Venues
Pacific Coliseum
Last Updated: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 | 6:46 PM ET
New York Times, for CBC Sports
The Pacific Coliseum is the figure skating venue in Vancouver for the 2010 winter Olympic Games. (Kim Stallknecht/Getty Images)
The Pacific Coliseum is a sports arena at Hastings Park, east of downtown Vancouver. The building is white and round, with upright rectangular panels along its outside wall. With 14,200 seats, it will be the site of the figure-skating and the short-track speedskating competitions at the 2010 Vancouver Games.
During the Olympics, the arena’s configuration will be changed from a figure-skating venue to a speedskating venue, and vice versa, about 30 times. Those quick changeovers require a choreographed effort of at least 50 workers who complete the main physical change in just 15 minutes. In all, it takes about an hour to transform the arena from being arranged for one sport to the other.
The timing deck for short-track is turned into the judges’ area used during the figure-skating competition. The thickness for the ice also changes. Figure skating requires thicker ice — about two inches, or five centimeters — than short-track does because figure skating requires softer ice.
At the Olympics, the ice for short-track will be about 1.6 inches, or four centimeters, thick, which makes the ice firmer than it is for figure skating. The ideal temperature at ice level also varies between the two sports. In figure skating, that target temperature is 64.4 degrees Fahrenheit, or 18 degrees Celsius. In short-track, it drops to 60.8 Fahrenheit, or 16 Celsius, keeping the ice below harder and faster for the skaters. Eight workers are assigned to drive the machines to resurface the ice during the Olympics. Each has at least three years’ experience in ice resurfacing of the particular sport he or she will be working on.
The arena, set apart from the rest of the Olympic sites, was built in 1968, primarily to lure a National Hockey League team to Vancouver. From 1970 through the 1995 season, the Vancouver Canucks called the arena home. Now it is home ice to the Vancouver Giants of the Western Hockey League.
