Katie Ledecky smiles after winning the women's 800m freestyle at the U.S. Olympic Games. … [+]
Recognizing growing interest in the Olympic Trials, USA Swimming officials decided in 2019 to open up bids for the event to larger venues.
Meanwhile, tickets for lower-tier seats at the 2020 Trials in Omaha, Nebraska, nearly sold out in 20 minutes. Omaha hosted the Trials in 2008, 2012 and 2016, drawing huge crowds to the 14,000-seat CHI Health Center Arena and building a reputation as a swimming mecca.
Still, USA Swimming CEO and president Tim Hinchey thought the event would be a perfect fit for an NFL stadium, where more fans could attend and it would attract more sponsors. This month, Hinchey's vision is coming to fruition: The trials will run from June 15 to 23 at Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts.
USA Swimming also considered bids from Minneapolis and St. Louis, both of which would have held the qualifying meet in an NFL stadium, but Indianapolis won the bid in large part because the city has hosted numerous major sporting events in the past, including multiple swimming qualifying meets, albeit in much smaller arenas.
Lucas Oil Stadium will be able to accommodate more than 30,000 fans for this year's Trials, and USA Swimming chief commercial officer Shanna Ferguson said event officials hope to attract more than 20,000 fans on the first day of competition, which would be the biggest attendance ever for a swimming meet and surpass the 2016 Brazil Olympics.
“We knew the event needed a bigger space both from a commercial perspective and to expand the reach of our sport, which unfortunately, unless you're the parent of an athlete, tends to only get attention about once every four years,” Ferguson said.
She added, “[Indianapolis]knows how to host a big event. This city really knows how to take part in a big event and they had the guts to try something that no one else had done before.”
Indianapolis has been a major sports destination for many years, since the Indiana Sports Corporation, the first sports commission in the United States, was founded in 1979. In 1980, the city hosted the NCAA Men's Basketball Final Four for the first time. Two years later, it hosted the National Sports Festival, a multi-sport event created by the U.S. Olympic Committee to help prepare athletes for the Olympics. And in 1987, Indianapolis hosted the Pan American Games, a two-week event that drew about 4,500 athletes from 38 countries.
“That was our international debut party,” said Patrick Talty, president of Indiana Sports Corp. “It was our biggest event yet. We showed that we can leverage volunteers. We showed that we can host events across multiple venues. We showed a walkable campus. We saw how Indianapolis and the Hoosier spirit of hospitality can host these events and how we can raise the bar.”
Since then, the city has hosted dozens of major sporting events, including seven additional NCAA men's basketball Final Fours, three NCAA women's basketball Final Fours, the 2002 FIBA World Championship, the 2012 Super Bowl, the 2022 College Football Playoff national title game and this year's NBA All-Star Weekend. The city is scheduled to host the Men's Final Four again in 2026 and 2029 and the Women's Final Four in 2028.
Indianapolis also has a swimming history dating back a century, having hosted the Men's Olympic Trials in 1924. The Indiana University Swimming Pool also hosted the Olympic Trials in 1992, 1996, and 2000, and seats approximately 4,700 spectators.
After the 2000 Trials, USA Swimming officials searched for a larger venue and decided to hold the 2004 Trials in Long Beach, California, building two temporary pools in a parking lot next to the Long Beach Arena.
Since 2008, Omaha has hosted the swim qualifiers three times, breaking attendance records each time, including drawing a total of nearly 200,000 spectators at the 2016 meet. When Hinchey took over as head coach in 2017, USA Swimming officials began considering a larger venue, but Omaha won the 2020 qualifiers before Hinchey arrived. The qualifiers were eventually postponed to 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Scott Davison, president and CEO of Indianapolis-based OneAmerica Financial and a longtime swimming fan and coach, was part of the group that convinced Hinchey that Indianapolis could host qualifiers at the NFL stadium. Davison was heavily involved in Indianapolis' hosting of the 2004 World Aquatics Championships and was active in the Indiana Sports Corporation, which works closely with the Capital Improvement Board (which operates Lucas Oil Stadium) and Visit Indy, the city's tourism organization.
“We all come together and say, 'Do you think this makes sense? Do you want to bid on something like this?'” Talty says. “We all come to the table with what we want to put into it. With the stadium, they've been hand in glove with us all along, because we can't have a unique event like this without the stadium in the first place. We ask them to invest, and they invest in these types of events.”
For the swim preliminaries, Davison is co-chairing the local organizing committee with Karin Surratt, executive vice president of OneAmerica. Davison and Surratt have been working on the event for the past two years, and it also includes many local business leaders, including Maggie Lewis, CEO of the Boys & Girls Club of Indianapolis, and Doug Boles, president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indianapolis 500 race.
Surratt said more than 3,000 volunteers will be working during the trials, which will include nine consecutive nights and eight days of competition (17 sessions total), as well as USA Swimming Live presented by Purdue University, a free event with live music and food, Toyota Aquazone, an indoor fan festival and USA Swimming House presented by One America, a hospitality area overlooking Lucas Oil Stadium's two warm-up pools.
One America plans to participate in the trials again in 2028 as part of a longstanding partnership with USA Swimming, but a location for that event has yet to be determined.
“Our hope is to wow the crowd and provide an amazing experience that will make them want to come back,” Surratt said. “When it comes to the fan experience, we have the reputation and the evidence to prove it that we put on an event unlike any other city.”
Construction crews at Lucas Oil Stadium have been working around the clock for the past month to install the main 50-meter competition pool and two warm-up pools (one 25 meters and one 50 meters), as well as lighting, scoreboards and seating. The stadium's capacity for NFL games is about 67,000, but officials will install large blue curtains at the 50-yard line at Trials to separate the competition pool from the warm-up area, reducing capacity to about 30,000. Still, the number of seats available for swimming is unprecedented.
This weekend, USA Swimming is hosting Stadium Splash, a two-day tournament at Lucas Oil Stadium for swimmers who didn't qualify for the preliminaries. The event is closed to the public, but because the stadium wasn't built to host competitive swimming, it's an opportunity for officials to make sure everything, including the plumbing, is installed correctly and working properly.
“It's not going to be perfect,” Ferguson said, “and we're going to have a few days of adjustments after that.”
Qualifiers will arrive in Indianapolis next Tuesday and will have four days to practice before the tournament begins on June 15. NBC will broadcast the tournament every night at 8 p.m. through June 23, and NBC's streaming service, Peacock, will air the qualifiers every morning at 11 a.m. through June 22.
For the athletes, the qualifiers are a chance to fulfill their Olympic dreams and compete on the biggest stage many will ever experience. And for tournament organizers and USA Swimming, the event marks the culmination of years of work to introduce the sport to large spectators and television audiences.
“This is what we do in life,” Ferguson said. “This is what we do. At the end of the day, I hope sponsors take notice and are interested in us, but really what I want is a 6-, 7-, 8-year-old kid who sees the Olympic selections and says, 'This is the sport I want to do.' That's what we want ultimately. We want more kids to get involved in the sport, more kids to learn to swim.”
