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USA Swimming has rolled out a 20% discount on single day tickets for the 2024 US Olympic Swimming Trials in what they are calling a “Nine Days of Swimming” promotion.
Each day through December 23rd, single day tickets for a different day of the 2024 Trials will be on sale. With the discount, single day tickets range from $268 per day for seats in the lowest, 100-level sections to $56 for seats in the 600 level of the stadium.
Note: this analysis excludes victory row seats, the best seats in the house, which have a very limited supply and are selling for $393 per day. Those tickets were $200 per day in 2020 (original pricing).
Even with the discount, those are much higher prices than in past years. In 2020, “Gold” tier seats cost $90 per day with the cheapest tickets running $60 per day – remembering that there are only two levels at the CHI Health Center in Omaha versus the six in Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.
At present, USA Swimming only has single day tickets listed as being available. In August, when three day and full session passes were still available, we counted 23,999 three-day passes available plus 485 all-session passes, for a total of 24,484 available tickets (based on a count of the first three-day session, with all sessions seeming to have a similar number of available tickets).
A count of one day of the meet done by SwimSwam today shows 24,320 tickets still available for that session. Without counting every day, that total seems pretty representative of the total available for most remaining sessions, with a few sections to the fringe of the pool still not opened up.
That means that, in spite of an effort to push LSCs to sell more tickets and discounts, little progress has been made in the approximately $24 million of unsold tickets that were still available in August.
That also still implies about 6,000 seats per session sold or blocked off, well below the sold out crowds of 18,000 seats that had become the norm for the CHI Health Center (COVID-19 exclusive).
USA Swimming reported $5.5 million in total event revenue at the 2016 Olympic Trials, though the event is co-owned with the USOPC and financial statements don’t make it clear how that revenue is distributed between the two organizations.
A sold-out CHI-Health Center over 8 days is worth somewhere around $10 million (estimated) in ticket revenue. With the new 9 day format, and significantly-higher ticket prices, even a crowd a third of that size is probably about $6 million in revenue already.
USA Swimming’s ticket sale remains until December 23.
As someone who attended 3 nights including the 22,209 night…I for one stand corrected and impressed. Well done USA Swimming with this presentation.
So very disappointed in the huge hike in ticket prices. Our daughter will swim in 3 races… Saturday, Tuesday and Friday. We paid nearly $6,000 for mediocre tickets for our family for the week. We have gone to the two previous trials in Omaha and absolutely loved the experience, venue, and host city. It will be a huge disservice to the sport if a venue for our ‘superbowl’ is only half full.
Well, masters nationals is at the same time over at IUPUI if you want to see some FREE subpar swimming from over-the-hill fatties like myself. My all-time favorite pool.
I paid for nose-bleed highest row seats for one session–55 dollars. Kinda ridiculous.
With less than 6k seats sold per session (less than the capacity of IUPUI), maybe Masters Nationals could delay their meet a week and trials could use that facility… I know, the logistics make this basically impossible, but this is what should be done to save the event.
$268 to watch a swim meet is insane
So, you’re saying that there will be walk-up tickets available?
In the old days, you could buy Expos tickets in Montreal from the scalpers for below face value. They’d buy a “group package” at a discount and then mark them up from that discounted price and sell them on the streets for a number where they made a little money and people saved money vs face value.
It was a great business model.
I’d like to leave a 5 star google review solely for the Expos reference. As interesting as all this swimming stuff is can we talk more about the Expos please? Jarry Park bleachers for a dollar in the early 70s.
ExposExposed.com?
Damn, URL is already taken.
Bringing it back full circle, as you Marley knows, the Olympic stadium where the Expos played from 1977-2004 is the same spot as the Canadian Olympic Trials pool for next year.
Montreal should be the permanent home for Canadian Trials. It has considerably more sole than that thing they built out in Scarborough and is accessible by metro from every downtown hotel.
soul
Sure! They are the Nats who beat the cheatingest cheaters of all time at their peak of cheating.
Unfortunately, the Indianapolis downtown is dangerous and has become a cesspool for drugs, crime and homelessness. Businesses are closing at record pace and the ones that are still open (food, hotels, transportation, etc.), have become even more overpriced than they were before Covid and City/County government changes a few years ago. On top of that, I’m sure prices will be higher for the kickbacks agreements that go back to USA Swimming, Indiana Swimming and Dale Neuburger’s organization, Indiana Sports Corp. Let the gouging begin!
