Editorial: Indianapolis deserves to host the 2028 Olympic swimming trials

Kudos to the Indiana Sports Corp., the Capital Improvement Board, Visit Indy and all the organizations and individual leaders who helped host the Olympic Swimming Trials through last weekend at Lucas Oil Stadium.

The nine-day event was spectacular.

IBJ had been reporting and writing about the event regularly for months, and still, the site of that competition pool inside an NFL stadium was almost unbelievable. So was the raucous crowd, which averaged more than 17,000 per session and totaled some 285,000 fans, an increase of more than 60% from the previous total attendance record set in 2016 in Omaha, Nebraska.

“One of USA Swimming’s main goals, aside from remaining the best swimming nation in the world, is to promote our sport and expose it to new audiences,” the organization’s CEO, Tim Hinchey, said in a press release announcing the attendance record. “As a host city, Indianapolis has exceeded our expectations, with the most tickets we’ve ever sold for an event. This overwhelming support is a testament to the growing popularity of the top Olympic sport and a promising sign for its growth.”

These are the types of comments you can expect to read in a press release. And if you’ve been in Indianapolis for any length of time, you know the city is often praised for the way it hosts events. The city is good at this.

But the swimming trial operations seemed to exceed even the lofty expectations always thrust on Indianapolis. People inside the sport and outside gushed about the setup inside Lucas Oil, the fans who cheered their favorite swimmers and the activities outside the stadium, which included the Toyota Aqua Zone fan fest and a replica Eiffel Tower that proved a popular spot for selfies.

Congratulations especially to the Indiana Sports Corp., the primary local driver of the event and the chief coordinator of what was happening.

But we’d also be remiss not to mention Dodd Technologies, the Pendleton company that provided the lights, music and special effects that pushed the event to new heights. In an interview with IBJ earlier this year, President Mark Dodd said the goal was to create a bombastic event, a spectacle that would draw in fans and help the swimmers get prepared for Paris.

One challenge, Dodd said, was making Lucas Oil Stadium feel intimate. The crew did so by relying on vertical video boards and scoreboards as a way to distract from the building’s height. And Dodd—which USA Swimming has used for past Olympic trials—used lighting to help keep spectators’ eyes on the pool rather than the vast upper levels of the stadium.

It was incredibly successful. Within minutes of sitting down, fans forgot they were in a football stadium. It felt like the most impressive swimming facility ever created.

We hope all of that hard work and success will lead USA Swimming to choose Indianapolis for the Olympic trials in four years. The city showed it knows not only how to host a great event but how to host a great swimming championship. Let’s do it again in 2028.•

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