Montréal's Sports Moment: Habs and F1 Collide
The Canadiens playoff run and Canadian Grand Prix converge this weekend, creating a rare convergence that has the city buzzing.
Montréal hasn't seen anything like this in years: the Canadiens are in the Eastern Conference finals, the Canadian Grand Prix roars onto Notre Dame Island Sunday, and earlier this week the Montreal Victoire brought home the first PWHL championship ever won by a Canadian team.
The timing is almost surreal. For the first time, a Habs playoff run overlaps with the Grand Prix—normally held in June but rescheduled to May starting this year. Game 2 airs Saturday night at the Bell Centre. The F1 sprint race happens Sunday. Downtown bristles with checkered flags and red, white, and blue jerseys.
Yves Lalumière, president and CEO of Tourisme Montréal, calls it "the beginning of a new era." The Grand Prix alone draws 170,000 visitors this weekend, mostly from outside Quebec. The Habs draw a fiercer, more local crowd—the kind that pack Crescent Street bars and turn playoff games into city-wide events.
Alain Creton, who owns Chez Alexandre et Fils on Peel Street, watched the circus build all week. He'll be stationed at his restaurant from morning until past midnight, splitting attention between the games and the Grand Prix crowd rolling through. "The planets are perfectly aligned," he said. "It's amazing."
Even Lance Stroll, the F1 driver, acknowledged what Montréal knows: hockey wins. "Everyone's much more excited about the hockey than the Formula 1," he told reporters. "That's the truth."
For locals, it's a rare collision of two things that usually own separate calendars. For the next 48 hours, Montréal is the centre of two worlds at once.