Montreal’s Olympic Stadium has been called any number of things—a big white elephant, a giant spaceship. But many locals know it as the Big Owe. The name refers to the hundreds of millions of dollars the vexed landmark has cost the province over the past three decades—to construct it, maintain it, repair it, overhaul it, and now (if the Coalition Avenir Québec government has its way), slap a new roof on it.
Le Stade is undeniably a prized part of Montreal’s heritage and visual landscape. With its striking elliptical shape designed by French architect Roger Taillibert and featuring a 165-metre inclined tower that is the world’s tallest such structure, the building is best understood as a megalomaniacal bragging right. When the city beat Moscow and Los Angeles for the 1976 Olympics, then mayor Jean Drapeau boasted that the Games wouldn’t run a deficit. By the time the construction of the required facilities came to an end, the city had sunk thirteen times more money into the project than what was originally estimated, with the budget skyrocketing from $120 million to $1.7 billion. The stadium was responsible for much of those cost overruns.