Given your commenting history, I assume you would say this about “any large urban area that doesn’t vote Republican.”
In reality, crime is falling YOY, and they recently rolled out a “safety ambassador program” to further enhance those efforts.
From 2019 through 2022, hotel prices in Indianapolis increased by about 8%, which is far less than the US total inflation AND the US wage growth in the same time period. I can’t find any hard data about businesses opening or closing, but the city’s Convention Center lists about 100 more restaurants in downtown Indianapolis than it did in 2019.
Hotels and other lodging are also dramatically cheaper than they were in Omaha. There are lots of fine and fair critiques… Read more »
Part of the “crime falling” statistic is because many former crimes are no longer being considered or enforced. Having just moved out of liberal downtown in NY that claims “less crime than before”, I can tell you *much* of those statistics are fake at worst and unhelpful representations at best (as most statistics are… I work in academia).
Small businesses closing in Indy and around the nation is also far too common now as large corporate interests are being pushed heavily by the Biden Administration. Covid wasn’t *just* a pandemic, it was a wealth transfer disguised as *only* a pandemic and the current politic has maintained this and is certainly greedy and corporate.
I’m definitely not a republican or a… Read more »
“All of these things about Indy are indisputably correct even though they’re counter to any presented facts.”
Source: “trust me bro. I used to live in New York and am not a Republican”
For the past 14 years have been in Indy 2-6 times a year for the past 12 years for swim meets. My family and I stayed in downtown hotels near Circle Center Mall. Most time we walked to and from the Nat. Felt safe the whole time and while there was homelessness like many cities, it was very safe.
Is Shapiro’s still open???? That’s THEE most important thing to know!
Indianapolis is difficult to fly into. Traffic is terrible. Restaurants are further away.
What dictated the move? Money?
Moonshot. If they sell it out, it’s a boondoggle. If they miss, it’s ugly.
Neuburger’s kid runs Lucas Oil. Gotta keep the silent hand that controls the whole game paid.
Of all the things to criticize for this move….you’re off on the ones you chose. Indianapolis is pretty easy to fly into from all points of the country. And the restaurants/downtown life are within walking distance of the stadium (just as far as IUPUI in the other direction, essentially), so I’m not exactly sure where you’re going with this?
Just because I’m a nerd – you can fly direct to Omaha from 31 cities, you can fly direct to Indianapolis from 46 cities (including Cancun, which is not super useful in this context).
You can’t fly directly from Philly to either city whomp whomp. Both Omaha and Indianapolis have 20 connecting cities where you can do a 1 stop from Philly.
I get that Omaha wasn’t the easiest place to fly to, but man did they run a nice event. You could stay close to the venue. Restaurants weren’t that far to walk to. Didn’t have to deal with traffic. Totally get why they kept going back there, and I’m not sure if would have been better in a bigger city. Figure 2028 will be in LA, and that’s understandable, but I’m not going to be disappointed if 2032 is back in Omaha unless the sport has just grown too big for that. Who knows what nine years will bring. If Tim is still in charge then, it might have to go back to the IUPUI.
I always thought Omaha was good but not perfect. Because of the overlap with CWS, it really needed another 2,000 hotel rooms.
Venue was ideal, though, and like you said, the compactness of the city worked.
But I agree that I’d rather see a sellout of 18k seats in an ideal venue than chasing the 30k in Lucas Oil where about half the seats are terrible, no seats on the one side, etc.
There were only about 3-4 alternatives (on paper) to CHI Health that were still in basketball stadiums. Never know until you’re in the room what can’t work and why, but I think the logical upgrade would’ve been the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville. It’s just a slightly… Read more »
Compare and contrast that with Capital One Arena in DC, which may be available as soon as 2028 (Nothing is finalized, but seems like the writing is on the wall with the NBA and NHL teams moving to Arlington). 18k size arena, downtown DC. Not a compact city like Omaha or Louisville, but huge amount of lodging options and flight options may result in lower cost. Also a large population could easily drive to DC. Gotta think they could charge more than Omaha and sell it out pretty easily, but would it make sense financially for that arena to be unused for the 4-6 weeks or more required to put in the swimming pools? I think DC would chip in… Read more »