While the Vancouver Canucks had a disappointing season, and despite the Vancouver Whitecaps' rise, locals still consider the city a hockey town.
V.I.A. polled readers on Vancouver's team sport, and (perhaps unsurprisingly for a Canadian city with an NHL franchise) hockey easily won with 65 per cent of the vote.
Hockey's supremacy may not have been all that interesting; soccer's clear place in second is more so. Historically, soccer hasn't always been the biggest draw in Vancouver, though precursors to the Whitecaps have existed for decades.
However, the sport has grown in Canada recently, with the women's and men's national teams seeing more success, the launch of the CPL and NSL, and the men's FIFA World Cup coming in 2026 (and the women's tournament in 2015).
Recently in Vancouver, we've seen the Whitecaps top the MLS, the Rise and Vancouver F.C. launch, and FIFA announce not only World Cup games but a major conference. On top of that, Canadian stars like Alphonso Davies and Christine Sinclair have strong local connections.
With hockey and soccer taking 85 per cent of the vote, other sports like baseball, basketball, and football received much smaller portions.
But in third place in V.I.A.'s poll is rowing. It's not one of the big sports with huge professional leagues and internationally recognized stars, but locally, there are lots of participants. And the Canadian International Dragon Boat Festival is one of the biggest of its kind.
Baseball has long been a part of Vancouver's identity, from the Vancouver Asahi to BC Place (which was built so that it could be turned into an MLB regulation field). However, even with the Vancouver Canadians being a Blue Jays affiliate and the second-highest-level ball team in Canada, the sport ranks fourth in our poll.
The BC Lions is the city's oldest professional team in operation, but football only took about 3.5 per cent of the vote.
And while the NBA did attempt to launch the Grizzlies 30 years ago, basketball didn't take over the city (though it's big in some communities).
Vancouver Is Awesome polled 1726 readers and asked the question: What is Vancouver's team sport?
The poll ran from 5/11/2025 to 5/25/2025. Of the 1726 votes, we can determine that 601 are from within the community. The full results are as follows:
Results are based on an online study of adult Vancouver Is Awesome readers that are located in Vancouver. The margin of error - which measures sample variability - is +/- 2.36%, 19 times out of 20.
Vancouver Is Awesome uses a variety of techniques to capture data, detect and prevent fraudulent votes, detect and prevent robots, and filter out non-local and duplicate votes.
