Morning Splash: Olympic Trials the ‘Super Bowl’ of Swimming

Photo Courtesy: David Rieder

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By David Rieder

For the third time in the past eight years, Omaha, Neb., has become Swim Town USA as the Olympic Trials have taken over downtown.

Yes, sure, the College World Series is happening just blocks away—if you were wondering, Arizona defeated Oklahoma State Friday by a score of 9-3, and Coastal Carolina took down TCU, 4-1.

But the only man with his face plastered across a hotel in this city is Ryan Lochte, whose smooth butterfly graces the front of the Courtyard Marriott. Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky each have their portraits pasted onto the CenturyLink Center—Ledecky admitted that she took a selfie with her own picture upon her arrival in town.

USA Swimming has turned Olympic Trials into a massive event, a celebration of the sport that happens just once every four years. USA Swimming executive director Chuck Wielgus explained Friday how as the event grew and attracted so many more fans, it evolved from just a swim meet to a real show.

“It’s our Super Bowl week,” Wielgus said. “Athletes are front and center with their performances. We’ve been able to build an experience around that, an atmosphere that has this become a legitimate, major sporting event.”

The Trials outgrew the IUPUI Natatorium in Indianapolis after the 4000-seat venue was busting at the seams for the 2000 event. The meet then moved to a 10,000-seat temporary arena in Long Beach, Calif., in 2004, before settling down in Omaha.

But even though the 15,000-seat venue is sold out for all 15 sessions, some may wonder why USA Swimming chooses to keep returning to Omaha. Surely there is some other city elsewhere in the country with an arena and adjacent convention center similar to Omaha’s setup that would do just fine.

Wielgus cites the familiarity of Omaha as a perfect reason to keep coming back.

“The athletes who have been here before and their coaches, they know where everything is. They know where the hotel is, they know where they’re going to have their meals, they know where the warm-down pool is—there’s no surprises and it takes all of that stress away,” Wielgus said.

“If you go to a new venue, it adds a whole level of stress for athletes and coaches.”

Certainly, if he wants to get top-level performance out of his best swimmers, having them stay in a hotel across the street connected by a skywalk is certainly a helpful touch.

Wielgus cannot guarantee, however, that the Trials will return to Omaha once again in 2020. The swimming competition at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics gets started on July 25, much earlier than the August 6 start date for the Rio Games. USA Swimming likes the 30-day break between Trials and the Olympics, but pushing Trials back might lead to an even-longer overlap with the College World Series, which the governing body would prefer to avoid, if possible.

But Trials is more than just the means of picking the swimmers who will represent the United States at the Olympic Games. More than 1800 swimmers qualified for the meet with over 1700 entered. The Olympic Team, meanwhile, will almost certainly consist of less than 50 swimmers.

“I don’t want to get myself in trouble, but realistically, the number of athletes who have a legitimate chance of making the Olympic Team is probably fewer than the number of athletes that are actually here,” Wielgus said.

He admits that USA Swimming did not intend for the meet to grow so big—the target range was and will continue to be 1200 to 1400 swimmers.

“What happens is with swimmers, you put a mark down, and then they chase after it. No matter how aggressive we think we are with setting those time standards, we’ve got kids who meet the mark,” Wielgus said.

“So we’ll do it again in 2020. We’ll try to set time standards that will get 1200 to 1400 athletes qualifying, and I’m willing to bet whatever mark we set, we’re going to end up with 1600 to 1800 athletes qualifying.”

Even for those with virtually no chance of qualifying for Rio, the experience of the Trials can be invaluable experience for the remainder of their swimming careers, providing that little bit of extra motivation for athletes to push themselves to the next level.

Of course, there’s always the chance that one of the supposed-longshots could actually come out of nowhere and make the Olympic team. Wielgus thought back four years to one particular teenager who entered Trials having been anonymous not too long before.

“Not too many people in Colorado Springs knew who Katie Ledecky was six, seven, eight months out, and she blossomed like a flower at Trials and then had an experience at Olympic Games that was monumental,” Wielgus said. “So somewhere out there is maybe the next Katie Ledecky, and that’s part of the fun of Trials, seeing who is going to start to rise to the top.”

*SwimMAC’s Team Elite had to deal with a slight change in travel plans Thursday when their flight into Omaha was diverted to Kansas City. The swimmers ended up training at a local YMCA where none of the lap-swimming patrons realized who they were.

“We just were going into the YMCA pool, and one of the lap swimmers, said, ‘Gosh they’re moving through the water awfully fast,’” said SwimMAC coach David Marsh. “I was like, ‘Yeah, they’re pretty good,’ and then I started naming off everybody, and he was like, ‘Holy S-H-I’—so he figured it out.”

*The swimsuit controversy that hovered over the sport in 2008 and 2009 has mostly taken a backseat since polyurethane and bodysuits were banned on January 1, 2010. Wielgus and USA Swimming hope it will stay that way.

“We want the performances of athletes to be gauged on what their hard work and on what they’re able to accomplish without technological aids, specifically swimsuits,” he said. “We take a hard position. We would love to see guys swimming in nothing below the knees and nothing above the waist and we want to keep it there.

“Where the women are today, we think that’s where we would like to stay. So then you start looking at the fabric of the suit and what that’s made of, and we don’t want that fabric to be something that provides an aid so, again, we want the performance results based on the work that the athletes do, not on a technological enhancement.”

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