The bidding war over the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials is underway, with the latest timeline from USA Swimming indicating finalists will be notified in September. According to the USA Swimming timeline, October and November will be used for final bid evaluations and in-person visits to the proposed sites. Additionally, USAS is indicating that a final decision should be coming in Feburary of 2021.
There are currently 7 cities bidding to host the 2024 Trials. So far, Indianapolis, San Antonio, and St. Louis have gone public with their bids to host the meet. Indianapolis has the deepest history with hosting the Olympic Trials, having hosted the event 6 times before. this time, however, they aren’t proposing using the IUPUI Natatorium, rather, they’re aiming to use Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts. This is also a huge venue, as Lucas Oil can seat up to 70,000 spectators for non-football events.
San Antonio hasn’t hosted the Trials before, and are proposing using the Alamodome, which formerly was home to the San Antonio Spurs, and can seat 64,000. St. Louis hosted the Olympics back in 1904, but hasn’t hosted the U.S. Olympic Trials. St. Louis is proposing using the home of the formerly St. Louis Rams, which can seat a whopping 82,000 spectators, making it the highest capacity proposed venue (that we know of so far).
4 other cities are in the bidding process, but haven’t yet gone public. Omaha has hosted the 2008, 2012, and 2016 Trials, and is set to set next year’s 2021 Trials. We can expect that one of the 4 unknown cities is Omaha. According to reporting from SportsTravelMagazine, Omaha has seen an economic impact of $75 million by hosting the last several cycles of Trials.
It’s March 4th and we still don’t know!
San Antonio would be incredible and I think an enjoyable location for fans and athletes alike. It isn’t overly congested but is an enjoyable city with great food, music, and history. The Alamodome is equipped specifically for special events such as these. Since the Spurs do not play there, a deep playoff run in the 2024 season isn’t a factor and the venue would have more than enough time to be adapted for an event of this magnitude.
Minneapolis 2024 – virtually a done deal
Yeah, lately it seems to be a lovely place.
I imagine and think it’s been mentioned that Greensboro is in the mix.
Places I’d like to see in the mix would be the bigger media markets …
Atlanta could be a good spot but as SwimSwam wrote about a few years back you need a big arena/stadium not committed in the summer. Atlanta has MLS in Mercedes Benz. Perhaps The WNBA team could play elsewhere for a month but that would be a stretch I’m guessing. Indy is my number 1 bet with Greensboro runner-up (two pools in the coliseum plus the GAC pools to reduce the warm-up pool conflicts).
The primary problem with Greensboro is that it’s no easier to fly to than is Omaha, which I know is a lot of peoples’ objections to Omaha (airport isn’t big enough/not enough flights/too many connections).
I think someone once suggested that the Coliseum doesn’t have enough obvious space for the warmup pool and the splash zone, but I don’t know how much merit there is to that.
Greensboro airport is small, about same as Omaha with Raleigh airport 1 hr away and Charlotte 1 1/2 hrs. The coliseum has more than enough room for warm-up pool as well as a time trial pool next door and another 50 meter pool.
Charlotte has direct flights from everywhere and Raleigh does from most of the east coast. Biggest difference from Omaha is that Greensboro has every town between Atlanta, New York, Jacksonville, and Cleveland within the same driving distance as Chicago to Omaha.
The Garden won’t happen. A lot of big name acts have to charge exorbitant amount for tickets just to break even. The set up and tear down in Manhattan with unions won’t allow it. And this is for 6 weeks not a 24-48 hour turn around.
While those are all great venues, the cost to travel and stay at any of these three cities for 3-10 days is more than most families can afford. Those three cities (plus Chicago, Atlanta and Miami) are all listed separately in my companies per diem calculations due to the cost to stay there.
All good points … the cost ones especially … so how about coming up to COVID-safe Canada and racing at the Pan Am pool. Come up a couple weeks early, quarantine in the Scarborough bubble and those American dollars will go far. The border might be open by then.
… Now this American living in Canada will run away from the hate mail about to come 😉
(And, just to be clear, as much as I’d love to take the NHL bubble idea and bring the American swim stars to Canada, this is NOT a serious suggestion)
i honestly would like to see a stadium with more natural light. omaha is just plain dark. sorta dungeon vibes really. no hate but it would be cool to have at least a little sun coming in
San Antonio! All seem like good options though so this is a good problem to have.
Off topic
Costa just swam a 7:39:84 SC 800 time trial without a block
what’s with the downvotes?
Because it’s not that great of a time and it’s really really irrelevant
ah yeah that makes sense