"The Richmond Olympic Oval is a complete money grab when it comes to memberships. The open gym for basketball is ridiculously overpriced compared to any other community facility in Metro Vancouver. On top of that, their billing practices are predatory. If you don’t cancel days before the end of your cycle, they trap you into paying for the entire next month. I cancelled in August, yet they still forced me to pay for September and even October, which is outrageous. To make matters worse, they only allow cancellations in person — no phone, no email, no online option. It’s clearly a deliberate obstacle. And when you do show up, they don’t even ask for proper ID, so their excuse about “not knowing who they’re talking to” is laughable. For a publicly funded facility, this kind of behavior is disgraceful. The Oval should be focused on serving the community, not running shady billing schemes like a private gym. Consider yourself warned."

Meli A

"The Richmond Olympic Oval is a fantastic recreational spot for nearby residents, especially during the hot summer days. It's a great place for kids to enjoy various activities like table tennis, ice skating, rock climbing, and basketball. The Day Pass is very affordable at just $20, and the air quality inside is excellent thanks to the high dome and advanced ventilation system. Unlike other rock climbing gyms we've visited, which often have unpleasant odors, the air here is fresh and clean.

During the summer, they offer a Family Skating session every Sunday for just $10, making it a perfect family activity. It's an ideal place for local residents to beat the heat and engage in fitness activities with their children."

Nancy Wang

"The Fitness Center would be out of business in less than a year if it wasn't heavily subsidized by tax payers.

I've genuinely never seen a place with so much random nuts a bolts, pieces of the racks and broken mirror constantly just laying on the ground. All the while hundreds of thousands has been spent on overly complicated cardio equipment with feature I've never seen anyone use, novelty equipment like the rope machine/body fat scanner, the new Precor machines that are mostly broken and is almost a downgrade from the previous machines.

The Oval as a whole is decent place for the community but the Fitness center is extremely mismanaged and insult to tax payers plus a liability due the gross negligence. To be clear the issue seems to be the management and not the other employees.

Edit 2023-12-28 for Oval response:

Can you elaborate on which part of my review is misinformation. I don't believe you could provide any type of maintenance record showing the gym equipment has been maintained properly, but I can assure you that people can walk into the Oval any time and find broken pieces of equipment.

The broken mirror for example took multiple months to fix and you just let pieces of it fall off during that entire time. Any member can attest to that.

The PDF you linked shows $16,844,247 in expenses, $17,571,433 revenue and $8,048,501 Memberships, admissions and programs. I'd also encourage you to show the financial figures of the fitness center compared to any of the other community centers.

I do agree that you certainly have a diverse amount of poorly maintained and selected equipment. For example the rope machine originally mentioned you saw that no one used it so you got another one.

Edit 2024-08-07 :

I happy to announce that after this becoming the most popular review backed with plenty of evidence the Oval has managed to do a complete 360. They’ve once again ignored what everyone was asking for and spent thousands only to deliver pennies on the dollars for all the members and Richmond citizens that fund them.

What the Oval has done:

- Bought some of the most expensive bars and rack available but somehow said there wasn’t budget to fix the Back Extension that had one broken plastic part.
- Somehow managed to choose the smallest J-Cups available that isn’t even lined properly. Some of them already has a bar shaped grove filed out of it
- Brought back the landmine attachment that was destroying the bars. Only to have people use the new Eleiko bars on it. Every other gym in the world uses beater bars for it but the Oval is so flush with cash that they use brand new thousand dollar bars.
- Had rack on top of a accessibility ramp only to put another rack on top of the ramp with a bar sticking half way over it.
- Had a bench hanging over the lip of the floor only to put another bench hanging over lip of the floor. Some ended up with 50% less dedicated flat benches after spending all this money.
- Bought a bunch of Technogym stuff only for 3/4 of the pieces to be break. The Smith machine randomly has a cable and has been broken for more than a month.
- Randomly put in a section of turf but refused actually fix all the tiles floor that bubbled up and is a tripping hazard.

What the Oval hasn’t done:

- Lube up the cable machines, you can hear and feel the entire guide rod being pulled up with the weights.
- Fix machines in a timely manner. Most machines takes a month to fix even the most basic part. The Hammer Strength seated calf raise had a bolt missing a nut and it took 4 days for someone to put it back on.
- Buy decent equipment(from cable attachment to machines) suited to what the members want.

To summarize: People who didn't care about the bars could have had membership fee not increased for a while. For the people who do care about the bars they’ll be bent with knurls filed off within a year like the old bars. Truly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory this is the true Oval Experience.

Also most of the buttons don't work on 2/3 Assault bikes and 2/3 Stair masters."

T M