BC Place has awarded Vancouver's Ryan Burns with two tickets to each public event held at the stadium in 2024, including the three much-anticipated Taylor Swift concerts in December of that year.
The prize was part of a contest that BC Place held to mark its 40th anniversary.
The venue urged the public to write in with personal memories experiences at the dome, and it received more than 2,000 submissions, according to BC Place.
Burns said in a statement that his father was a foreman who helped construct the original stadium, which had a mushroom-styled roof.
"He was chosen as one of the eight people to push the start button on one of the eight fans that inflated (and kept inflated) the roof in November of '82," Burns wrote of his father.
"My mum took my sister and I to McDonald's on Main Street very early that November morning and we watched the roof inflate from there, proud that my dad was inside the building and part of what is still to me a significant moment in Vancouver history."
He said in his statement that he was one of 60,000 people who attended the venue's first gala opening ceremony on June 19, 1983, although the official count for that opening is 41,603 people.
The first sporting event at the stadium was the June 20,1983 soccer game between the North American Soccer League's Vancouver Whitecaps and Seattle Sounders. The Whitecaps won the game 2-1 in front of a reported 60,342 fans, demonstrating that Vancouverites can fill the dome for soccer matches.
The Whitecaps recently touted the club's Nov. 5 game as drawing a club-record 30,204 fans, but that attendance record is only for the club that joined Major League Soccer in 2011.
BC Place data holds that the venue hosts more than 70 major events each year, and that it is occupied at least in part on 245 days each year.
The BC Lions use the stadium as the team's home venue, and in 2024 plan to host the Canadian Football League's Grey Cup championship game.
Burns said that he has attended many Whitecaps and Lions games as well as a celebration in 1994 to mark the National Hockey League's Vancouver Canucks' return after being in that year's Stanley Cup final.
"Every time I enter that stadium I think of my dad, his part in its building, and the many memories he and I have of being there," Burns said.
