Montreal Olympic Park > Reviews > The Turtle And Shoehorn

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	Impressive design of stadium and tower
Disadvantages:	The deterioration of everywhere, a concrete paradise

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

There's plenty to do during the day, plenty of fun in the dark,
But the best things always happen, in Montreal's Olympic Park!

Well alright, I'll keep away from writing poems from now on. Bad idea. Montreal, on the East side of Canada, was awarded the Olympics 31 years ago, and decided, as countries often do, to make them the most impressive yet. A recurring theme at Olympics is to have something which breaks a world record - biggest stadium, largest firework display, Britain is already lined up to have the most rainy Olympics in history, things like that - and Montreal weren't prepared to be any different. They decided, not only would they build an incredibly whopping stadium for their main events, but to give it a roof that could open and close at will. Not it's own will, it's not sentient, but at the will of the man in charge of the mechanism. To hold such a large roof would prove tricky, as this was 1976 after all, so the organisers realised that the only way to hold it would be to have a tower holding it up. A big tower. In fact, a tower so whoppingly huge it makes any stadium look weedy in comparison.

But not only would this tower be huge, it would also, the organisers decided, be on an incline. There were a lot of large towers in the World, anybody could build one of them - but it takes a special Montreal spirit to build the World's largest incline tower, and so the plans were drawn up and commissioned, and they built it. Montreal was home to the World's tallest inclined tower, and even though the BT Tower looks strangely wonky when you look at it from a distance, the Olympic Tower in Montreal continues to be the tallest inclined tower in the World. But it wasn't built in time. Strikes (it was built by the French, after all) meant that the design never got to do the job it was designed to do, namely holding up the roof of the stadium, but it did look nice, which is what really matters in these sort of circumstances. That was a fair while ago. I decided to visit in 2007.

The reason for visiting so late was quite simple; I hadn't been born at the time, and thus my parents decided I wouldn't appreciate the Stadium fully, so we waited until I existed and had grown up a bit. This year, my parents decided to give up on waiting for that to happen, and took me along anyway, along with my grandparents and little sister.

The best way to get to the Olympic Park is via the Montreal Underground system. The Underground in Montreal is staggeringly not famous, which is strange when you consider it happens to be much cleaner, easier and less suicidal to navigate than the one in London, or the Parisian Metro. You buy your tickets, wait for your train, which goes either left or right, and get on. Simple as that, and because a train is along every five minutes or so, you don't have to wait long. Which is good, because there is a vast absence of benches to sit on. The stop for the stadium is called Pie-Ix, which could be some clever Latin joke for all I know, but I'll never know. You can drive to the stadium (or, if you're mental, walk - Montreal tends to be either boiling warm or raining, so it's best to be in a vehicle of some sort), as there are car-parks, but it's easier to take the metro, and probably cheaper.

When you get off at the stadium, called "The Big O", don't be put off by the fact that nobody else on the train does the same - it's been a long time since the stadium first opened, the Canadians know what it looks like by now - and walk up to the exit of the stadium. Strangely, there's then a long walk to the stadium round what smells and sounds suspiciously like a munitions factory, and you emerge after about ten minutes in a concrete wonderland. There are some concrete stairs in front of you, concrete walls, concrete ceiling… it's easy to think you've gone the wrong way (in fact, I believe very strongly this may have been the case when I went), but if you keep walking then you emerge between the stadium and the tower. And yes, the tower really is a stunning thing to see. It looks a bit like a white upside-down shoehorn with cables attached to it, and on the back little cablecars are pulled back and forth.

Entering the building beneath, this is where you pay. Price varies depending upon what you want to see. Everything costs you money; going up the tower, seeing the stadium, going to the nearby Biodome or Insectarium (reviews pending), which are both run by the same company. The only thing which you can see for free are the swimming baths, which is frankly a little weird, but the pool looks very nice, nevertheless. There's a big main pool which, for a fee, you can swim in, and you also get use of the diving boards. If you're lazy/have no money, then you can sit on the chairs and watch and mock as other people try to swim.

The Tower, then. After paying entry, you're ushered in to a small area I like to think the attendants call "the pen", while you wait for the cable car to arrive. When it down, however, there's a big window you can look out of, and the car is winched up slowly enough to get a really good look at the surrounding area, as well as seeing the stadium properly for the first time. It's looks like a turtle, a white turtle, a white turtle made of metal, in fact. Getting off, there's a lovely big gift shop in front of you, but if you walk around it, there are some very big windows to look out of, which over a view not only straight ahead, but also of down. And there's a lot of down. You can see, on a clear day, the whole of Montreal from the tower. It's staggering. As a side-note… when I went, the sun quickly vanished and was replaced by rain, thunder, and - oh yeah - lightning. You could see it hitting the buildings around you, and your first thought is "I'm in a giant metal shoehorn and there's lightning".

However, having survived the tower, I took the cable car down, and went to the stadium. You can't see the stadium unless you pay, so after being stung again we had a tour. It's a decent tour, and the guide was friendly and funny and not overly French, which is always a Godsend. The stadium is kept in reasonable nick, but residents don't call the Stadium the "O No" for nothing. Generally it's just kept ticking over, waiting for something to happen, since it stopped having any official duties in 2004. Shame, really.

There's not much to the Olympic Park. There's a Stadium, Swimming Pool, and Tower. It's all nice enough, but you can't help but think that it could all be put to better use. There's a lot of concrete going around everywhere, and it could be kept in better repair. The walk there doesn't seem to have been thought out (although again I stress - we probably took a wrong turn), and is unappealing. Whilst the tower is highly impressive, the stadium is a slight let-down, and the decision to charge for each separately is strange. It's worth a visit, but only if you go see the Biodome at the same time, which is on-site and much more interesting than the rest of the place. Also, there's a botanical garden nearby, which contains possibly the only benches anywhere. Oh, and - café/restaurant thing going on, although it looked expensive and there were many children everywhere, so we just had an ice-cream and nacked off.

So if you ever happen to be in Montreal, which can happen occasionally, then it's decent enough entertainment from the Olympic Park, but I couldn't give it more than a bronze medal, in a bizarre athletic metaphor I just thought up now.