The construction of a new roof for the Montreal Olympic Stadium will not in itself be enough to make it a popular performance venue for internationally renowned artists and high-level sports teams, experts warn. They therefore expect that other colossal investments will follow in the coming years in order to restore the image of this building built in the 1970s.
The announcement last Monday of a government investment of $870 million to install a new fixed suspended roof for the stadium and replace its technical ring was greeted with a shower of praise within the political scene. , offering the opportunity for a rare consensus between elected officials from the Coalition Avenir Québec and the opposition parties.
In order to reimburse this colossal bill – still less imposing than that of two billion dollars estimated for the demolition of the immense building – the Legault government is banking on the numerous business opportunities which should open up in this installation at end of this vast project, which will last until 2028.
It is therefore expected that the number of events that the Olympic Stadium will host per year will increase from around thirty to around one hundred in the long term. The site’s managers hope in particular to be able to attract large sporting gatherings, as well as tours by international stars – such as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé – as well as trade shows and conferences. At the Stadium, the number of annual paying visitors should then double to reach more than two million.
“We are a commercial company, so what we are going to do is develop, during the years of work, our partnerships to ensure that we fill the stadium with major sporting, special and cultural events,” said thus argued last Monday the Minister of Tourism, Caroline Proulx, at a press conference.
Not the panacea
The construction of a new roof for the Olympic Stadium, however, will not immediately place it on the same pedestal as some major facilities in the country, which already host major sporting events and pop superstars. The Rogers Centre, built in the mid-1980s in downtown Toronto, features a retractable roof which increases its opportunities to host various sporting events. The stadium with a capacity of 55,000 people – a number similar to that which prevails at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal – is the subject of major renovations, estimated at several hundred million dollars, which aim in particular to replace the seats of the building in order to make them more comfortable and more attractive for fans of the Blue Jays, the Toronto baseball team. New sections premium will also be arranged in the stadium to accommodate more fortunate spectators.
The BC Place stadium in Vancouver will be able to host the Gray Cup final in 2024, as well as World Cup soccer matches in 2026, enough to arouse the envy of the Montreal Olympic Stadium . However, here too, this stadium has undergone major renovations, leading in particular to the installation of a retractable roof in 2011, the installation of new, wider seats, private suites and new transparent glass doors. at the entrance to the building.
In this context, “changing the roof of the Stadium, it is certain that it will not be enough” to attract major sporting events to the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, says Moshe Lander, who is a professor of sports economics at Concordia University. . “The seats need to be changed, the floor needs to be changed, the insulation needs to be improved; everything must be changed,” says the professor. And again, he doubts that the Stadium will be able to convince a professional sports team to become a “tenant”, particularly because of its geographical location. Modern stadiums, he notes, are found in the downtown areas of metropolises.
In other words, “it would have taken a completely new stadium built in the 21st century designe century and not the 20the century,” continues Mr. Lander, who does not hide his support for a pure and simple demolition of the Stadium.
“Execrable” acoustics
The Montreal Olympic Stadium will also have to make colossal investments intended to improve the acoustics between its concrete walls, which have been criticized many times over the years. Between the passage of Madonna in 1993 to that of AC / DC in 2015, then the two shows given by Metallica last summer, criticism from spectators regarding the numerous sound feedback during these performances has come up time and again.
“We can always improve the sound, but it is difficult,” notes Professor Thomas Dupont, who is a member of the Acoustics Research Group in Montreal at the École de Technologie Supérieure (ETS), in an interview. In order to limit the “enormous reverberation” within the stadium – which causes the same note to continue to resonate several seconds after being played by a musician – “we need absorbent materials inside the stadium” , which could involve significant “investments”, notes the expert.
Thomas Dupont also specifies that improving the acoustics of the stadium should at the same time help preserve the “hearing health” of its spectators. Because, he points out, performance halls generally tend to increase the volume when the acoustics are of poor quality. “The more terrible the acoustics of a place are, the more sound engineers tend to make the sound louder,” says Mr. Dupont. However, this is not without risk for spectators, not to mention the headaches that it can cause to neighbors of these installations.
Romain Dumoulin, who is an acoustics consultant for the firm Soft dB, notes for his part that the quality of sound in a space as large as the Montreal Olympic Stadium “depends as much on the acoustics as on the quality of the sound systems” generally provided by the big names who come to perform in the building. “In a space like this, the role of acoustics is simply to limit damage so that the sound systems are as effective as possible,” continues the expert, according to whom the repair of the stadium roof should be the opportunity “to put an acoustic treatment on the ceiling”, as well as to install “absorbent surfaces” elsewhere in the Stadium in order to improve the auditory experience of spectators by limiting the duration of the reverberation. “That’s huge budgets,” warns the expert, who also notes the importance of improving the “insulation” of the Stadium.
Thomas Dupont also hopes that the question of acoustics will be taken into account early in the design and construction process of the new stadium roof. “The more upstream we address the problem of sound and acoustics, the more effective it will be,” notes the expert, who at the same time insists on the importance of involving neighboring residents in this process in order to find ways that they will not be inconvenienced, at the end of this project, by the shows which will be held at the Olympic Stadium.
“If we want to put absorbent materials within the roof, generally, we have to think about it quite quickly because we will still have to hang additional things,” also notes Romain Dumoulin. Might as well do everything at once. »