Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics: The Richmond Olympic Oval

Supporting Olympic dreams.

The Richmond Speed Skating Oval is located on 32 acres of city-owned land at the southwest corner of River Road and Hollybridge Way. Pre-development, the majority of the site was occupied by a recreational vehicle (RV) park.

The facility, designed and constructed to host the long track speed skating for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, is also convertible to numerous other sport and non-sport uses. The Richmond Olympic Oval is a model for cutting-edge sustainable design, breaking new ground for sports and wellness facilities.

The building is unique due to the 100m timber arch. Although the main floor slab acts to tie the arch buttresses together, the large span sheds significant load onto the concrete buttresses and underlying compressible soils.

The oval structure is about 200m long by about 100m wide.

Thurber provided geotechnical investigation for foundation design, including developing solutions to mitigate settlement. We also completed detailed dynamic analyses and developed a ground improvement scheme to mitigate the sesimic risks associated with liquefaction.