Dress accordingly when going to B.C. Place

If you're going to see the Vancouver Whitecaps host D.C. United on Oct. 12, wear a rain jacket and bring an umbrella. In fact, this umbrella hat could be the most appropriate attire for any event at B.C. Place Stadium for the time being.

Oh, the new retractable roof of B.C. Place Stadium is bound to be closed for most of this fall for the obvious seasonal weather. But after several fans at the B.C. Lions' Oct. 8 win over the Calgary Stampeders got wet, B.C. Pavilion Corporation cannot guarantee a dry experience. Workers are still sealing the roof from the elements.

Should we be surprised? British Columbia has a long history of leaky buildings.

Expo 86 modular pavilions were leaky and needed patching. Same for the Expo Centre, now known as Science World, after it opened in 1985. There was a billion-dollar epidemic of leaky condominiums because of shoddy 1980s and 1990s workmanship. An estimated 65,000 dwellings had leaks that rotted walls. Former Premier Dave Barrett conducted an inquiry into the scandal.

As the 2010 Winter Olympics approached, B.C. Place Stadium’s 1982-installed, air-supported roof needed constant care from maintenance workers. Many gray garbage cans were redeployed from trash catching to drip catching. (That original roof was inflated in November 1982, more than six months before it opened, affording workers a shield from the elements while they finished the building.)

B.C. Pavilion Corporation is blaming the weather for the leaks after reopening from a $563 million renovation. But that is not the root cause.

Minutes of the B.C. Pavilion Corporation construction committee in August 2010 show the stadium was on-track for a Nov. 1, 2011 “substantial completion.” Owner’s representative Roy Patzer called the schedule “tight.” Then, suddenly, on Feb. 7, 2011, PavCo chairman David Podmore announced a Sept. 30 reopening -- a full month sooner.

When Podmore announced the accelerated opening, the governing B.C. Liberal Party was in the middle of a leadership campaign to replace the unpopular Premier Gordon Campbell. The successor, who turned out to be Christy Clark, was expected to call an election for October. There even is an internal government document called "Implications of a Fall Election" that contemplated a Sept. 14 election call and Oct. 12 voting day. That issue note was written Feb. 9 and dated Feb. 10. So it's not a great leap of logic for the stadium's reopening to have been a photo opportunity on the election trail.

Within a matter of weeks of Podmore's proclamation, construction was in turmoil. The installation of roof fabric was supposed to begin in February, but was delayed to April and then until June. Quebec-based steel supplier Canam Group reported to shareholders that its Structal division suffered a $25 million cost overrun and blamed it on French cable installer Freyssinet. Architects, engineers and builders had to shuffle work schedules. The B.C. Lions and Vancouver Whitecaps were chomping at the bit to return downtown. It would have been a major embarrassment for the two main tenants to have delayed their moves to B.C. Place after announcing their schedules.

Under the original schedule, crews would have enjoyed the long, mostly dry days of August to methodically put the finishing touches on B.C. Place’s roof. Instead, they had to battle the September and October rains. More than a week after the stadium's reopening, crews are still welding and sealing the fixed fabric panels.

What’s more, leaks were a problem for many months after Commerzbank Arena opened in 2005. The Frankfurt stadium’s retractable roof technology is at work in Vancouver.

After the reopening night gong show that subjected paying customers to long lineups at ticket booths and concession stands and a lack of food and beverage supplies, delaying the opening seems like one of those "hindsight is 20/20" thoughts.

As it is, Telus has delayed the announcement that it is the naming rights sponsor for seemingly pragmatic reasons. The multi-year, multimillion-dollar deal will include some cash, but it will largely be what's called "value in-kind" or goods and services in lieu of cash. Technicians are still installing telecommunications gear and teaching B.C. Place staff how to use the new equipment. Cisco is a key contractor working with Telus on the StadiumVision media management system that includes the shoebox-style, centre-hung scoreboard (what I call the Titanic Tube Under the Tarp.) Telus is using the screens at B.C. Place, both big and small, but is understandably reluctant to attach its name to the building amid what can be termed a rocky reopening. Why show off the expensive bells and whistles before you're confident they'll ding and toot properly? Why would Telus, a combatant in the telecom marketing war, want to risk embarrassment?

PavCo is hoping that all the glitches will be forgotten by Nov. 27 when the stadium hosts the 99th Grey Cup, for which the government paid $1.88 million to the Canadian Football League for hosting rights.

Expect a glitzy press conference near the end of October or start of November for the corporate renaming of B.C. Place. Will we have to dress accordingly?

An act of sod

Only in Vancouver would a well-drained, well-padded and eminently playable synthetic turf field be naively covered by grass for a weekend to please the vanity of a touring European soccer team.

Only in Vancouver would the organization that paid for the exercise be surprised that it can sometimes rain very hard in Vancouver and cost it more when it has to cancel a league match.

Another day in the trying expansion life of the Vancouver Whitecaps, who are languishing in last place of Major League Soccer during a season marred by injuries, red cards and the futile replacement of coach Teitur Thordarson with Tommy Soehn.

