The New BC Place Stadium

This is actually pretty funny. I was looking at some stadiums on worldstadiums.com, and was looking at Vancouver. I knew they were renovating BC Place stadium, and so I looked it up. Turns out, the first game played there with the new renovations took place Friday. The BC Lions hosted Edmonton and won 33-24. Then the Vancouver Whitecaps hosted the Portland Timbers today, but lost 1-0.

The renovations took place from April 2010 to September 2011. All together, over $150 million took place in major renovations. These included seating replacements, washroom and concessions renovations, and replacement of the ETFE roof with a new retractable roof. The work was done in two phases. The first phase involved upgrades to seating, washrooms, concessions, and luxury suites, as well as the reinforcement of the existing ring beam at the top of the building and was completed in October 2009. Work on the retractable roof began in May 2010, shortly after the completion of the 2010 Winter Paralympics and the final deflation of the air-supported roof. 1,140 tv screens were added, and the second largest hanging video board is located hanging above the field(only Dallas has a bigger one.)

Originally built in 1983, it was one of those crappy generic domes like the SIlverdome, RCA dome, and Metrodome. In one of the videos below, the host said when he played, the air just seemed to sit and it felt like you were running through mud. The stadium was always known to be very loud, but it wasn't that state of the art. The Winter Olympic ceremonies took place there, which is probably the biggest moment. Unless you think 7 Grey Cups might contend. The dome actually collapsed Metrodome style in 2007, not because of snow however.

Empire Field is a temporary stadium that housed the Lions and 'Caps for the last two and a half seasons. They built it in... 3 months. Which is very speedy. Especially for a stadium with 27,500 seats. Sure, it probably wasn't that amazing, but it's impressive. The stadium will be torn down now that BC Place is all new and shiny. So from now on, the Lions and Whitecaps will play games at the new stadium, and it really looks great. The 2011 Grey Cup will be hosted there, and that should be very nice.

 Here are some videos on the renovations from the BC Lions' website.
Second level, concessions- http://bclions.com/video/index/id/21033
Fourth level, seating, presentation, and roof- http://bclions.com/video/index/id/20997
The field, and scoreboard- http://bclions.com/video/index/id/20971
Gates, and locker room- http://bclions.com/video/index/id/20949