Large crowds and understocked concessions spoiled an otherwise exciting event
Photo via City of Victoria, Victoria Archives.
On Saturday, Aug. 31, the last day of summer, Victoria’s Royal Athletic Park became a sea of orange and black, as the BC Lions faced off against the Ottawa RedBlacks for the first professional football game ever held on Vancouver Island.
The crowd favourite Lions came to Victoria on the heels of a brutal five-game losing skid, which left them without a mark in the win column since July 13. Despite this, they managed to deliver nothing short of their best game of the year, as they routed the RedBlacks to the tune of an astounding 38–12 score — a 26 point spread which equaled the largest blowout of any CFL game this year.
It was an excellent match. Or at least, that’s what I heard from those who could actually watch it, which wasn’t the case for myself and many other fans.
Royal Athletic Park is a space that boasts a standard seating capacity of 3 800 people. During the Victoria Harbourcats season, that number expands to over 5 500 with the support of temporary bleachers. Once, in 2007, when Victoria was selected as one of six venues to host the U-20 FIFA World Cup, the capacity was stretched to 10 500.
Touchdown Pacific blew all those numbers out of the water.
14 727 fans were reported to have attended the event, which sold out in less than an hour, according to a release by the BC Lions. While many of these fans were Victoria residents, the Lions reported that ticket buyers were “coming in from every province.” To accommodate ticket holders from Vancouver and the lower mainland, BC Ferries moved their late sailing from 9:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. All the stops were pulled out to make Touchdown Pacific a country-wide event. And the result? There were simply too many people.
Right from the beginning, you could see the crowds were immense. Despite six different section-specific gates, massive entry lines snaked up and down the sidewalks and spilled out onto the roads. Once inside, the mayhem was far from over. If you were lucky enough to be in the grandstand seating or the VIP section there was some room to maneuver, but in the west-end “party zone,” where I was seated for most of the game, the crowds were more than ten people deep.
Those at the front were pressed up against the metal railings while, due to the lack of bleachers or risers, those at the back had little hope to catch more than a quick glimpse of the game.
Because of this, many fans were forced to turn away from the field altogether, to watch the game on the large video board that had been set up behind play. However, this was by no means a perfect solution, as the big screen malfunctioned and failed to show both downs and yardage, making it impossible to follow the game.
There were plenty of other mishaps, too. The concessions, which were shoved in the back of the party zone and quickly devolved into a constant throng of pushing and shoving, experienced wait-times of more than an hour and sold out of bottled water before the game had even begun.
The PA system was turned so low that both the announcer and the referee were completely inaudible. Those in the bleachers complained of being crammed in like sardines, and one Reddit user, who professed to be a volunteer at the event, said “from my viewpoint, they oversold on tickets… and there wasn’t enough good signage.”
According to the BC Lions website, the Royal Athletic Park was “expanded to welcome 14 000 fans.” The Times Colonist also reported that the event was prepared “for a capacity crowd of 14 000.”
However, the actual number of fans was reported to be larger than that, and you could feel the difference that even 700 people made.
The Royal Athletic Park and City of Victoria declined to comment on the allegedly over-capacity turnout.
It’s likely that an event similar to Touchdown Pacific will return to Victoria in the near future. Vancouver is set to be one of the host cities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, an event that will coincide with the CFL season and will cause the BC Lions to lose access to their beloved BC Place for two to three months.
One proposed solution has been to play games in Victoria, and if that is the case, you better believe tickets will sell out just as fast as they did this time.
The question that remains is: will Victoria be ready? This time, they certainly weren’t.