The Whitecaps hired English Lawns of North Vancouver to spend 30 hours to install and 30 hours to remove 90,000 square feet of sod for the July 18 visit by FA Cup champion Manchester City. The field was supposed to be tested once in a real MLS match situation with a July 16 visit from Real Salt Lake, but that was scuttled almost two-and-a-half-hours before kickoff because the grass was waterlogged.

Granted, Vancouver is enduring an unusually rainy July (normally the driest month) and the July 18 game is a gift to season ticketholders, who are getting in for free. Whitecaps’ chief executive Paul Barber outrageously proclaimed on Team 1040 that scuttling the Real Salt Lake match had nothing to do with the upcoming Manchester City match, part of the Herbalife World Football Challenge exhibition series.

Instead of Real Salt Lake being awarded a win for its trouble, the game was not forfeited. It will apparently be rescheduled sometime later this season and tickets from July 16 will be honoured. (Whitecaps’ co-owner Greg Kerfoot is a member of the MLS competition committee. When commissioner Don Garber visited Vancouver in February, he noted Kerfoot’s influence.)

Certainly the traveling Real Salt Lake fans have a good case to ask the Whitecaps for compensation for their travel bills. The game did not happen July 16 because of an act of God. It didn't happen because of an act of sod. The match would have been played, as scheduled and on-time, on the regular Empire surface. When one travels to a soccer match, he or she has a reasonable expectation that it will take place. Soccer is not baseball, the great American game they don't play in the rain.

Here is a little bit of history.

Empire Stadium opened for the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games with a natural grass surface that remained until 1970 when 3M’s artificial Tartan Turf artificial product was installed.

The Vancouver Whitecaps played North American Soccer League games there from 1974 to 1983 on the surface, which could be best described as a green layer of felt over concrete. Bob Lenarduzzi cited the wear and tear from Tartan Turf when he finally got a hip replacement in early 2010. Players enjoyed rainy nights, because that meant no rug burn on the crowned pitch. A very noisy truck that everyone called the “squeegee” would go to work to suck excess water from the carpet before matches on rainy days.

Tartan Turf was good enough for Manchester City when it played at Empire in 1980 and 1981. Lenarduzzi fondly remembers scoring once in the Whitecaps’ 5-0 beating of “the Blues” in 1980. The next year, the clubs tied 1-1. (Among the many international clubs hosted at the original Empire was Italy's AS Roma, featured in this video.)

The stadium was demolished in 1992 and used as a parking lot until 2001 when Empire Fields got a new lease on life -- and a natural grass pitch -- to become home of community soccer and softball.

But the field follies were not over. That grass field was removed and replaced by an AstroTurf GT synthetic surface when the temporary Empire Field 27,683-capacity stadium was built in 2010. The FIFA-approved AstroTurf GT product is good enough for Major League Soccer and Canadian Soccer Association competitions. The Empire surface is awaiting FIFA’s two-star certification.

Though there is some concern that the “tire crumbs” used in synthetic turf fields may irritate players’ lungs and skin through prolonged exposure, such fields are not injury magnets.

“Risk of injury on third-generation artificial turf in Norwegian professional football” in the British Journal of Sport Medicine found that between 2004 and 2007 there were 526 match injuries on grass and 142 on artificial turf. The study concluded “no significant differences were detected in injury rate or pattern.”

Researchers found 17.1 injuries per 1,000 match hours on grass and 17.6 injuries per 1,000 match hours on artificial turf.

The Manchester Citys of the world go abroad to bolster their brand, promote their sponsors, sell merchandise, recruit players and increase the international TV and online audience for their league matches. But the demand to play on temporary grass over a permanent synthetic pitch is akin to the famous Van Halen demand for brown and only brown M&Ms. It is frivolous.

I can hear the cries of soccer snobs already, deriding me for ignorance and blasphemy. Don't waste your time. I prefer to watch and play the world's greatest game on grass, but I have no complaints about the latest generation of high-quality synthetic fields. Manchester City's visit is for a relatively meaningless, one-off exhibition game. It is not for a multi-game tournament and no trophy is at stake.

Until teams like the Whitecaps either pay to have natural grass permanently installed in their stadiums or stand firm on the playability of their high-quality synthetic turf, foreign squads will exploit their sucker hosts and get what they want. Even if it means doing something which is totally contrary to the 21st century push by governments to be sustainable and friendly to the environment.

It takes a lot of energy to grow all that sod, transport it, unroll it, roll it up and take it away after a soccer match.

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Manchester City shutout Mexico's Club America 2-0 on July 16 in San Francisco, where the game was played at the San Francisco Giants' AT&T Park baseball stadium. It's rather odd that the so-called "Blues" (who wore their red and black striped kit in the Bay Area) would schedule a 7 p.m. news conference with the Whitecaps at Burnaby's EA Sports complex on July 17.

Sunday night news conferences are exceedingly rare in an economically difficult environment where the media is already challenged by tight resources and deadlines. Only a few people in the world can pull off Sunday night specials with success; I refer to the famous Obama-offed-Osama announcement of Sunday, May 1, 2011.