So you’re a veteran pool builder; you know your
craft. You’ve solved some
problems — with pipe runs
and equipment, with drainage and soils,
with slopes and access and trees and
enormous boulders nobody knew were
there until you hit them with the bucket
of a backhoe. And you’ve got some
commercial experience, too. You’ve built
a few community pools and seen those
challenges.
With all that in mind, as a pleasant,
professional exercise, take the ultimate
pool building challenge: that which
faced Myrtha Pools’ Chief Technical
Officer John Ireland this summer. He
led construction of the pools for the U.S.
Olympic Swimming Trials at Lucas Oil
Stadium in Indianapolis.
It would be the first Olympic
swimming event in a football stadium, to
be held before the biggest crowd to ever
witness such an event. The job would be
two pools — a 10-lane, 50-meter pool
for racing, another L-shaped pool with
18 lanes for warming up — plus surge
tanks, for a total delivery of more than
2 million gallons of pristine swimming
water, plus decking and surrounds to
transform the venue into a primetime
stage for USA Swimming.
That’s the challenge. And there’s a bit
of a time crunch. You have 14 days, start
to finish, green turf to clear water, plus
decking, scoreboards and lights.
START AT THE BOTTOM
As a professional builder, your first
thought is not of what the viewer will
find pleasing to the eye, but of what
will hold up the enormous weight of
this pool. If it was a backyard, you’d
probably be taking samples, looking for
competent soil.
Here, you have an indoor stadium
floor — concrete covered by artificial
turf. It’s used to bearing the weight of
Colts all-pro defensive tackle, DeForest
Buckner, about 300 pounds. But that’s
nothing compared to the weight of an
Olympic competition pool which is more
than 3500 tons.
“Not as big a problem as you might
think,” says Ireland. “Most arenas or even warehouse spaces list their floor
loading capacity at about 350 pounds
a square foot. But that’s bull. They can
take more. I mean, this is an 18-inch
slab. With the pool filled, we’ve got
an average of around 800 pounds per
square foot, but in certain places there
are much higher loads from other things
than the pool. Like for instance, there’s
a 60-foot camera tower that’s applying
more load to the floor. So it’s not really a
problem.”
Under the pool, Ireland’s biggest
concerns are fairly pedestrian: 1) The
turf has to come out, which the stadium
conveniently planned to replace anyway;
and 2) There are airlines in the slab
that will have to be protected with steel
plates.
So far, so good. Right away, you yank
out the turf and immediately start to
erect a steel balance frame upon which
the pool will sit. It’s a special design
from Myrtha. It helps to absorb stresses
from the buttresses sticking out from
the sides of what’s going to be a gigantic
aboveground pool. The frame bolts and
straps together quickly, giving a firm
foundation for the pool.
Everything is streamlined to only
what is essential. Anything else wastes
time and money, and both are in short
supply. So there will be no structural
connection between the pool and the
floor. The pool will be held in place by
its massive, distributed weight. “If you
had a big enough truck, you could pull it
around the stadium,” Ireland says.
ONE MORE THING
One thing I forgot to mention. You
remember the tight two-week schedule
to get everything trucked in, set up, and
ready for the U.S. Olympic Swimming
Trials? Well, after that eight-day
competition, everything has to fly out of
here fast so the stadium can get ready
for NFL football. And everything has
to be recycled, and the pools have to
find a new home because frankly, USA
Swimming can’t afford to buy these
pools. They’re just renting them.
“Even though they’re selling tens
of thousands of tickets for the trials,”
Ireland says, “the only way to make the
trials financially feasible is if these pools
find a permanent home somewhere
else.”
The actual owner of the main
competition pool is a private swim club
in Fort Wayne, Ind. And that’s where
it’s headed directly after the Indy Trials.
That club is going to use the pool
as the foundation of a public-private
partnership to develop a natatorium
over the next couple of years. The
pool has some cachet, having hosted
swimmers such as Olympic champions
Katie Ledecky and Caeleb Dressel, which
will help with fundraising.
While the main pool is going north,
the warm-up pool is going south to
the new national training center in
the Cayman Islands. These same
aboveground pools in Indy will become
inground pools in the Caymans and Fort
Wayne. So that necessitates modular
steel sections, trucked in and fitted
together, piece by piece. And as soon
as the event’s over, you break it down,
repack it into containers, and ship it
to the new home where they’ll rebuild
it and surround it with dirt and a new
deck.
“That modular steel technology really,
really lends itself well to temporary pools
like these in Indy,” Ireland says with an
engineer’s admiration for an elegant
solution.
The panels stand as tall as the height
of the pool [8.2 feet in this case], and a little over 3 feet wide. They connect with
each other, and the frame underneath
with bolts, and they’re supported by
struts and buttresses.
“In a permanent Myrtha pool, the
wall panels are made of joined, rigid
PVC sheets. We use a patented process
of burning PVC into steel. That’s how
we build all our pools. So in a normal
pool, those panels show up on site
already laminated in steel, and we bolt
them together and then chemically seal
them. We apply an organic solvent and
permanently melt the panels together.
“We don’t do that in temporary
applications like this one at Lucas Oil
because you could never get it apart. I
could unbolt it, but you cannot break it
apart, it’s a permanent chemical weld.
So for these temporary pools, because
they’re being resold, we use a bag liner
inside the panels, which ultimately is the
waterproofing surface. When the trials
are over, that liner will be taken out and
ground up and recycled into commercial
carpet backing.
“And the new owners of the pools, in
Fort Wayne and the Caymans, are getting
essentially brand new equipment that
has never touched chlorinated water.”
BIG DECK
With the pool walls up, it’s probably
time to think about the deck. You’ve
done decks before. This deck will be a
little different, since you’re building an
aboveground pool. The rim is about 9
feet high off the stadium floor. You can’t
have people climbing up there to dive in.
