Whitecaps won’t have to move for World Supercross Championships

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We know this: This year, the Vancouver Whitecaps won’t have to move a game away from their home stadium because of a bunch of motorbikes.

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Tuesday’s announcement that the World Supercross Championships will make a return to Vancouver this fall was all about the excitement of fans, the quality of racing, and so on and so on.

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It all happens Nov. 15.

What wasn’t in the announcement — but if you have a touch of sense, you’ll quickly understand — is the significance of that date.

It is smack-dab in the middle of November’s FIFA international window, when national teams around the world, including Canada, will play a pair of matches against international opposition.

It’s also smack-dab in the middle of Major League Soccer’s playoff schedule, but the league smartly has always taken that international window off. (International windows that have fallen in the midst of the regular season have generally not been breaks in the MLS schedule.)

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We can credit last fall’s fiasco, when the long-scheduled Supercross ended up forcing the Whitecaps out of town for a wild-card playoff game. They had won the right to host the match against the Portland Timbers and yet they couldn’t because the motocross organization needed time to prepare the dirt track. The day MLS picked for the Caps-Timbers match, Oct. 23, was inside the needed preparation window.

It was a ridiculous scene for a team that has a deal with the stadium to be a primary tenant, one that you would think could have been avoidable. Why pay all that extra money, as the Caps and B.C. Lions do, if you can’t get preferred access to your own home pitch?

PavCo, operators of B.C. Placeacknowledged last week that they had offered to host the playoff match a day earlier, on Oct. 22, which was the other match day MLS had identified for the wild-card round. But in coordination with Apple TV, the league’s broadcaster, chose to schedule the CF Montreal vs. Atlanta United match that night instead.

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It was all so avoidable. B.C. Place should be booking all kinds of events. It’s there to be used. But should PavCo be prioritizing one-off events over ongoing, locally owned partnerships? It was a very odd plan.

The mess was a big reason why MLS commissioner Don Garber called B.C. Place an “unviable” venue int the future for the Whitecaps. They need to have true priority at their stadium, was the implication. Also, having their own stadium would allow them to generate their own revenue, which is more and more of a challenge at the downtown dome.

That said, Garber is a bit of an outlier in his critiques of B.C. Place. The Caps are obviously talking a lot about building their own stadium out at the PNE, but they have been careful to be anything other than well-spoken tenants when it comes to B.C. Place. Officials from FIFA are obviously a big fans of the stadium. World Rugby loves the building too.

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And so do, evidently, the fine folks at World Supercross.

You do wonder if B.C. Place had a grass surface, like many stadiums of its ilk are able to do even without consistent direct sunlight from above — think the Bernabeu in Madrid, or the Sapporo Dome in Sapporo, Japan — would the MLS be so adamant that the Caps need a stadium plan.

Anyway, a year later, B.C. Place’s bosses seem to have learned their lesson. There will be no playoff debacle this year.

There is also no risk of there being a conflict with the B.C. Lions that weekend either — that’s the weekend of the Grey Cup, which is being playing in Winnipeg.

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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