INDIANAPOLIS — With a cannonball by fan-favorite Colts mascot Blue, the U.S. Olympic Swim Trials pool inside Lucas Oil Stadium officially opened.
It’s a history maker for the Circle City, for the first time, a swimming pool is inside of an NFL stadium.
”We’re doing it and we did it,” said Shana Ferguson, the chief commercial officer for USA Swimming. “We have put two and a half, really three pools in a football stadium.”
The work was done mainly by four companies, three of them local to central Indiana. Dodd Technologies, Spear Corporation, Shiel Sexton and Myrtha Pools built these pools and the surrounding infrastructure in less than a month.
”To be here through the construction has been special, hundreds of people working on this from Lucas Oil Stadium stagehands to carpenters and electricians and engineers, and architects and construction specialists,” said Ferguson.
It’s a dream CEO of One America Financial Scott Davidson said was created over drinks at Harry and Izzy’s in downtown Indy six years ago with USA Swimming President Tom Hinchy. Their idea is now six days away from taking over downtown Indy.
The pool isn’t the only new addition to Lucas Oil Stadium, a new jumbotron now hangs above the pool and a 70-foot LED screen will introduce the swimmers, both are courtesy of local company Dodd Technologies.
It creates an environment that would feel more familiar in the player intros and pizazz of the NFL or NBA, but now it’s here for swimming. Ferguson hopes to create the experience of a lifetime for the nearly 1,000 swimmers involved.
”I want them to walk through that 70-foot tall board and say, ‘This is really amazing, this is special, I must have arrived,’” she said.
A black curtain hangs in Lucas Oil, dividing the arena in half, but that doesn’t mean only half the facility is in use. On the other side are two additional pools. They’re built so the athletes can warm up and cool down. It’s the biggest practice pool ever built for a competition of this kind.
The three huge pools take roughly 2 million gallons of water to fill up. Crews got all that water from an unexpected place: a hydrant right outside of Lucas Oil Stadium on Capitol Avenue.
So, the water that will create Olympians was once in the White River, and it will eventually return to the river. Fans and swimmers alike should have no worries about quality, John Ireland with Myrtha Pools said it’s some of the clearest water they’ve ever worked with.
All of the action kicks off inside Lucas Oil Stadium on June 15. It’s been a long time coming for Indy Sports Corp President Patrick Talty. Talty and his team first put the bid in for the trials in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
”They were familiar with Indiana and Indianapolis and we have a rich swimming history, so we were ahead there, but it is hard, it was really hard, we did a lot of things over zoom,” Talty said.
In uncertain times, Talty said it was a must to bring the Olympic Trials back to Indy for the first time since 2000.
”You think about back then and what the world was like,” Talty said. “We didn’t know what the future of sport was, so this event was really, really important to us to land, because we felt like it was something we could count on, the city could count on.”
Talty can now welcome USA Swimming and the Olympic Trials back to a city that has bounced back from that pandemic.
”This is going to be entertainment,” he said. “You’re going to see the world’s fastest swimmers and you’re going to see an Olympian named to the team every night.”
The party isn’t just inside of Lucas Oil Stadium, the trials will flood downtown with an expected 250,000 fans for the nine days of swimming with attractions like USA Swimming Live on Georgia St. and the Toyota Aqua Zone inside the Indiana Convention Center.
”That is free concerts for 10 nights out on Georgia Street, we have a 66-foot Eiffel Tower, free Aqua Zone which is a USA Swimming activation,” Talty said.
But all of this doesn’t happen easily. USA Swimming Live is looking for volunteers to help across the nine days of swimming. All volunteers earn an All Lanes Lead to Indy gold medal.
”There are hundreds of people who have given us thousands of hours of volunteer service to this event that has quite frankly been staggering for me to witness,” Ferguson said. “But I know that is the Hoosier hospitality.”
Amid all the fanfare, the real reason all of this has been created is not lost on Ferguson.
”Our number one goal for this event is to name 26 women and 26 men for the Olympic team that goes to Paris,” she said.
Now, along the way, if they inspire the next generation of swimmers and convince people to learn to swim, that’s a great bonus.
“And say, ‘I want to do that, I want to learn how to swim, I want to be the next Katie Ledecky,’” Ferguson said.
All of the action kicks off June 15. That night Lucas Oil Stadium could be home to a world record. 30,000 fans would break the record for largest swim meet ever and each fan will get a free t-shirt to honor the special occasion.
