarantee it alone.

  Charles Bronfman, set to become the new franchise's first owner, was on the verge of walking away from the deal. Drapeau's staff hastily drew up a stadium proposal, enough to keep Bronfman committed. French architect Roger Taillibert then designed an elaborate facility with a retractable roof. Cables meant to open and close it would hang from the 165 meter tower, at the time the tenth tallest structure in Montreal. Taillibert had tried a similar umbrella-style roof before, for a theatre in Cannes in 1964 and the Piscine Carnot in Paris in 1967. Soon after Montreal won the 1976 Games, Drapeau struck a secret deal with Taillibert to build the stadium, an arrangement that did not become public until 1972.

  The stadium was originally supposed to open in 1972, but a strike by construction workers forced the grand opening to be cancelled. The Conseil des metiers de la construction, led by Andre Dede Desjardins, kept the site in what Taillibert called anarchic disorder, until Quebec premier Robert Bourassa bought him off in a secret deal. In his 2000 book Notre Cher Stade Olympique, Taillibert wrote: "If the Olympic Games took place, it was thanks to Dede Desjardins. What irony!"

  Further delays came from Taillibert's refusal to compromise on his design, even as material costs climbed. The original project manager, Trudeau et Associes, struggled with basic construction tasks. In 1974 the Quebec government lost patience and fired Taillibert from the project. Montreal's harsh winters also slowed work for roughly a third of the year, leaving the stadium and tower unfinished when the 1976 Olympics opened.

  The roof's material sat waiting in a warehouse in Marseille until 1982. The tower and roof were not fully completed until 1987. The 66-tonne, 5,500 square meter Kevlar roof, designed and built by Lavalin, took another year before it could actually retract, arriving in 1988. Even then, it could not be used in winds above 40 kilometers per hour, and over its lifetime it was opened and closed only 88 times. That fragile mechanism would keep failing for decades to come.

• 5. A Roof That Would Not Behave

  ›

  Construction on the tower resumed in the 1980s. During that work, a large fire set the structure ablaze, forcing a scheduled Expos home game to be postponed. On the 29th of August 1986, a large chunk of the tower fell onto the playing field before a game against the San Diego Padres, pushing that game into a doubleheader the next day.

  In January 1985, the Quebec government approved finishing the project and installing a retractable roof, funded by an Olympic cigarette tax. Workers completed the tower and its orange Kevlar roof by April 1987, a decade later than planned. The roof soon developed numerous rips that let rain leak into the stadium.

  As part of renovations made in 1991 to better suit the stadium for baseball, workers eliminated 12,000 seats, mostly in the distant outfield. On the 8th of September that year, support beams snapped and sent a 55 long-tonne concrete slab crashing onto an exterior walkway. No one was injured, but the Expos moved their final 13 home games of the season to their opponents' cities.

  Engineers declared the stadium structurally sound in early November 1991. Certifying the roof took longer, because a June windstorm had torn it badly. For the entire 1992 season, officials kept the roof closed at all times. The Kevlar roof was removed in May 1998, leaving the stadium open-air for that season, and a $26 million non-retractable opaque blue roof went up later that year.

  On the 18th of January 1999, a 350 square meter section of that new roof collapsed. It dumped ice and snow onto workers setting up for the Montreal Auto Show. Organizers cancelled the auto show and a boat show planned for the next month, and the auto show left the venue for good. The Olympic Installations Board later installed heated pipes under the roof to melt snow, though the stadium floor still had to close every December through March.

  Birdair, the company that supplied and designed the roof's fabric, was later sued over the failure. Its installer, Danny's Construction, had been terminated mid-project after cost overruns with its subcontractor Montacier, and Birdair finished the job. Danny's Construction sued Birdair in 1999. In February 2010, after a lengthy trial, the Quebec Superior Court ruled in Danny's Construction's favor and dismissed Birdair's countersuit. By the early 2000s, during the Expos' final years in Montreal, the stadium's concrete had grown grimy, chipped and stained.

  In 2009, officials approved keeping the stadium open through winter when weather allowed. The Olympic Installations Board warned the roof was unsafe during heavy rain or snowfall over 8 centimeters, tearing 50 to 60 times a year. That August, Montreal's fire department warned it might order the stadium closed without a new roof. Events still cannot proceed if more than 3 centimeters of snow are forecast a day out, a rule that postponed the Montreal Impact's home opener in March 2014.

  A contract for a new permanent steel roof, awarded in 2004, carried its own steep price tag. The Olympic Installations Board sought provincial approval for it in June 2010, and a committee formed in May 2011 to study the stadium's future use. On the 4th of March 2012, a concrete slab roughly 8 by 12 meters fell from the roof of the underground parking facility, though no one was hurt. By May 2017, the roof had accumulated 7,453 tears, still limiting winter use to days with 3 centimeters of snow or less.

