The Richmond Olympic Oval: A Visitor's Guide

The Oval is the building people picture when they picture Richmond from the air, and it is also the building a lot of us who live here have never actually gone inside. I did that for years. It sat over on the River Road side being famous while I swam and skated closer to home.

Then a friend talked me into a badminton booking, and I have been going back since, mostly for the loop outside and occasionally for a public skate. So this is the guide I wish someone had handed me around 2013. What the building is now, how to get in, and what it costs you in effort.

What it is now, and what it isn't

It was built for long track speed skating in 2010, and that was its entire purpose for about three weeks. Everything after that has been a second life. If you are still picturing the 400 metre ice ribbon from the broadcast, let it go. The floor was converted once the Games left, into a mix of hardwood courts, ice and a running surface, and what the building does now is work as a very large community recreation centre with an Olympic footnote attached to it.

The roof is the part that still earns the trip. It is one enormous span of BC pine, much of it beetle-killed wood that would otherwise have been written off, and it curves overhead in a way that makes the inside of the building feel like weather. On a grey afternoon the light coming through is flat and even and faintly church-like. I like it considerably more than the outside, which from the road is a lot of glass and a lot of concrete.

Getting there is the hard part

This is the honest warning. The Oval is not where the transit is. Lansdowne is the closest Canada Line station and the walk over runs around twenty minutes, longer than it looks on a map, and the last stretch of it is not a pleasant streetscape. If you are hauling skates and a kid, that walk will decide your afternoon's mood before you get through the door.

Driving is easier. There is parking beneath the building. Rates are posted at the entrance and they have changed more than once over the years, so I am not going to quote you a number. On a normal weekday I have never had to circle. During a tournament weekend, and this place hosts big ones, the parkade fills and you end up on the street a few blocks back. If you see a lot of matching team jackets in the lobby, that is your signal.

Cycling is genuinely the best way in if you live on the west side. The Middle Arm path runs right past the building, so you can come along the water from the Terra Nova direction or up from the No. 2 Road bridge and arrive without touching No. 3 Road at all. That is what I do with Biscuit when I only want the outside part of the visit.

Skating, courts and the fitness floor

Public skate times move around with the season and with whatever tournament is booked, and I have driven over on a wrong assumption more than once. Check the schedule the morning of, not the week before. Rentals are available at the desk. The ice is indoors and unromantic in the best way, which is to say it is smooth, it is warm enough, and nobody is judging your ankles.

The court space is the busiest thing in the building. Badminton and volleyball eat most of it, which will surprise nobody who grew up here. Getting a court is a competitive sport in itself, particularly on weekday evenings, and the people who get them are the ones who book the moment the window opens. There is also a very large fitness floor, an indoor running surface that is a real gift in February when the dyke is a wind tunnel, and last I looked, a climbing wall. You can buy a day pass at the front desk or a membership if you plan to make a habit of it.

What I would tell a newcomer is that this is not a cozy neighbourhood rec centre. It is enormous, and on a busy Saturday it is loud the way an airport is loud, with sound coming off that ceiling from four sports at once. Some people find that energising. My mother finds it exhausting and would rather go to Minoru.

The Richmond Olympic Experience

There is a ticketed attraction inside the building, built around the Games and around sport generally, with medals and equipment in cases and a set of simulators to try. It is aimed squarely at kids somewhere between six and thirteen, and for that audience it works properly. I took a borrowed niece, and she spent most of the visit trying to beat her own time on the same machine over and over while I read the display text nobody else was reading.

I would not assume a day pass covers it, so ask at the desk. Two hours is plenty. If it has been raining for a week and you have a restless nine-year-old, this is one of the better indoor answers in the city, and I say that as someone whose default is the library.

The outside is underrated

Here is my actual favourite thing about the Oval, and it does not involve going inside. Walk around to the water side, to the ponds and the red netted sculpture strung above them. The piece is called Water Sky Garden, and it does something unusual for public art in a suburb, which is that it changes completely depending on where you stand and what the sky is doing. Low sun makes it glow. Fog turns it into a suggestion of itself.

From there the path carries on along the Middle Arm. It is flat, wide, mostly wind-exposed, and the planes come in low overhead on their approach, which is either a nuisance or the entire point depending on your temperament. My father used to bring us out this way to watch them long before the Oval existed, back when this stretch was working riverfront and nothing else. That is the thing about the site. It looks brand new because everything around it is brand new, but the river has been doing the same work here for a very long time.

Food, because the Oval will not feed you

There is a concession inside, and towers have gone up all around the building with ground floor spaces that open and close, so I am reluctant to send you anywhere specific in the immediate neighbourhood. What I actually do is drive back toward the No. 3 Road corridor, which takes about five minutes.

If it is early and I want something in my hand, Maxim's Bakery for a coffee bun, or Anna's Cake House, which is the one my family has been going to since the market-stall days. For a cheap lunch after a skate, Tsim Chai Noodles does wonton soup with no ceremony at all, and Samsoonie Noodle and Rice is my pick when I want something heavier and want to sit down. If someone else is paying, Harold's Kitchen & Bar and Cavu Kitchen Bar are both in that part of the city centre and both handle a group without fuss. After an evening booking with a crowd, Haidilao Hot Pot up the corridor is the obvious call, though be honest with yourself about how late that will run on a school night. Dessert, if the kids are still upright, is Daydreamers by Cafe 33.

Who I would send here

Send yourself if you play a court sport, because the facility is better than anything else you have access to in this city and it is not close. Send yourself in the rain with kids, because between the Olympic Experience and the sheer volume of the place it will absorb a whole afternoon. Send yourself on a clear winter evening for the walk on the water side and skip the building entirely.

I would not send a first-time visitor here as their one Richmond stop. Steveston does more for a newcomer and Garry Point does more for a sunset. But if you live here and you have spent a decade treating the Oval as a landmark you drive past on the way to the bridge, go in once. It stopped being an Olympic venue a long time ago. It is a very good rec centre with a spectacular ceiling, and that is a better thing to have.