INDIANAPOLIS — It's so big you can't smell the chlorine.
When you enter a pool area, the first sensation you'll encounter is the smell of chlorine, the chemical that keeps the water clean. The smell is more intense and noticeable than the sight of blue water or the sound of splashing. But that's not the case at Lucas Oil Stadium, which for the next 10 days will be repurposed as the world's largest indoor swimming venue.
The space is spacious enough that you won't smell the chlorine at U.S. Olympic Trials unless you're on the pool deck or in the water.
USA Swimming is growing its signature event out of the traditional pools that once held the trials, such as the Jamail Texas Swim Center in Austin and the IUPUI swimming pool just a few blocks from Lucas Oil. After hosting four trials in Omaha from 2008 to 2021, the basketball venue has also outgrown it. Now it's time to try its hand at scale at an NFL stadium.
“We'll try,” USA Swimming CEO Tim Hinchey acknowledged. Sports Illustrated “We want to use this opportunity to promote our sport,” he said after touring the venue last week.
The United States has a long history of hosting non-football events in football stadiums, from the UCLA vs. Houston men's basketball game at the Astrodome in 1968 to the NHL's annual Winter Classic vs. Nebraska game. A women's volleyball match in front of 92,000 fans Last year, we as a nation became obsessed with creating big sporting spectacles, but this is something new.
It took a lot of courage to host swimming, one of the flagship events at the quadrennial Olympics but otherwise a minor sport, in a place like this.
The idea was born over steaks and red wine at Harry & Izzy's in downtown Indianapolis in 2018, when local businessman Scott Davison and Hinchey, two former swimmers, were eager to figure out how to take the sport they loved to the next level.
“Are you going to hold the Olympic Trials in a football stadium?” Hinchey asked Davison.
“I'm serious about it,” Davison replied.
On the drive home after dinner, Davison called Ryan Vaughn, then president of Indiana Sports Corp. Davison, CEO of OneAmerica Financial, worried he might have overpromised on behalf of city leaders.
“Hey Ryan,” Davison said, “are you serious about holding the Olympic Trials in a soccer stadium? I just told you I am.”
“Exactly,” Vaughn said.
Thus, the path for the event was set. Though recent reports had suggested the idea was a pipe dream by USA Swimming's chief commercial officer, Shanna Ferguson, during the 2021 qualifying rounds in Omaha, the plan actually dates back several years.
(At the pandemic-altered Lucas Oil Final Four in April 2021, local sources pointed to a two-court setup separated by a giant curtain and said the same design was being used at the swim trials. In June of that year, SI Be the first to report Regarding plans to move the event from Omaha to an NFL stadium in Indy.
Davison swam in college and was a coach for a time. He's still passionate about swimming; his backyard has a two-lane pool, where masters-level swimmers stream in and out every morning. (“I wish I'd built a one-lane pool, but I like people,” he says.) Hinchey is another backyard swimmer.
With those two at the forefront and Indy Sports Corp on board, the plan developed and took shape. USA Swimming received bids from four cities to host trials this year (the other three were Omaha, St. Louis and Minneapolis), and Indy was the winner.
Its central geography and hosting history were key factors: Indy has hosted or co-hosted the Olympic Trials six times, and this year marks the 100th anniversary of the first one (which, as now, selected the team to compete in Paris). Indy hosted the 1987 Pan American Games and the 2002 FIBA World Championship. It's also been home to the 2022 College Football Playoff Final and the 2012 Super Bowl, and is a key site for the Final Four.
“The Olympic Trials will enhance our reputation as a world-class sports city,” said Patrick Talty, current CEO of the Indiana Sports Corporation.
The Colts obviously had to buy into the idea, as did stadium operators, who easily accepted.
Stadium director Eric Neuberger is the son of Dale Neuberger, who served as vice president of World Aquatics for 21 years and previously worked for USA Track and Field and the IUPUI swimming pool. Eric was one of the “basket kids” at the 1992 Trials, tasked with carrying the athletes' sweats, shoes and other belongings off the pool deck after the race.
His response to the idea of building a swimming pool at the stadium was, “Yes please. I live for swimming. It's been a big part of my life so I'm all for it…. It would turn the emerald green grass into diamond blue water.”
Ferguson moved to Indianapolis from USA Swimming's headquarters in Colorado Springs more than a month ago to oversee construction and oversee the details, and has been driving logistics while Hinchey handles the marketing and promotion side of things.
A few weeks ago, she watched as the fire hydrant on Capitol Street was opened and a million gallons of water poured through the pipes into Lucas Oil and into the competition pool, then another million gallons into the warm-up and warm-down pools. Everything else coalesces around that most important element.
“We're almost there,” Ferguson said last week.
Barring any logistical glitches or complete disinterest from fans, the U.S. swimming team's foray into soccer venues could rewrite the sport's Olympic qualification standards in the future — it could become the norm, not just a one-off shakeup.
“It's going to be hard to go back,” Davison said.
They built it using the same technology that built the temporary pool at CHI Health Center in Omaha, where the Creighton Blue Jays play their home basketball games. So will fans come?
That remains to be seen. Lucas Oil's swimming stadium, with a capacity of 70,000 for football, was an ambitious build with a maximum seating capacity of 30,000. It's beyond reach. In fact, USA Swimming would likely be happy with even half that number of spectators, averaging it over the nine days and nine nights of competition.
The stated goal is to break the world record for indoor attendance on Saturday's opening night, which Hinchey said peaked at about 16,000 fans at the 2016 Rio Olympics (the venue's capacity for that event was listed as 14,997).
The setup means that even a record-size crowd could look and sound a little sparse, and USA Swimming's hope is that the noise and energy of this dramatic, high-pressure event won't dissipate in the empty space.
Regardless of how many fans show up, this is the biggest stage in swim meet history, and even veterans like Katie Ledecky and Caleb Dressel are sure to have a “wow” moment when they take one look. The pool is the same size as always, 50 meters long and 10 lanes, including one for competition, but the scale of everything surrounding it is epic and spectacular.
The building has a statue of Peyton Manning at the front and next to it a huge mural of Kate Douglas, the multi-stroke star who could become one of America's stars of the summer.
Indoors, swimmers will stand on a starting block with the names of their Indianapolis Colts Ring of Honor heroes on their backs, and when they finish, they'll swim toward Marvin Harrison, Edgarin James, Eric Dickerson and Tony Dungy.
Swimmers enter the competition pool deck through an entrance that features a 70-foot overhead video board that shows each swimmer as they are introduced leading up to the finals.
Above the pool, another giant four-sided video board/scoreboard has been installed, which will be useful for fans seated farther from the pool than in Omaha, and for the swimmers themselves, who will have a reference point during their backstroke (better than getting disoriented staring at the darkness above). The board will also display times on the bottom, which should help swimmers who have to crane their necks to find that important information at the end of their race.
Other new competitor-friendly implementations include:
Fan experiences will also vary from the pool deck to the upper deck, with fans having the opportunity to be wined and dined to suit every budget, suites are sold out and there are hospitality areas available for VIPs.
But the coolest perk is the “speakeasy” known as the Dive Bar, a collection of several converted field-level suites with windows offering underwater views of the competition pools during warm-ups before the nightly finals.
It remains to be seen whether this big shakeup will bankrupt USA Swimming financially, but thinking small is no way to change the scale of a sport.
“We want to showcase how great our sport is,” Hinchey said poolside at the NFL Stadium, his ambitious vision hanging around him.
