Whistler Olympic Park - Scoreboard Rigging
In December 2008, Panther won the contract to provide rigging services to the Whistler Olympic Park for the FIS Nordic Combined and Cross-Country World Cup, and the World Cup of Biathlon, after a competitive bidding process.Part One - The Small Scoreboard
Working on a tight timeline, we met with the venue's logistics team, reviewed their brand-new support structures with our engineer and theirs, and consulted with the Swiss Timing crew to work out a plan for safely rigging a 4,000-pound scoreboard (for this project, this is the one that counts as 'small') on the side of a mountain in all sorts of weather for over a year.
Installation was our favourite kind of challenge - five hundred feet up the side of a ski hill, in waist-deep snow, with truck access entirely out of the question. Before long, we enlisted a team of snowmobiles, snow cat tractors and old-fashioned hand delivery to haul chain motors, video panels, distro equipment and rigging equipment over the snow to make it happen!Part Two - One Enormous Television
With the scoreboard hung, we turned our attention to a sterner challenge - rigging a 40-foot-wide, 18,000-pound LED video wall on a sloping, snow-covered hillside next to the Biathlon rifle range. Conditions were similar except that in between the access road and the installation site lay a carefully-crafted, Olympic-quality ski run with very strict quality standards.
In addition to designing a way to replace the complicated, ugly scaffolding structure in the initial design with a simple five-beam steel structure, we worked with the Olympic and World Cup governing bodies and site staff to work out a method for loading over a hundred thousand pounds of ballast, structural steel and video technology across the fragile ski run while leaving it competition-ready the day after our load-in. After some substantial weather-related curveballs, the end result was one enormous television delivered exactly where it needed to be! A few hot showers, a few cold beverages and a successful test event later, both our team and the client's walked away with big grins on...