Lucas Oil and Water: Indy’s NFL Venue Sops Up Olympic Swim Trials
This June is the first time the U.S. Olympic Swim Trials will be held in a pool built on a football field. The U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials will be held at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, home of the NFL's Indianapolis Colts, on June 15. This marks the first time the Trials will take place in a pool built on a football field, which presents challenges for both athletes and their representation in the upcoming Olympic Games. USA Swimming, the national governing body for the sport, tasked aquatic manufacturer Myrtha Pools with constructing the world-class pools in the football stadium. The stadium's 67,000-seat capacity allows the two pools to be installed in the same venue, divided by a large tarp between them. The construction took about three weeks, including filling the pools with over 860,000 gallons of water. The costs of the pool installations are split between local nonprofit organization Indiana Sports Corp. and USASwimming, with the millions offset by ticket sales and sponsorship revenue.
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Lucas Oil Stadium, the home of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, has hosted a swath of sporting events from the Super Bowl, the Final Four, the NFL combine and Monster Jam. This month, it will add the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials to that list.
Over the course of nine days starting June 15, the nation’s best swimmers will come to Indianapolis to race for the honor of representing their country at the upcoming Olympic Games in Paris. This is the first time ever the Trials will be held in a pool built on a football field, which creates a litany of opportunities as well as never-before-experienced difficulties.
“There’s so much to this event,” USA Swimming chief commercial officer Shana Ferguson said in an interview. “It’s an exciting moment for our sport especially [to put on a big event] for folks who are only focusing on us in an Olympic year. It’s a big order to deliver.”
USA Swimming, the national governing body for the sport, tasked aquatic manufacturer Myrtha Pools with constructing the world-class pools in the football stadium—the main Olympic-sized 10-lane competition pool, along with a 10-lane 50 meter training pool, which is connected to a 25-meter, seven-lane bump out.
“That brings a lot of its own challenges,” John Ireland, the chief technical director of Myrtha, said. “It’s on a scale that’s never been done before.”
Myrtha partnered with commercial pool services company Spear Corp. and Dodd Technologies, the latter of which helps broadcast the event to fans and supports with video scoring presentations. Both companies, which are based in Indiana, are longtime partners of USA Swimming and started collaborating almost two years to make this a reality.
“It’s the logistics of doing a construction project that would normally take six to nine months and finishing it in two weeks,” Ireland said. “It requires a lot of coordination.”
The size of the 67,000-seat stadium allows the pools to be installed in the same venue, divided by a large tarp hanging at the 50-yard line between the two pools to keep them separate.
Lucas Oil Stadium, which is run by former USA Swimming board member Eric Neuburger, ripped out the artificial turf a couple months ago as stadium operators were already planning to replace it. Myrtha, which builds institutional pools, waterparks and lagoons worldwide, used that opportunity to send their surveyors in to verify things such as floor flatness and access to perimeter drains that run around the stadium.
Construction of the pools started last month at Lucas Oil Stadium. The first step was laying down floor protection before creating a balanced frame that keeps the verticality of the stainless-steel modular panels that makes up the sides of the above-ground pools. Gutters separately were bolted on top of that structure before contractors installed temporary pool decking while plumbing and sanitation systems were installed inside of the competition pool. That same strenuous process was done for the warmup pool, which lagged about one week behind the competition pool.
In total, construction took about three weeks, included filling the pools with more than 860,000 gallons of water. The work goes beyond manufacturing the pool structures but also doing an array of other duties including tweaking mechanical systems, setting up plumbing and building pool decks inside the stadium.
The costs of the pool installations are split between local nonprofit organization Indiana Sports Corp. and USA Swimming. Patrick Talty, president of the Indiana Sports Corp., didn’t go into specifics on pool installation costs, but said the millions it takes to put on the profitable event is offset by ticket sales and sponsorship revenue.
But not everything is going to be temporary. After the event, the competition pool will be transported to Fort Wayne, Ind., to a new training facility. The warmup pool, meanwhile, is slated to be transported to a new national training center in the Cayman Islands, according to Ireland.
While building world-class pools on a football field brings its own challenges, there is plenty of opportunity with hosting the meet in the stadium.
The U.S. Swimming Trials were last held in Indianapolis in 2000. After a stop in Long Beach, Calif., in 2004, the meet has been held at the CHI Health Center in Omaha, Neb., with an original selling capacity of about 9,700 seats that was sliced in half due to the pandemic-related procedures in 2021. Organizers came to terms that ticket demand was outpacing supply before the global crisis, but the incident made the timing of the transition obvious.
USA Swimming also wanted to make the sport more accessible for non-swim fans after seeing how quickly tickets sold in 2016 and 2021. For the 2024 Trials, USA Swimming is looking to sell at least 20,000 tickets a night for the event in Lucas Oil Stadium, which would make it the most attended swim meet ever—topping the 2016 Summer Olympics Games in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro, which averaged 16,000 fans per day. Team USA has reached two-thirds of that goal but is still short one week out.
The ticket sales approach has changed with the 30,000-seat configuration. Revenue opportunities lie beyond targeting avid swim fans, who don’t need much convincing to buy.
“The tactics switch to selling to folks who are interested in the Olympic movement, or those who like football and can’t imagine there’s swimming pools on the football field or selling to folks locally who want just something fun to do on a Saturday night,” Ferguson said. “We didn’t think about those consumers before, but now we are.”
Indiana Sports Corp., which oversees the local organizing committee, led the bid for the Trials and helped steal the event away from Omaha, partly by showcasing the history of the trials in the Hoosier State. In 1924, 100 years ago, before the Olympics also held in Paris that year, the Trials were held in 62-acre Broad Ripple Park in northeast Indianapolis.
“We thought [that] was the icing on the cake,” Talty said.
Indiana Sports Corp., which is responsible for ancillary events around the trials, plans to host a nine-day festival outside the Indiana Convention Center. The ’party atmosphere’ slate includes food trucks, music performances and other fan activations.
“It’s an opportunity for the community here to be part of the Olympic movement,” Talty said.
It’s not the first rodeo for Indiana Sports Corp, which has facilitated and staged large scale sporting events for the last 40 years. Most recently, this includes NBA All-Star Weekend, the opening rounds of the NCAA men’s Division I basketball tournament and the men’s NIT championship. The Big Ten football Championship and the 2024 Indy Classic are both on the calendar this year, and the NFL’s scouting combine also happens every year at Lucas Oil Stadium.
To support these events, Indianapolis has more than 7,500 hotel rooms to offer, according to Indiana Sports Corp, which allows the downtown area to accommodate bunches of fans coming in town. The city’s 30-plus lodging spaces will come in handy for swimming’s Trials.
While USA Swimming operates and manages the Olympic Trials, it’s property of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic committee. Sponsor rights for the trials already belong to Team USA, but that hasn’t stopped USA Swimming from selling outside of the field of play (pool deck and in the arena). The organizing body will utilize other spaces like the nine-day fan fest where USA Swimming sponsors and local Indy companies will activate their brands.
Despite the busy schedule, the significance of this event and what it means for about 1,000 swimmers who are trying to fill the maximum 52 spots on the team is not lost on Myrtha. After all, the reality is that hundreds of athletes have trained their entire lives for this moment, and this might be the last meet they swim in.
“It’s a real privilege for us to help them experience that and have their experience be as positive as it can,” Ireland added.
Onderwerpen: Football, NFL, Olympics