Calgary Olympic Oval

Situated on the university campus, the award-winning Oval was the Olympic Winter Games’ first indoor speed skating venue. It staged an event on the 2019/20 ISU Speed Skating World Cup circuit and has hosted both the World Allround Championships and World Sprint Championships five times, most recently in 2019 and 2017 respectively.

It is used by the university’s sports teams and the Calgary X-Tremes, the city’s women’s ice hockey team. The Oval is also Speed Skating Canada’s official training centre and the home of the country’s Elite Athlete Pathway, a blueprint for the development of young speed skaters.

Set up in 2005, the Olympic Oval’s Athlete Bursary has given out over CAD 180,000 to more than 100 athletes to help them strive for excellence in speed skating, cycling and women’s ice-hockey.

For the two months of the year when it is not staging ice events, the Oval is a multi-purpose venue that plays host to car shows, science fairs, the Canadian judo and taekwondo championships and volleyball, gymnastics, floor hockey, running and billiards events.

The venue is used by more than 20,000 people a year for skating, and over 1,000 athletes from 22 countries trained there in the 2018-19 season. It has generated an estimated CAD 70 million since it was built, money which is reinvested to cover its maintenance. In 2012, for example, the facility was fitted with a new roof costing CAD 10 million.

Funded entirely by the Canadian government, the Oval’s construction cost CAD 40 million. Following its completion in May 1987, it received a number of awards in recognition of its architectural and structural excellence. It also quickly became known among speed skaters as having “the fastest ice in the world”. Six of the 10 distance world records were broken here at Calgary 1988, and over 300 world long- and short-track speed skating records have been set at the venue since then.