  In November 2017, the Quebec government approved yet another new roof, one initially planned to be removable so the stadium could switch between open-air and enclosed. That removable option was later dropped from the project. The Olympic Installations Board estimated demolition could cost as much as $700 million, based on a preliminary study with a wide margin of error, largely because the stadium's pre-stressed concrete rules out a simple implosion or wrecking ball and instead requires carefully releasing rebar wire under tension.

  In February 2024, Quebec's Tourism Minister Caroline Proulx announced the new roof's cost had climbed again, with construction now expected to take four years and the finished roof meant to last 50 years. Proulx called demolishing the stadium unthinkable, citing its status as a Quebec icon, the Metro line running beneath it, and the businesses leasing space in its tower, while placing demolition costs in the billions. Le Journal de Montreal later reported that figure was inflated and that demolition would cost only a small fraction of it, and that the roof estimate excluded hundreds of millions of dollars needed for acoustic fixes and remodeled seats and restrooms. The Expos, the team the stadium had been built to house, had already left for Washington after the 2004 season, a departure with its own long backstory.

• 6. A Team That Never Felt At Home

  ›

  The Montreal Expos moved into Olympic Stadium in 1977, replacing Jarry Park Stadium as their home ballpark. Their original franchise agreement called for a domed stadium by 1972, but delays meant the team kept seeking waivers to stay at Jarry Park each year until 1977. As late as January 1977, some expected the Expos might still need to play part of that season at Jarry.

  A landslide win for the Parti Quebecois in the 1976 provincial election led the Expos to break off stadium lease talks entirely. An agreement was reached in February 1977, with the official announcement following in March. Olympic Stadium's first baseball game came on the 15th of April 1977, when 57,592 fans watched the Expos lose 7-2 to the Philadelphia Phillies. Staff first had to use a hacksaw to cut open the locks, because the Olympic Installations Board had no master key.

  The Expos played 81 home games most seasons until 2003, when 22 of their home games shifted to Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They played 59 home games at Olympic Stadium in each of their final two seasons before the franchise moved to Washington, D.C. for 2005 and became the Washington Nationals. Their only playoff appearance came in 1981, when they lost the decisive fifth game of the National League Championship Series 2-1 to the Los Angeles Dodgers on Rick Monday's ninth-inning home run.

  Because Canadian football fields run longer and wider than American ones, Olympic Stadium's lower seating tier sat even farther from the field than at comparable American multipurpose stadiums. Most of the towering upper deck, especially in the outfield, sat too far away to be useful during the regular season. The Expos had no say in the stadium's location, design or construction, despite being its intended primary tenant.

  During the 1970s and early 1980s, fans arriving by Metro were greeted by an oom-pah band playing The Happy Wanderer. Whenever an opposing pitcher tried to hold a runner at first instead of pitching, the stadium's sound system would cluck at him like a chicken. Longtime Expos trainer Ron McClain repeatedly asked for a better playing surface. The Olympic Installations Board refused to spend the $1 million needed to replace the thin AstroTurf carpet that sat directly over concrete.

  That surface was hard enough on players' knees that visiting teams often chose to run at a nearby park instead. Thin padding along the outfield fence also put fielders at risk chasing long fly balls, and the board declined to replace that too. By the 1990s, some free agents specifically refused to consider signing with the Expos because of the poor conditions.

  Owner Claude Brochu concluded by the mid-1990s that Olympic Stadium could not work as a long-term baseball venue and pushed for a replacement. He sold the team to Jeffrey Loria in 2000, who was equally unhappy with the venue and stated bluntly: "We cannot stay here." Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard refused to authorize public funding for a new stadium, partly because Olympic Stadium's own construction debt still had not been paid off.

  Those conditions contributed to a 2001 Major League Baseball plan to disband the Expos alongside the Minnesota Twins, an effort that collapsed after court rulings blocked it. The Expos played their last game in Montreal on the 29th of September 2004, losing 9-1 to the Florida Marlins in front of 31,395 fans.

  A decade later, the Toronto Blue Jays revived baseball at the stadium, playing spring training games against the New York Mets on the 28th and the 29th of March 2014 that drew a combined 96,350 fans. The Jays continued the tradition for five more years, facing the Cincinnati Reds in 2015, the Boston Red Sox in 2016, the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2017, the St. Louis Cardinals in 2018 and the Milwaukee Brewers in 2019. A planned 2020 matchup against the New York Yankees was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and no further games have been scheduled since. One of those Blue Jays crowds, 106,102 combined fans across two games against the Red Sox in 2016, ranks among the largest the stadium has drawn for any sport.

