Olympic Stadium gearing up for SM-Liiga fixture in February

Some 27,000 tickets have already been bought for a Jokerit-HIFK local derby in the Olympic Stadium

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By Satu Pajuriutta
      Initially, the Olympic Stadium (Olympiastadion) in the heart of Helsinki was designed for summer use only.
      Its big moment was of course the 1952 Summer Olympics, and it has since then hosted many football matches featuring the national side, and also a good many rock concerts, most recently the visit of U2 this summer.
      Nevertheless, in February 2011 Finland’s prime sporting arena is to enter new territory by hosting an ice hockey match between Jokerit and HIFK, the local teams from the SM-Liiga - the top domestic club competition.
      An audience of some 30,000 people is expected to attend the one-off match.
     
If Stadium Managing Director Maija Innanen’s wish comes true, the temperature on February 5th - the birthday of Finnish national poet Johan Ludvig Runeberg - will be frosty rather than Arctic.
      ”Some five degrees below zero would be good”, Innanen hopes.
     
The process of converting the summer arena into a winter stadium has been started, and even though it will be an ice hockey match, the starting point has been the grass surface, as it is needed for football as well as track and field athletics.
      The aim is that the turf, laid last spring, could be used even next year.
      ”It is a major project”, Innanen admits, speaking about the protection of the turf.
      ”The grass will be covered with protective sheeting as was done in the case of the U2 gig in the summer. The plates will be covered with gravel, and a portable cooling system will be brought to the Stadium”, the Managing Director reports.
      ”It is possible that the grass will die, but if we succeed, there is demand for such know-how even across the Atlantic”, Innanen adds.
     
As the stadium was initially designed for use in the summer months, there will be a number of other challenges, aside from those set by the grass.
      For example, the WCs in the Olympic Stadium are frozen in the winter.
      ”We will have to bring in quite a few Baja-Maja mobile loos”, Innanen notes.
      Even catering will have to be arranged in a different way in the winter.
      Innanen gives her assurance that there will be enough hot coffee and juice and maybe even meat pasties to warm people up during the event.
     
This winter, weather forecasts will be followed even more carefully than usual.
      Attempts will be made to keep the potential snow layer on the grass as thick as around 10 centimetres through the winter.
     
”If there is a lot of snow, we will have to clear the stands and aisles and passageways of snow. If it is slippery, we will have to secure the safety of all the areas where people are moving around”, Innanen goes on.
      The number of spectators moving along these slippery routes could be more than 30,000.
      So far, 27,000 tickets have been sold. The total number of tickets available is 34,000.
     
No additional stands are to be built to increase the Stadium's capacity, as was done for the Olympics, when more than 70,000 could be accommodated. The decision followed a fact-finding trip made by the representatives of the Olympic Stadium, the City of Helsinki, and Jokerit HC to Gothenburg last December.
      Then the match between the Swedish hockey teams Färjestad and Frölunda in the Ullevi Arena led to chaos among the audience of more than 31,000.
      ”We concluded that temporary additional stands could be a security risk. In Gothenburg the crowd packed out the stadium and there was some crushing, and the match even had to be interrupted”, Innanen reports.
     
Innanen would have liked to organise the match closer to the winter holiday break in Southern Finland, namely during week 8 (21.2.-27.2. 2011), as the plan is to arrange public skating in connection with the event, and this would have increased the numbers able to take part.
      As things stand, public skating will be organised before the match.
      It will not be possible to keep the grass frozen until week 8, and so the game has been scheduled for Saturday, February 5th.
     
”For the sake of the grass, it will not be feasible to go any later than that. If the grass is ruined, there will not be very many willing payers”, Innanen predicts.
      Football enthusiasts were also interested in playing and organising their own event in the Stadium, but in that case the ice surface should have been larger. Now it will be only slightly larger than the ice hockey rink itself.
     
On the subject of football, as it happens this is not the first major sporting event to take place in the Olympic Stadium in the depths of winter.
      In March 1986 FC Kuusysi of Lahti (now defunct, and merged into FC Lahti in 1996) played a European Cup quarter-final here against Steaua Bucharest of Romania.
      They lost 1-0 in front of a crowd of 32,522, after heroic work had been carried out to clear the stands of snow. The pitch itself was in perfectly decent shape, thanks to sub-surface heating.
     
The Tower of the Olympic Stadium will not be open for visitors during the match between Jokerit and HIFK, as renovation work in the tower will start at the turn of the year.
      During the renovation project, a new lift will be installed in the tower. The repair work will start from the setting up of scaffolding in December-January, whereafter the tower will be covered with a look-alike hood, as was used for the clock tower at Helsinki's Central Railway Station earlier this year.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 22.10.2010

More on this subject:
 Five questions for the Jokerit captain, Ossi Väänänen
 The NHL in the great outdoors

Previously in HS International Edition:
  Olympic Stadium to receive EUR 8 million facelift (16.4.2009)

Links:
  Helsinki Olympic Stadium
  Jokerit HC
  HIFK Helsinki

SATU PAJURIUTTA / Helsingin Sanomat
satu.pajuriutta@hs.fi