Shortly after news broke on Tuesday that Jacksonville had withdrawn from the running to host the 2016 Olympic Trials, we caught up with USA Swimming’s Assistant Executive Director Mike Unger to discuss what the next two months will hold for the remaining 5 cities as final questions are answered.
The 5 candidates still in the running:
- St. Louis (Edward Jones Dome)
- San Antonio (Alamo Dome)
- Indianapolis (Lucas Oil Stadium)
- Greensboro, North Carolina (Greensboro Colliseum)
- Omaha, Nebraksa (CenturyLink Center)
A brief timeline:
- USA Swimming submitted a list of questions to each city, which was then answered
- USA Swimming has made their official visit to each of the candidate cities
- USA Swimming submitted a further list of questions to each city, to which responses are due back Friday, March 1st
- USA Swimming will then convene internal meetings discussing the options
- At this point, the current list of 5 cities could be further whittled to 2 or 3 or 4 before a final decision is made
- The presentation of the final decision will then be taken to the USOC and Chuck Wielgus
- On April 27th, the decision will be brought before the USA Swimming Board of Directors, who will be responsible for final approval
- The decision will then be made public after all bidding cities are called and informed of the outcome.
- The final dates for the meet will be finalized this fall after consultation with FINA, though tentatively the expectation is that the meet will run July 4th-11th; that’s roughly the same relative timeline as the 2012 Trials were from the 2012 Olympics.
Unger, who is as involved with and knowledgeable about the production of the Olympic Trials as anybody within the organization said that this year, they were blown away by the bids they received this year.
“It speaks to what a premier event the Olympic Swimming Trials have become. The amount of effort and level of detail we’ve seen in all of the bids we’ve received has been unbelievable. I was blown away by it. We received 16 bids this year, and that wasn’t us going out and asking for them. This is cities who wanted to host the Olympic Trials, and I think that’s great for our sport.
“We’ve had three primary goals when choosing an Olympic Trials host. First and foremost is to run a flawless technical event that allows us to pick our best Olympic Team possible,” Unger elaborated. “Our first goal always is and always has been to provide the best possible competitive environment. Secondly, we want to run a great event either at the pool or away from the pool, to everyone. That includes to spectators, to sponsors, to fans; we want everyone involved to enjoy the times.
The process used to make sure those goals are met is a very detailed and very involved one. “We’ve put together a spreadsheet with over 70 different metrics on which we scored each city,” Unger shared. “The major ones, which had several subcategories, from things like airports to the availability of flights and hotels, city support, restaurants, what the organizing committees were like. We had nearly 20 categories related directly to the venue like its capacity, how television fits in, how the Aquazone fits in. We even looked at things like the legacy of the vent, what the city is going to do long-term after the trials leave.”
USA Swimming is taking every precaution to ensure that the process is fair and above-board. This was very important to Unger and the rest of the staff. “We warned the cities, if there were any attempts to give gifts, any attempts to do anything of that nature, that they would be eliminated. We let them provide us with lunch once during our visits, and that was it. Everything else, travel, hotels, was paid for by USA Swimming.
“It’s a very analogous situation to a high school swimmer looking at colleges, really. We even had an X-Factor category, where we looked at things like if the people who are pitching us now are still going to be there when 2016 rolls around, just like a college swimmer would do with a coach.”
With 70 different factors being considered, USA Swimming is taking into account all of the factors that you or I would. We can’t forget that some of the bid cities, and in some cases venues, have hosted Super Bowls: the biggest single-day sporting event in the world. While that in itself shouldn’t make-or-break a decision in a city’s favor, what it has done is forced all of the bidders to invest a lot of time and resources into bidding.