• 7. Record Crowds And One Riot

  ›

  Olympic Stadium holds the record for nine of the ten largest crowds in Canadian Football League history. That includes five regular-season games and four Grey Cup finals. The largest Grey Cup crowd on record, 68,318 spectators, watched the hometown Alouettes defeat the Edmonton Eskimos 41-6 in 1977, despite a local transit strike and harsh winter weather. A single-game record of 69,083 fans attended an Alouettes game against the Toronto Argonauts on the 6th of September 1977.

  The stadium has hosted the Grey Cup six times overall, most recently in 2008, when the Calgary Stampeders beat the hometown Alouettes. On the diamond, Willie Stargell of the Pittsburgh Pirates hit the longest home run recorded at the stadium, an estimated 535 feet into the second deck in right field on the 20th of May 1978. A yellow seat once marked that spot before it was moved to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.

  Darryl Strawberry hit a ball an estimated 525 feet off a hanging speaker on the Expos' 1988 Opening Day. Henry Rodriguez matched that distance on the 15th of June 1997, when his hit bounced off the outfield's concrete ring, struck the roof, and came down onto a speaker. Vladimir Guerrero hit the longest home run to left field on the 28th of July 2003, striking an advertising sign later replaced with one reading VLAD 502.

  On the soccer side, Olympic Stadium set Canada's record for a single soccer attendance during the 1976 Olympics itself, when 71,617 people watched East Germany beat Poland 3-1 in the final. The current Montreal Impact broke modern Quebec and Canadian professional soccer attendance records twice within months in 2012, drawing 58,912 fans for their MLS debut on the 17th of March and 60,860 for a match against the LA Galaxy on the 12th of May. That Canadian record was broken again on the 29th of April 2015, when 61,004 people watched a CONCACAF Champions League final between the Impact and Club America.

  Music brought its own record crowds. Pink Floyd drew the largest paid audience in the stadium's history, 78,322 people, on the 6th of July 1977, followed by 73,898 for Emerson, Lake and Palmer that same summer. Those shows sat quietly alongside a very different concert night 15 years later, one that ended not in applause but in a riot.

  On the 8th of August 1992, Metallica and Guns N' Roses co-headlined a stop on their joint stadium tour at Olympic Stadium. During Metallica's song Fade to Black, frontman James Hetfield was accidentally burned by faulty pyrotechnics, cutting the band's set short and sending him to the hospital. Guitarist Kirk Hammett, bassist Jason Newsted and drummer Lars Ulrich promised the sold-out crowd of 54,666 a makeup show, which the band delivered as two half-priced concerts at the Montreal Forum in February 1993.

  After a delay of two hours and fifteen minutes, Guns N' Roses played a shortened set. Singer Axl Rose later blamed the trouble on bad audio and vocal problems. An estimated 2,000 fans then rioted inside and around the stadium, overturning police cars and setting bonfires that caused about $600,000 in damage. The Expos, away on a seven-game road trip at the time, saw their schedule unaffected, though the venue's operator banned Guns N' Roses outright. Metallica did not return until the 11th and the 13th of August 2023, as part of their M72 world tour.

  Opera drew its own crowd record at the stadium too. Some 63,000 people came across two nights in June 1988 to see a production of Aida, proof the building's biggest nights were never limited to sports or rock and roll.

• 8. A Stage For Everything Else

  ›

  In the winter of 1977, the band Emerson, Lake and Palmer filmed a performance at the stadium. It was their arrangement of Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man. That August, the group also recorded a concert there that was later released as a live album. The stadium then hosted the 1978 World Junior Speed Skating Championships, crowning American siblings Eric and Beth Heiden as junior world champions.

  In August 1979, the venue hosted the IAAF World Cup in Athletics. That same year it held a Catholic Charismatic Renewal Assembly in the presence of Father Emiliano Tardif. On the 20th of June 1980, Roberto Duran defeated Sugar Ray Leonard at the stadium to win the WBC welterweight world championship. The Drum Corps International World Championship finals were held there in both 1981 and 1982.

  On the 11th of September 1984, Pope John Paul II led a youth rally at the stadium attended by about 55,000 people. More than 30,000 people gathered there on the 30th of October 2010 for a special mass marking Brother Andre's ascension to sainthood. In 2017, the venue hosted the Artistic Gymnastics World Championships.

  During the COVID-19 pandemic, Quebec's government designated Olympic Stadium a mass vaccination site in 2021, making it one of the largest such sites in the province. Premier Francois Legault received both of his required vaccine doses and a booster shot there. Starting in 2018, the financial group Desjardins began planning to move roughly 1,000 employees into seven of the Montreal Tower's 12 available floors, a shift expected to require about $60 million in renovations first.

  Canada Post issued a commemorative stamp depicting Olympic Stadium and its velodrome as part of its collection marking the 1976 Games.