By Marcelle Dibrell
Indianapolis is expected to break the record for the largest swim meet in history, where the city is hosting the 2024 United States Olympic Trials. The event is taking place inside Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts, from June 15-23, the first time an Olympic qualifying swim meet has ever been held on a football field.
The venue can bring a crowd of 30,000 to each session for a total of 250,000 fans over the course of the nine-day event. (According to the International Swimming Hall of fame, the largest crowd at an indoor swim meet ever was 25,000 at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.)
It’s also a big jump from the Olympic Trial venue in Omaha, Nebraska, which has hosted the previous four trials and can seat 14,000.
It’s interesting to note that the 1924 Olympic swimming trials were also hosted by Indianapolis, with the team selected to go to the Paris Olympic Games. Now, 100 years later, Indianapolis is again the host city for the US Olympic Swim Team, which will be sent to the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. Indianapolis has the distinction of being the city that has the record for the most times hosting the meet — it will be 7 times this June — but it’s the first time it has done so since 2000, when 15-year-old Michael Phelps made his first Olympic team.
The event will draw more than 1,000 Olympic swimming hopefuls to dive in and set out for the biggest dream of their lives: A chance to fill the 52 open spots setting out for Paris this summer.
The magnitude of event is impressive, but perhaps equally astonishing was the feat of constructing the swimming pools — a 25-meter warmup pool and a 50-meter competition pool — inside an indoor football stadium.
Myrtha Pools, an Italian-based contractor that has supplied Olympic pools for decades, manufactured the materials for the pools. Rigid PVC and stainless-steel panels were sent from its factory in Italy to Indianapolis, where hundreds of workers built the pools and deck.
Over the course of four weeks, eighteen-wheelers and heavy machinery rolled through Lucas Oil Stadium to deliver their cargo.
Workers stashed away the yellow goal posts and folded up the first 10 rows of seats to make the aboveground pool visible for fans. Then they built more than an acre of raised pool deck about 10 feet above the stadium’s floor.
To create the pools themselves, they bolted together “millimetricallyperfect steel panels” and then chemically sealed them to make them waterproof.
They filled the pools with 2 million gallons of water, which they tapped from a nearby fire hydrant that pumped water at 1,200 gallons per minute through specially built pipes, which extended from the concourse and down the seats until it finally reached the stadium floor.
They hung an enormous black curtain at the 50-yard line to separate the warm-up pool from the main attraction: The competition pool, where the real action will take place.
And from the ceiling, they suspended a 35,000-pound LED scoreboard directly above the pool, which was installed for this very occasion so that swimmers can look up after touching the wall to find out if they will represent America in Paris.
The entire operation took two months and millions of dollars.
When the event is concluded, the water will be sent to the White River, the pools will be disassembled, and the parts will be sent to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the Cayman Islands, where they will be reconstructed as permanent pools.
Indianapolis has been ramping up for the opportunity to host one of the biggest events in the country this year. As an homage to Paris, the city has put up a nearly 70-foot lighted replica of the Eiffel Tower. Free live musical performances are planned every day.
It’s a not-to-be missed event, where history will be made every night featuring the world’s fastest swimmers and Olympians named to theAmerican team every evening.
Photo credit Myrtha Pools, www.myrthapools.com.
