Montreal’s Olympic Stadium (French Le Stade Olympique) was the main venue of the 1976 Summer Olympics and was the home ballpark of Major League Baseball’s Montreal Expos from 1977 until the franchise was moved to Washington, D.C. after the 2004 season. It now serves as a 56,040-seat multipurpose stadium for the city.

	Capacity		56,040
	Opened		July 17th 1976
	Owner		Régie des Installations Olympiques
	Cost		C$ 1.4 billion (with interest)
	Architect		Roger Taillibert

Nicknamed “The Big O”, the stadium was designed to be a very elaborate facility and was to feature a retractable roof, which was to be retracted by a huge 556 foot (approx. 169 1/2 metres) tower — the tallest inclined structure in the world, a foot taller than the Washington Monument, and the sixth tallest building in Montreal. The Olympic swimming pool is located under this tower. Designed by Paris architect Roger Taillibert, the park was very expensive, with the total cost of the stadium being over C$1 billion. The city of Montreal will only have completely paid off this debt by 2006. Due to its extremely high cost, the stadium has also been dubbed The Big Owe. The then-mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau, is remembered for saying, in a speech announcing that Montreal would host the games, “The Olympics can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby.” This now-famous quote is often parodied by residents.

Problems plagued the stadium from the time it opened for the Olympic Games. Seating 58,500 at the time, the stadium was not fully completed in time for the games due to strikes by construction workers, leaving it without a roof and only a small portion of the tower built for a number of years. Both the tower and the roof, made of over 60,000 feet (approximately 18,500 meters) of kevlar, were not completed for over a decade, and it was not until 1988 that it was possible to retract the roof. The 65-ton roof then proved difficult to retract, and was occasionally torn in heavy winds.

The roof is only 52 metres (171 ft) above the field of play. As a result, a number of pop-ups and long home runs hit the roof since play began, necessitating the painting of orange lines on the roof to separate foul balls from fair balls.

The Olympic Stadium was remodeled in 1991, with 12,000 seats being removed for Expos games. On September 8 of that year, support beams snapped and caused a 55 ton concrete slab to fall on to an interior walkway. No one was injured, but the Expos had to play their final 13 home games on the road. The following season in 1992, the retractable roof concept was abandoned in favour of a new permanent cover roof. This fixed roof was removed (for repairs) in May 1998, turning the park into an outdoor stadium for the season. In January 1999, a 350 square metre portion of the roof collapsed, dumping ice and snow on workers that were setting up for the annual Montreal Auto Show. This led to the auto show leaving the Olympic stadium for good. Yet again a new permanent roof was installed for the 1999 season and has remained on the park since, however even this roof has proven less than reliable, as structural breaches have occurred during the winter months (due to snow and ice accumulation).

In addition to the Expos, the park was home to the Canadian Football League’s Montreal Alouettes for a number of years, but they now use the Percival Molson Stadium of McGill University. The stadium is, however, still used for the team’s last regular season game and for all playoff games. The stadium was also the home of the Montreal Manic soccer team from 1981 – 1983. A 1981 playoff game against the Chicago Sting attracted a crowd of over 58,000. The stadium also has various other multipurpose uses: indoor exhibitions, monster truck shows, and so forth (excluding winter months, due to safety issues with the current roof in place). In 2005, the FieldTurf surface was sold for $1 million (Canadian) to the BC Place domed stadium in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is being used by the CFL B.C. Lions.

(source .. wikipedia) reproduced under GFDL

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Olympic Stadium (Montreal) wikipedia entry
Montreal Alouettes website
The Olympic Movement

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