With each passing day in the early 1980s, Calgary got one step closer to seeing its new Olympic Saddledome come to life.<\/p>\n
Construction on the state-of-the-art facility got underway on July 29, 1981, and just over 26 months later, the building opened its doors when the Flames hosted the Oilers in a Battle of Alberta. But right from the jump, proponents of the project – originally known as the Olympic Coliseum – were eager to showcase its features to sports fans and showcase the city of Calgary to the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe building will be the most pleasing I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d Art Froese told the Calgary Herald in June of 1981.<\/p>\n
Froese, the former Calgary Stampeders halfback turned construction committee chairman for the Calgary Olympic Coliseum Society, was one of the key spokespeople of the era as excitement ramped up about the new building.<\/p>\n
But the Flames, who skated across the street at the 7,000 seat Stampede Corral for the first three years of their history in Calgary, were excited, too.<\/p>\n
Winger Tim Hunter, a born-and-raised Calgarian, marvelled at the work being done as he began his own NHL career after being selected by the then-Atlanta Flames in the 1979 NHL Draft.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing from Calgary, I had so many buddies that were in the construction business that were working on the Saddledome,\u201d Hunter recalled. \u201cI\u2019d be going to practice, I\u2019d get a wave or a whistle from one of my buddies growing up, a pipe-fitter, plumber or some sort of construction guy. \u2018Hey Hunts, how ya doin? Just bangin\u2019 away on this Saddledome, here!\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was really something to see, the building going up beside the Corral where we were playing, and every day you\u2019d get to see little bits of it get more and more put together, and just morph out of the ground into this beautiful, new building that we were going to play in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of particular interest, the \u2018Dome\u2019s iconic roof. And putting it in place was no easy task.<\/p>\n
But piece by piece – in this case, cable by cable – the job got done.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe safest way to build a roof is to build a cable-supported, tension-ring roof,\u201d Froese told the\u00a0Herald in December of 1981. \u201cThe cable system is inherently failsafe. It\u2019s like a tennis racket. All these cables crisscross and there\u2019s enough of them so that even if you had a failure in one cable, the roof isn\u2019t going to fail. It\u2019s like breaking a string in your squash racket or tennis racket.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen eventually, when everything is up, it\u2019s cast in concrete and it acts just like the shell of a turtle.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With each passing day in the early 1980s, Calgary got one step closer to seeing its new Olympic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":913132,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194293],"tags":[49,2798,48],"class_list":["post-913131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-calgary","tag-ca","tag-calgary","tag-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/913132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}