VANCOUVER -- As the $38-million spectacle to open the 2010 Olympic Winter Games unfolds tonight and Canadian kitsch and culture clash at centre stage, spectators under the roof can savour this: They are witnessing the death throes of a dingy, dowdy dame. 

That's cause for celebration all its own. There's little love for B.C. Place, the pillow-topped stadium that's been messing up Vancouver's downtown skyline since 1983, the year its white, air-supported roof was first inflated. 

Last year, after more than a decade of speculation and hope, B.C.'s Liberal government confirmed the roof will being coming down, for good. A new, retractable cover is going up in its place; installation is to be completed by summer 2011. The bad news: the renovation is to cost a staggering $458-million. Even worse, that's a spendthrift government's estimate. The announcement also came a few years late. Never before has an Olympic Games had to start under an enclosed canopy, let alone a rubber-like, Tefloncoated dome that's kept aloft by pressurized air. 

Scorned, scarred and torn at the seams, B.C. Place is certain to leave a strange impression in the minds of TV viewers. Medal ceremonies and the closing of the Games are also being staged inside the stadium, which, while gussied up for the occasion, still looks like a greying marshmallow. 

Ceremonies organizers claim the bulging top is actually a blessing. They say it will act as a canvas for overhead projections, allowing for extra degrees of artistry during the celebrations. Most details of the opening ceremony remain secret. It's rumoured that pop stars Bryan Adams, Sarah McLachlan and Nelly Furtado will perform under the roof. It's believed that First Nations performers will kick off the festivities, and that local snowboarders will show off tricks on constructed slopes. It's expected that one point nearing the finish, an Olympic cauldron will rise from a false floor and will be lit by a final torchbearer. His or her identity also remains top secret. 

How this indoor cauldron is to remain lit, without causing ventilation and heating problems, is unclear. But technical challenges have long vexed the dome's operators. 

Unlike the Big Owe, that expensive flop of a stadium in Montreal, or Toronto's Skydome, with its slick but expensive retractable roof, B.C. Place was never hailed as an engineering marvel. Built and operated entirely at taxpayers' expense and run by an arm of the provincial government, Vancouver's dome was sold as simple, practical and safe, sort of like the K-Car, a boxlike automobile that Chrysler launched the same year. 

But it was quickly discovered to have issues, chief among them, poor acoustics and a sterile, alienating vibe. Not long after the CFL's Lions moved inside the 60,000-seat venue, their fan-base dropped. At one point, the team attracted fewer than 19,000 fans a game, on average. Players complained that the dome's compressed air made punting and field goal kicking more difficult. 

"Mark my words," said former Lions' president Jack Farley. "By 2010 we'll have a stadium with a retractable roof." That was in 2001. In fact, rumours of the dome's demise had started much earlier. Legendary, old school local sports reporters Archie McDonald and Jim Taylor launched their own campaigns, calling for the roof to come down. Cockamamie improvement schemes were hatched, including one to install natural grass under the windowless, air-sealed dome. A prominent local architect came up with another face-saving plan, to raise the stadium's playing surface several stories and turn the basement into a second convention centre for Vancouver. 

That didn't fly, of course. Instead, the province embarked on an even more ambitious convention centre expansion, one that spun wildly, madly out of control and cost taxpayers almost twice the originally projected amount. 

B.C. Place suffered a further indignity in 2007, when a combination of "human error" and foul winter weather caused some of the roof's seams to rip apart. Stadium caretakers were forced to deflate the roof while the problem was fixed. B.C. Place sat pancake flat for weeks. Its laughingstock status was sealed. 

Hopefully, so was the leak that sprang last month. Rain is forecast tonight.