History
Before joining the "Q", the team was a member of the Central Junior A Hockey League, known originally as the Hull Castors but later as the Hull Hawks. Originally Hull and the CJHL were eligible to compete for the Memorial Cup, the Major Junior crown, but were relegated to Tier II Junior "A" in 1970. Three seasons before joining the QMJHL in 1973 they became the Hull Festivals, and in 1976, they became the Hull Olympiques; the team name was changed to the Gatineau Olympiques one year after the city of Hull was amalgamated into Gatineau in 2002.
The Olympiques share a junior hockey market with the Ottawa 67's, across the Ottawa River. Pre-season games between the two teams were a regular occurrence from 1975 to 1986. The teams have played interleague regular-season home and home games in the 1999–2000, 2000–01, 2001–02, 2002–03 and 2009–10 seasons since.
The Olympiques have won the President's Cup seven times, most recently in 2007–08. The team has been to four Memorial Cup finals, losing three (1986, 2003 and 2004) and winning the 1997 Memorial Cup, which they also hosted.
On May 31, 2010, it was announced that former Olympiques coach Benoit Groulx, who had left the organization to coach the Rochester Americans would be returning to be the General Manager and Head Coach.
Beginning in the 2011–12 season, the Olympiques returned to their old colours of black, silver and white.
Read more about this topic: Gatineau Olympiques
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)