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When USA Swimming holds the Olympic trials in Indianapolis from June 15-23, the event will mark the first time the competition is staged at an NFL football stadium.
To make the unusual choice of venue work, swimming officials have a list of demanding priorities. They want:
◗ The trials to feel bombastic, like a WWE event.
◗ A spectacle on such a scale that it prepares U.S. swimmers to handle anything at the Olympics in Paris this summer.
◗ The temporary pools to appear as if they’ve always been there.
◗ The 70,000-seat Lucas Oil Stadium (which will hold 30,000 for swimming) to feel … intimate.
In other words, USA Swimming want to make a big splash.
To bring this ambitious vision to reality, USA Swimming has again to a longtime Indiana partner: Dodd Technologies in Pendleton. The company will provide the lighting, decking and special effects for the U.S. Olympic Team Swimming Trials.
“The No. 1 thing they do is they’re problem solvers,” said Dean Ekeren, the director of national events for USA Swimming. “We walk through the venue, and they just come with such creative solutions.”
More than 30 years ago, in 1992, when USA Swimming first started working with Dodd Technologies, the Olympic trials were held at the Natatorium at IUPUI. Then, drawing a crowd of 3,000 people to see Summer Sanders or Matt Biondi was considered a success. By 2008, the event was held in a basketball arena in Omaha.
Now, it’s ratcheted up again.
“It could be close to 30,000 people in Indianapolis” at any particular session, said Mark Dodd, the president of Dodd Technologies. The swimmers “are walking out into the biggest stage they’ve ever been on in their lives, and you really want them to be excited and their families and their coaches and everybody to be excited.”
Enter the theatrics and enter Dodd.
The big shows
For Dodd, producing the Olympic trials means building on a career that winds back 50 years.
In the late 1970s, he and a partner owned a music studio. Several years in, the company started receiving more and more requests for live music production. By 1993, the live sound aspect of the business outstripped the work for the studio. So Dodd sold the studio and incorporated Dodd Technologies.
“All of a sudden we’re building stages and doing all kinds of staging events,” Dodd said. “And then you had video and then projection and now it’s LED and display technology.”
In 2004, Dodd helped start another business, Tyler Truss, which eventually became one of the country’s largest truss companies. The trusses are beams connected by nodes that create a rigid structure. They work well for the giant sets used for concerts, tours and other live productions. Dodd sold the company in 2019 (to Glenn Clelan of Fishers, who remains its CEO today), but the experience helped the staff at Dodd Technologies build the foundation for larger, more intricate staging.
“We really have kind of evolved into a company doing corporate national meetings, big sports, big broadcasting, special events things,” Dodd said. “That’s really our guts, really our wheelhouse. That’s where we’re the best.”
Now, 40 years from the original studio, Dodd offers audio, video, LED, sets, lighting and event management. The company produces a broad range of shows around the world, and its work includes some of Indianapolis’ notable moments, such as corporate meetings and equestrian events as well as the nightly Signature Salute at Monument Circle, Conner Prairie’s outdoor Symphony on the Prairie and this year’s NBA All-Star Game weekend festivities in Indianapolis.
The company’s resume also includes work at the Olympic Swimming Trials in 2008, 2012 and 2016.
Dodd handles shows about 300 days a year, sometimes juggling four or five different events simultaneously. And it does it all as a behind-the-scenes company everyone in the business knows but that spectators might not ever take note of.
In May, the company will be putting the final touches on the Indy 500, where Dodd’s team will have multiple responsibilities including the post-race victory dinner.
That work comes just as construction crews working on the pools at Lucas Oil Stadium take part in a race of their own: meeting the tight construction deadlines at Lucas necessary for the Olympic trials.
Relying on partners
As crews, unions and companies build the pools, the order of operations is as follows: the pool structures themselves, then the plumbing and the decking and then the production from Dodd.
That means the Dodd team is dependent on all its partners—including Myrtha Pools, which will build the pool structures, and Indiana-based Spear Corp., which will handle the plumbing—to keep to a schedule.
It’s demanding, but it’s a team of companies that has worked together at several large-scale events in the past.
“The biggest challenge and the biggest reward for us is that we keep trying to top every trials, so we then elevate it to a world class event,” said Dodd Technologies Vice President Andy Meggenhofen
A primary goal is to help keep the attention on what’s happening in the water and to make the spectators feel as close to the action as possible.
At Lucas Oil Stadium, Dodd will rely on more than 30,000 square feet of decking, installation of which began in May. To make the arena feel smaller, crew members will rely on vertical video boards and scoreboards as a way to distract from the building’s height. And they will use lighting to help keep spectators’ eyes on the pool rather than the vast upper levels of the stadium.
Dodd said the work is meant to create an environment that allows the athletes and their families and the endless hours of work they’ve put in to get to the trials to shine.
“That’s what we’re looking for—that excitement level,” he said.
One way to do that, Meggenhofen said, is a new LED lighting technology used for special effects and for some of the swimmers’ entrances. It’s the kind of small touch that Ekeren said can make a swim meet feel like a rock concert.
“When we say WWE entrances, that’s literally what we’re talking about,” Meggenhofen said. “We’re talking about a 70-foot-tall screen with the athletes coming on as their entrance. It goes back to that cultural part. We green-screened every athlete walking out. So they come out, and they’re 50 feet tall. We’re trying to make brands of the swimmers.”
Dodd added: “You’re not just seeing somebody with a cap on half soaking wet. It’s really a high-end introduction for everyone.”
But for now—until the teams meet all of their deadlines and the fans are in their seats—the Dodd team will keep working. The payoff is when the swimmers appear.
“There’s always a big introduction every night to the swimmers,” Dodd said, “and seeing and making that happen, when you get through your first one, you start going, ‘Yep, this is gonna work. This is going to feel right.’”•
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