No, you’re going to need a huge deck
that runs up to the edge of the pool — a
supported surface extending from the
pool’s edge all the way to the stadium
seats. Twelve rows of stadium seats
will have to be removed, and by the
time you’re done, you’ll have built over
50,000 square feet of decking and the
steel supports that hold it up and make
it solid.
FILTRATION AND
TREATMENT
All this and we haven’t even brought in a
drop of water. We’ll use municipal water,
straight from the hydrants outside the
stadium in downtown Indy, more than 2
million gallons of it. As you know, water
quality will be one of the crucial KPIs,
the thing everybody sees. People want
crystal clear water at an Olympic event.
And remember what happened at the
Rio Olympics in 2016 with the green
pool? Yes, well, enough said about that.
“Yes, water quality is absolutely one
of the most important factors,” Ireland
says. “And that’s tricky because we’re
dealing with tight time constraints. By
the time we fill these pools, theoretically,
we might only have one or two cycles for
the filters before we need to have HDTV-quality
water ready.”
That sentence alone could make
a pool pro break out in sweat. What
will we use for filtration? You can
forget about any kind of high-rate sand
filter with enhanced media, because
you’re on the 40-yard line of a football
stadium. You can’t backwash thousands
of gallons of water. Nowhere to put
it. At the same time, you need super
fine, particulate filtration. They’ve got
underwater cameras broadcasting to the
world. You need to be able to see the swimmer in lane six.
“We exclusively use regenerative
media filtration for that reason. It just
filters a smaller particle. And as you
say, not having to backwash is very
important,” Ireland says.
“Also, from an HVAC perspective,
this space is not intended to be a
pool space, so we need to take careful
consideration of the water chemistry
because we cannot be generating any
chloramines. So we’ll use Pulsar dry
chlorine feeders with full bypass UV. And
then for pH control, we’ll have both bulk
CO2 and muriatic dosing.”
“All that’s running through a
combination of Schedule 80 PVC, and
then some CPVC, because we also have
to heat 2 1/2 million gallons of water.
We’re commingling the water for both
pools through some pretty massive heat
exchangers. We’re actually piggybacking
off the building’s boiler systems to heat
the pools.”
Filling the U.S. Olympic trials competition pool at Lucas Oil Stadium. A triumphant pause in the hectic 2-week project.
CURRENT AFFAIRS
For Olympic swimming, there’s another
big consideration you don’t have at
the local YMCA — currents. You have
to design and plan circulation so
there’s never so much as a whiff of a
current that could slow swimmers by
a hundredth of a second, and thus,
potentially, cheat them of victory. That
starts with the inlets.
“Myrtha has developed an inlet
system that runs through the sidewall
using very large diameters — 3 and 4
inches — that allow you to use laminar
flow. So because we’re not using a
dispersion principle, like all conventional
inlets, we’re able to push water over
great distances at very low velocities.
“The entire pool has been modeled
using computational fluid dynamics
to completely predict exactly how it’s
going to recirculate and ensure we’re
not generating currents that might affect
swimmers. And once it’s built, we field
test it to verify that before the event,
using international standards that we
helped develop with world aquatics.”
After all that complexity and CFD,
the pump schedule itself is pretty
straightforward. Full power all night to
maximize clean, and then when it comes
to race time, cut the engine.
“At night, we’re running at almost
4,000 gpm to turn the pool over as
many times as possible for the next
morning. And then right before athletes
go into the water, we drop those flow
rates down to under 1000 gallons a
minute so that we’re minimizing any
disturbance.”
EVERYTHING AT ONCE
The hard part, according to Ireland,
isn’t the shell or the deck. It isn’t
supporting the staggering weight of
millions of gallons of water. It isn’t the
water treatment or line velocities needed
to transport enormous volumes yet
produce no current at race time.
It’s going from absolutely nothing to
perfect in two weeks, with no margin for
error. It’s building two large, high-tech
pools mid-field of an NFL stadium, the
largest swimming venue in the history
of the sport, in 14 days, and getting it all
right.
“The issue with any of these
temporary builds is you’re taking
nine months of construction and
compressing it into just a couple
of weeks. So it’s really a ballet of
organization for a small army of people,
all working 18-hour days. The local
unions provide hundreds of skilled
workers to help supplement our crews
and the crews of the other builders.
For an event like this, we’ll plan for two
years.
“Multiple companies all have to
interact efficiently, on a tight schedule,
and they have to get things done at
the same time because in addition to
building a pool, you’re basically putting
on a rock concert. There are 110,000
pounds of lighting rigs going up. You
have to build a whole new scoreboard
just for the event. And all of that needs
to happen almost simultaneously and to
tight tolerances — 5 mm for the pools.
And in addition, for everything, you’ve
got to justify the expense.”
INFINITE SOLUTIONS, AND
ONE THAT WORKED
And that is how Myrtha Pools and
John Ireland solved the ultimate pool
building challenge. Of course, there are
an infinite number of solutions to any
problem, and builders reading this will
have their own ideas, but the Myrtha
plan worked to perfection in the crucible
of real life. The 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials
went off with a bang, and the aquatics
performed perfectly.
Like any great construction project,
the historic pool build at Lucas Oil
Stadium was achieved with great concert
of action, combined with intense focus.
But what about the pressure? For
Ireland, everything had to work flawlessly
and on schedule or it would all be his
fault.
“If I can be perfectly honest,” Ireland
told the Indy Star, “it scared the s—t out
of me.”
This article first appeared in the August 2024 issue of AQUA Magazine — the top resource for retailers, builders and service pros in the pool and spa industry. Subscriptions to the print magazine are free to all industry professionals. Click here to subscribe.
