USA Swimming has announced the host city for the 2020 U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials: Omaha, Nebraska will host the event for the fourth-consecutive Olympic cycle.
Omaha first hosted the event in 2008, and USA Swimming raved about the city and venue before returning in 2012 and 2016. The competition takes place at the CenturyLink Center in Omaha, with a long course competition pool built into the multi-purpose sports arena. The venue holds roughly 14,000 spectators and has traditionally included a long course warmup pool and a short course warmup pool during the Olympic Trials.
While the host city is unchanged from the past three Trials, USA Swimming’s selection process was much different this cycle. In the leadup to the 2016 Trials, USA Swimming announced 6 host contenders in January of 2013, and continued to lay out the bid process as the swimming federation came to a decision on hosting. For the 2020 Trials, there had been no information from USA Swimming on which cities were considered, and the host announcement came out of the blue this week: USA Swimming announced Omaha’s hosting status in a Facebook Live video, giving interested parties a 30-minute “heads up” that the announcement would be made.
You can see the announcement video below, from USA Swimming’s YouTube page:
Promote swimming by making sure there’s good theater, concerts or a decent bookstore? Makes sense to me.
Name another city that has tail gate parties before a swim meet.
Challenge Accepted.
-Wisconsin
I don’t want to make a trials cut anymore after finding out it will be here again
Great city with great infrastructure and friendly people. However, one of two things needs to happen. Either they tighten cuts to significantly reduce numbers (which won’t happen) or they add an additional warm-up pool. The ridiculous crowding in the warm-up pools (both 25 yard and 50 meter) made it exceptionally difficult for swimmers to properly prepare for races. It looked like a typically over- crowded age group meet warm-up every day. If we want this to be the best possible experience for the athletes, we have to do better. The meet is larger every time with no increase to the facility. It’s a real problem. They have three years to plan. Address this. Please.
I agree with you, but it sounds like we both know neither of these will happen. Unfortunately, I think the most realistic option for any swimmer who thinks they might make Trials in three years is to start developing a dryland warm up now. By 2020, I’m sure he or she will have found a warm up that provides adequate preparation for races and the warm up pool can be avoided entirely if necessary!
I think its time to go the stadium route. They can work their way through a list of the 25 largest cities in America and find a city that can handle a bigger event. St Louis comes to mind here they lost their NFL team.
St Louis — murder capital of the United States. Yeah sounds like a great plan.
That is a very competitive title . For St Louis – even before Ferguson – the French had a travel warning for the airport to the city . Said it was ill advised to stop or alight & to definitely stay on that bus .
I don’t know why I know that .
I don’t know what other cities/arenas bid, and it doesn’t matter anyway. Just as a thought, I think Trials would be awesome in the following cities that have huge arenas AND tourist accommodations (history, things to do, hotels, airport). All the domes could have the pool built across one end zone, while the warm-up pool would be behind a curtain in the other end-zone, with seating so people could watch warm-up/cool-down):
Minneapolis (Vikings Stadium)
San Antonio (Alamo Dome)
Atlanta (Falcons Stadium)
NOLA (Superdome)
Indy (Lucas Oil Stadium)
St. Louis (the unused Edward Jones Dome)
Houston (Texans Stadium)
Dallas (Jerry World)
etc
Having been to a couple of Final Fours now, I would strongly advise against going with a football stadium. From a spectating perspective, you’re going to end up with a thousand seats that have good views and 79k that have mediocre to awful ones.
As I said, across one end zone to have all those permanent seats in that half, then some temporary seats on the other side, the way Alamo Dome does it for basketball. Maybe the temporary seating for the swimmers. I think that would be in the neighborhood of 25-30,000 seats, or maybe 18-22,000 if they don’t use the upper seating bowl. Warm-up pool on the other side of the curtain. Kazan did this in 2015.
In any case, this was just an interesting thought to use domes. I like the basketball/hockey arena concept, and Omaha does a great job. How many other facilities can have spaces to put two pools close enough to each other (and not do it like… Read more »
Our team had a great experience in Omaha. The people were all very friendly and helpful. I would agree with the overlapping event comment. The hotel choices were not that great.
Damn