Olympic hockey venue at UBC opens
7,500-seat venue completed ahead of schedule
Jeff Lee, Vancouver Sun
Published: Monday, July 07, 2008
VANCOUVER - Vancouver's Olympic organizers have moved one venue closer to completion of their aggressive construction schedule with the opening of the hockey complex at the University of British Columbia.
On Monday the Vancouver Organizing Committee used the backdrop of a pickup game of ball hockey with Premier Gordon Campbell, Vanoc CEO John Furlong dozens of children and a pair of Olympic and Paralympic athletes to show off the three-rink Thunderbird Winter Sports Centre.
The facility, which replaced an aging four-rink facility, will host Paralympic sledge hockey as well as most of the women's hockey and some of the men's hockey games for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Built at a cost of $48.7 million, most of it from Vanoc, the facility was completed four months ahead of schedule. With its completion, only two major venues - Richmond's speed skating oval and Vancouver's Hillcrest curling venue- are yet to be finished. Vanoc says both will be done by the fall.
Two other practice arenas at Trout Lake and Killarney, won't be finished until later in 2009, according to Dan Doyle, Vanoc's executive vice-president of construction.
Campbell and the Four Host First Nations Secretariat also used Monday's event to unveil a plan to install aboriginal art in all 15 Olympic venues in 2010.
Vanoc and FHFN, which represents the four Coast Salish communities on whose traditional territory the Games will be held, issued a call for expressions of interest from First Nations, Metis and Inuit artists.
At the event the province displayed two doors made by Squamish artist Aaron Nelson-Moody for the B.C.-Canada Place pavilion at the 2006 Turin Winter Games. The doors have been in storage ever since, and only now have made a public reappearance. The province plans to install them in a pavilion it is building at Robson Square for the 2010 Games.
jefflee@png.canwest.com