INDIANAPOLIS—It’s so huge you can’t smell the chlorine.
The dominant sensory experience upon entering a swimming pool is the olfactory assault of chlorine, the chemical that keeps the water clean. More than the sight of blue water or the sound of splashing, the smell of a swimming pool is pungent and universal. But that’s not the case at Lucas Oil Stadium, which has been converted for the next 10 days into the world’s largest indoor swimming arena.
The space is large enough that unless you’re on the pool deck or in the water, the smell of chlorine isn’t part of the agenda at these U.S. Olympic trials.
USA Swimming has seen its flagship event overtake the conventional pools that once hosted Trials, like the Jamail Texas Swim Center in Austin or the IUPUI Natatorium, just blocks from Lucas Oil. It outgrew a basketball venue, after a four-try run from 2008-21 in Omaha. Now it’s time to try the size of an NFL stadium.
“We are turning a corner,” acknowledged USA Swimming CEO Tim Hinchey, giving Sports Illustrated a site visit last week. “We are seizing the opportunity to amplify our sport.”
America has long dreamed big in terms of hosting non-soccer competitions in soccer stadiums. From the UCLA-Houston men’s basketball game at the Astrodome in 1968 to the annual NHL Winter Classic to Nebraska playing a women’s volleyball match in front of 92,000 fans last year we as a nation love creating massive sporting spectacles. But it’s a new one.
It took a lot of courage to put swimming – one of the flagship Olympic competitions every four years, but otherwise a fringe sport – in a place like this.
The idea took root over steak and red wine at Harry & Izzy’s in downtown Indy in 2018. Local business mogul Scott Davison and Hinchey, two old swimmers, were beginning to dream of how to take their favorite sport to another level.
“Do you seriously want to hold the Olympic trials in a football stadium? Hinchey asked Davison.
“I’m very serious about this,” Davison responded.
On his way home from dinner, Davison called Ryan Vaughn, then president of the Indiana Sports Corporation. Davison, CEO of OneAmerica Financial, worried he had promised too much on behalf of civic leaders.
“Hey, Ryan,” Davison said. “Are we serious about holding the Olympic trials in a football stadium? Because I just said we are.
“It’s really true,” Vaughn said.
The path to this event was therefore mapped out. Recently published reports have attributed the idea to optimistic thinking by USA Swimming Chief Business Officer Shana Ferguson during the 2021 trials in Omaha, but in reality this plan predated this moment by several years.
(In April 2021, during the pandemic-altered Final Four at Lucas Oil, local sources pointed out the configuration of two courts separated by a giant curtain and said the same design was in play for the swim trials. In June of the same year, SI was the first to report on plans to move the event out of Omaha to the NFL Stadium in Indy.)
Davison swam at the collegiate level and even coached for a time. He is still immersed in the sport. It has a two-lane swimming pool in its garden and regularly has masters swimmers coming in and out in the morning. (“I would have built a one-lane pool, but I like people,” he says.) Hinchey was among those who took a few laps around the garden.
With these two leading the way and Indy Sports Corp. on board, the plans continued and crystallized. USA Swimming accepted applications from four cities to host this year’s trials — Omaha, St. Louis and Minneapolis were the other three — and Indy won.
The city’s centralized geography and welcoming history were major factors. Indy has hosted or co-hosted the Olympic Trials six other times, and this marks the 100th anniversary of the first. (Then, as now, the Trials selected a team that would compete in Paris.) The 1987 Pan American Games were held in the city, as was the 2002 FIBA World Championship. It also became a flagship venue for the Final Four, in addition to hosting the 2022 College Football Playoff championship game and the 2012 Super Bowl.
“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, clearly, had to buy into the concept. Stadium operators too. The latter was easy to sell.
Stadium Director Eric Neuburger is the son of Dale Neuburger, who was vice president of World Aquatics for 21 years and previously worked with USA Track & Field and the IUPUI Natatorium. Eric was one of the “basket kids” at the 1992 trials, responsible for carrying swimmers’ sweatshirts, shoes and other personal belongings out of the pool after races.
His reaction to the idea of building a swimming pool in his stadium: “Go for it. I live for this stuff. Swimming has been an important part of my life, so I was all for making this happen. …The emerald green turf is now diamond blue water.
Ferguson moved from USA Swimming’s Colorado Springs headquarters to Indy more than a month ago to oversee construction and handle details. While Hinchey worked on the marketing and promotion aspects, Ferguson was the logistical driver.
A few weeks ago, she saw a fire hydrant on Capitol Avenue open, sending a million gallons of water gushing into Lucas Oil through pipes to fill the competition pool. Then another million went into the warm-up and warm-up pool. Everything else is gathered around this most vital element.
“We’re almost there,” Ferguson said last week.
Barring any logistical mishaps or complete fan apathy, USA Swimming’s arrival at soccer venues may well set the bar for the sport’s Olympic trials in the future. This could be more than just a big one-time change; This could be the norm.
“It’s going to be hard to go back,” Davison says.
They built it using the same technology that created a temporary swimming pool at the CHI Health Center in Omaha, where the Creighton Bluejays play home basketball games. Now, will the fans come?
That remains to be seen. With a capacity of 70,000 seats for football, the Lucas Oil swimming pool was ambitiously built with up to 30,000 seats. Reaching an exceeded scope. In truth, USA Swimming would settle for an average of half that over nine days and nights of competition.
The stated goal is to break a world record for indoor attendance on opening night Saturday, with the Rio 2016 Olympics credited with a peak crowd of around 16,000, according to Hinchey. (The venue for this meeting had a rated capacity of 14,997 people.)
Even a record crowd might seem a little sparse in this configuration. USA Swimming’s hope is that the noise and energy of this high-pressure, dramatic competition does not dissipate into unoccupied space.
Regardless of the number of fans in attendance, this is the largest competitive swimming scene in history. Even the most seasoned veterans like Katie Ledecky and Caeleb Dressel are bound to experience a “wow” moment upon first sight. The pool measures as always – 50 meters long with ten lanes, one of which will be used for competition – but the scale of everything around it is spectacularly large.
In front of the building, a statue of Peyton Manning is dwarfed by a huge mural depicting multi-hit star Kate Douglass, who has the chance to be one of this summer’s stars for the United States.
Inside, swimmers will stand on starting blocks with the names of the Indianapolis Colts’ Ring of Honor heroes on their backs. When they’re done, they’ll look to Marvin Harrison and Edgerrin James, Eric Dickerson and Tony Dungy.
Swimmers will access the competition pool deck via an entrance with a 70-foot video board above. The table will present each athlete as they are presented for the final.
Another giant four-sided video scoreboard has been placed above the pool, which will be useful for a few interested parties: fans who are seated further from the pool than they were in Omaha; and the competitors themselves, who will have a reference point while swimming on their backs (better than the disorienting sensation of staring into the darkness of the ceiling). Times will also be displayed at the bottom of the table, which should help swimmers who have had to crane their necks to find crucial information at the end of their races.
Other competitor-friendly implementations and news here:
From the pool deck to the upper deck, the fan experience will also be different. Fans will have the opportunity to win and dine as much as their wallets can afford. Suites are sold out and reception areas are available for VIPs.
But the biggest perk is a “speakeasy” dubbed the Dive Bar: a few converted court-level suites with windows that will offer an underwater view of the competition pool during warm-ups before the nightly finals.
It remains to be seen whether USA Swimming will find itself financially underwater because of this big change. But you can’t change the scale of a sport by thinking small.
“We want to show how great our sport is,” Hinchey says from the pool of an NFL stadium, his ambitious vision towering around him.