Olympic Swim Team Trials Put on a Show at Lucas Oil Stadium The event posed new challenges for in-venue sound, broadcast audio By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Monday, July 8, 2024 - 11:22 am
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In yet another example of the event-ization of once-routine sports activities, last month's highly watched U.S. Olympic Team Trials - Swimming followed the NFL and NHL Drafts from business-as-usual to business-as-spectacle. The qualifying tryouts, which had been held at Omaha's 14,000-seat CHI Health Center Arena for the four previous trials, were moved this year to Indianapolis's Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the NFL Colts. The move more than doubled the seating capacity, even after the gridiron was converted into a pair of Olympic-size swimming pools: a 10-lane, 50-meter competition pool and an L-shaped warmup pool with intersecting 50-meter and 25-meter lengths.
It was the first time the trials, which took place June 15-23, were held in an NFL stadium, which itself follows a recent trend in which regular-season NHL and NBA games have also moved from arenas to stadiums.
In addition to the indoor sports events, the trials featured USA Swimming LIVE, an outdoor music event with DJs, bands, and presentations all week between trials sessions.
Along with record crowds on hand, the trials logged a 20% increase from the 2021 trials, averaging 3.2 million primetime viewers across NBC and Peacock, according to early numbers. The first two days of the diving trials averaged 2.9 million viewers in primetime, an increase of 39% from the overall 2021 trials average.
The live side of the extravaganza was expected to create event-level numbers, too. The nine-day series was predicted to generate more than $100 million of economic impact locally, according to the Indiana Sports Corp.
It is on a scale with an NFL Draft, says Caleb Cassler, senior audio specialist, Dodd Technologies, which provided the live sound for this year's and previous years' swimming trials and also supplied all the LED, lighting, scenic, and rigging for the event.
Testing the Waters These large events bring with them new challenges for audio, not least of which is how to manage a fluid surface that's more reflective than a football field but certainly less so than a hardwood basketball court.
Dodd Technologies' Caleb Cassler: The [goal] was to keep audio intelligible for the swimmers while not ruining NBC's nat sound.
[Water] actually reflects pretty well, Cassler explains. I wouldn't say the water itself is a huge acoustical issue, just an obstacle [to negotiate]. The design of the PA system is to try to keep everything away from the pool unless I want it there. The purpose of keeping the sound controlled around it was to keep audio intelligible for the swimmers while not ruining NBC's nat sound.
Lucas Oil Stadium's JBL VLA installed PA system was augmented with additional Meyer Sound loudspeaker components for the swimming trials. This was done to convert the typical line-array design of the installed sound system into a distributed-system design, creating highly specific individual audio zones for certain areas: warm-up pool, first-call, athlete entrance, athlete lounge, and massage room as well as underdeck elevator positions, VIP sections, starting blocks, and athlete-seating areas.
All the areas would be part of the broadcast and/or the in-venue production, which was shown on a 75-ft. LED screen that served as backdrop to the main pool. Each zone required a set of loudspeakers and separate groups/auxes on the front-of house mix console that controlled all the various mixes for the house and sent selected feeds, such as poolside interviews with swimmers, to the production truck parked outside.
Additional speakers created the distributed-sound effect that kept sonic energy focused on crowds and events and away from reflective surfaces.
We had to do a lot more speaker locations to try to segment the space, so it's not just a big acoustic mess everywhere, Cassler says. I basically could control audio in most of the rooms that had any sort of swimmer in it from my console.
Fluid Acoustics The stadium's interior is naturally reflective, and its acoustics were somewhat compounded by the pools and their water, although that was partially mitigated by a 320-ft.-wide by 120-ft.-tall drape bisecting the field. Nonetheless, indoor announcements had to contend with reflections that created an approximately 250-ms delay from the PA and caused a disorienting echo for the announcers.
The in-venue production was shown on a 75-ft. LED screen overlooking the main pool at Indianapolis's Lucas Oil Stadium.
Swimming events are very dynamic shows, Cassler explains. The place goes from perfectly silent when the athletes are on the blocks to a deafening roar when, say, a record gets broken. And everyone - the audience, the swimmers, the announcers - had their own demands for the live sound. The warmup pool, first-call room - all those rooms have PA in them, but they also needed to have a particular feel in terms of content and volume. Then there's the last-call room, which didn't have speakers but was open to the main area so [the swimmers] could hear the crowd and announcements and music through the doorway as they got ready to enter. I spent a lot of time walking around and adjusting delays between all the systems to try to have the audio focus guide you to the next place. Every area was very particular, and the console routing was very, very flexible, which it needed to be for this.
Cassler managed the entire in-venue audio from a DiGiCo SD12-96 console, which was also used to provide isolated feeds to broadcast as well as specific mixes for various areas of the venue. It was also deployed to manage the venue production
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Olympic Swim Team Trials Put on a Show at Lucas Oil Stadium The event posed new challenges for in-venue sound, broadcast audio By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
