Sports Teams
Currently, BC Place's main sports tenants are the BC Lions of the Canadian Football League and Vancouver Whitecaps FC of Major League Soccer. The stadium was also home of the Vancouver Whitecaps of the North American Soccer League in the early 1980s. The last NASL Soccer Bowl was also held at BC Place.
The stadium has hosted the CFL's championship game, the Grey Cup, eight times: in 1983, 1986, 1987, 1990, 1994, 1999, 2005, and 2011 . Perhaps the most thrilling game was the 1994 championship in which the hometown BC Lions defeated the U.S. expansion team the Baltimore Football Club on a last-second field goal by Lui Passaglia, preventing the Grey Cup trophy from leaving Canada (Baltimore would win the Grey Cup the following year). The stadium hosted the 99th Grey Cup in 2011 now that the new roof has been finished.
The stadium hosted the 47th Vanier Cup on the same weekend it hosted the Grey Cup. The McMaster Marauders defeated the Laval Rouge et Or in double-overtime in what has been called one of the greatest games ever played at any level. The official attendance at the game was 24,500.
In 1987, an exhibition match of Australian rules football was played at the stadium and drew a crowd of 32,789 - a record for the largest AFL/VFL crowd outside of Australia. The stadium also held an NFL exhibition game in 1998 when the San Francisco 49ers beat the Seattle Seahawks 24-21 in the American Bowl.
The Vancouver Nighthawks, a member of the World Basketball League, played the 1988 season at BC Place.
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Famous quotes containing the words sports and/or teams:
“The whole idea of image is so confused. On the one hand, Madison Avenue is worried about the image of the players in a tennis tour. On the other hand, sports events are often sponsored by the makers of junk food, beer, and cigarettes. What’s the message when an athlete who works at keeping her body fit is sponsored by a sugar-filled snack that does more harm than good?”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)