A swimming pool in … an NFL stadium? Welcome to U.S. Olympic trials
In a bold, grandiose ploy to expand the reach of swimming, the 70,000-seat home of the Indianapolis Colts has been transformed from a football field into the world’s biggest aquatic arena.
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The temporary pools came from northern Italy. The two million gallons of water came from a fire hydrant on South Capitol Ave., via 6,000 feet of piping that snakes through an NFL stadium. The swimmers will come from all over the United States, and step onstage near what’s usually the 45-yard line. And from June 15-23 in Indianapolis, they’ll take part in a grand, unprecedented experiment — all while trying to qualify for the Olympics.
It’s “crazy,” Bobby Finke, a 2021 gold medalist, said of the plan for this year’s U.S. Olympic swimming trials — crazy in a good way.“It’s wild,” and “bananas,” USA Swimming chief commercial officer Shana Ferguson told Yahoo Sports last month as she surveyed the project from inside Lucas Oil Stadium.
The 70,000-seat home of the Indianapolis Colts, over the past month, has been transformed from a football field into the world’s biggest aquatic arena.
It’s a bold, grandiose ploy to expand the reach and scale of swimming, and its execution, Ferguson says, revolved around one core question: “How in the heck are we gonna put swimming pools in a football stadium?”
(Courtesy of USA Swimming)
An ambitious gamble
The answer came together over multiple years, and came to life over the past four weeks. Eighteen-wheelers and heavy machinery rolled into Lucas Oil. Scores and eventually hundreds of workers cycled in and out, passing stashed-away yellow goal posts on the way. They built more than an acre of pool deck some 10 feet above the stadium’s floor. The elevated “false deck,” made of “rubberized woven flooring,” allowed them to fit a 2.5-meters-deep pool without drilling into the stadium’s concrete base.“If I drill 4,000 holes in the arena floor,” explains John Ireland, who’s overseeing construction of the pool, “they're gonna charge me $20 million for ruining their arena.”
To make the arrangement look semi-normal, they folded up the first 10 rows of seats. They also brought bleachers from one end zone in past midfield, and hung a giant black curtain at the 50-yard line, to divide the cavernous building in half. On the unseen half, they built a warmup pool. And on the other, they built the competition pool, the star of the show.
“They,” at this stage of the build, is Myrtha Pools, an industry-leading contractor that has supplied Olympic pools for decades. It manufactures materials, including rigid PVC and stainless steel panels, at its factory in Italy, then ships them all over the world — in this case to Indianapolis.
There, “millimetrically-perfect steel panels are bolted together and then chemically sealed in order to create a waterproof vessel,” said Ireland, the company’s director of technical services. After trials, the entire thing will be disassembled, and the parts shipped off to build permanent pools in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the Cayman Islands.
The final integral step, then, is water. Working with the local fire department and an energy company, engineers tapped into a nearby hydrant, and pumped in some 1,200 gallons per minute. The water flowed through specially built pipes, from the concourse down over seats, to the stadium floor — which is two stories below street level.
After passing through regenerative media filters and UV-light chambers, which help with sanitation, it filled the pools. And after an Olympic team has been named, it will be pumped back out to the street.
