Olympic Stadium (Montreal)
stadium built for the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal
Olympic Stadium (French: Stade olympique, pronounced [stad ɔlɛ̃pik]) is a multi-purpose stadium in Montreal, Canada, located at Olympic Park in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district of the city. Built in the mid-1970s as the main venue for the 1976 Summer Olympics, it is nicknamed "The Big O", a reference to both its name and to the doughnut-shape of the permanent component of the stadium's roof. It is also disparagingly referred to as "The Big Owe" in reference to the high cost of its construction and of hosting the 1976 Olympics as a whole.
The stadium is one of the largest by seating capacity in Canada. After the Olympics, artificial turf was installed and it became the home of Montreal's professional baseball and football teams. The Montreal Alouettes of the CFL returned to their previous home of Molson Stadium in 1998 for regular season games, but continued to use Olympic Stadium for playoff and Grey Cup games until 2012. Following the 2004 baseball season, the Expos relocated to Washington, D.C., to become the Washington Nationals. The stadium currently serves as a multi-purpose facility for special events (e.g. concerts, trade shows) with a permanent seating capacity of 56,040. The capacity is expandable with temporary seating.
“Olympic Stadium (Montreal)” enters the record as stadium built for the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Olympic, Stadium and Montreal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q285467. VIAF identifies the subject as 173356460. The Library of Congress control number is n2011048915. Authority coordinates are 45.558, -73.552. 3 of 7 selected statements include explicit references; 4 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1976, 1998, 2012 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Olympic Stadium (Montreal)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.