NHL-Sized Rink at my Olympics?

It’s more likely than you think …

This is the first of a series – a look at the venues that will make up the Vancouver 2010 Olympics.

Name: Canada Hockey Place

Events: Hockey

Venue Capacity: 18,630

Cost: $160 million (original cost in 1995/privately financed)

Status: Existing

Opened: September 17, 1995

Elevation: 8 metres

Distance: 2km from Vancouver Athletes' Village

The 2010 Olympic Winter Games hockey tournaments will take place in two venues -- Canada Hockey Place and the UBC Thunderbird Arena.

Canada Hockey Place, known outside the Olympic Games as General Motors Place, will be the main hockey venue at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. It was completed in 1995 and privately financed to be the home of the NHL's Vancouver Canucks and NBA's then Vancouver Grizzlies. The arena has 88 luxury suites, 12 hospitality suites and 2195 club seats. In 2006, Canada Hockey Place was upgraded with an LED ribbon board encircling the upper bowl and a brand new state of the art high-definition scoreboard overhanging centre ice.

When Vancouver originally won the right to host the 2010 Games, the plan was to renovate Canada Hockey Place to accommodate an international-sized ice surface for the Winter Games that would have forced the removal of seats in the arena. But on June 7, 2006, VANOC and the International Ice Hockey Federation announced they had cancelled the ice renovation plans and the 2010 Olympic hockey tournament would be played, for the first time, on NHL-sized ice. The new plan saved VANOC $10 million in renovations and will allow 35,000 more spectators into Canada Hockey Place over the duration of the tournament. Additional locker rooms will be built as part of the venue preparations for the Games.

General Motors Place has played host to international hockey before. The 2006 World Junior Hockey Championships were held in Vancouver, which saw Canada win the tournament. Russia's Evgeni Malkin was named tournament MVP.