Conseco Fieldhouse
Few weeks after the end of Athens Olympic Games, the 7th edition of the Short Course World Swimming Championships (Oct. 7/11th, 2004) has been held in Indianapolis. A sports structure among the most accredited of USA, the Conseco Fieldhouse, seat of the NBA basket team, Indiana Pacers, temporarily transformed into the world largest swimming centre, with more than 10,000 seating, will host the event. In fact two temporary pools, one for competitions and the other for training, built thanks to the exclusive Myrtha Technology, have been installed inside the arena, in the pitch.
Myrtha Technology is now more and more frequently chosen by Swimming Federations all over the world for the construction of large permanent competition facilities and, in peculiar cases, like for example the one of Conseco Fieldhouse, for temporary installations. Myrtha has in fact many advantages: the pools are real mechanical constructions, obtained thanks to the use of very high quality and long lasting materials, equipped furthermore with a possibility of millimetric adjustment; consider in regard that FINA regulations allow for a maximum tolerance of 1 cm on a 50 m tank. The pool structure allows furthermore the athletes to reach high speeds thanks to the design of the overflow gutter, that, besides being very capacious, absorbs the wave created by the swimmer, without any return. Finally, the extreme installation speed allows in some cases to install a complete competition pool in very few days and this is exactly what has happened at Conseco Fieldhouse, where the course of the swimming competitions did not have to compromise anyway the calendar of the trainings and of the matches of Indiana Pacers. The installation of the two swimming pools has begun starting from Sept. 22nd and it has been finished in only one week.
In the Conseco arena the pool for the competitions, with eight lanes, measured m25x25ydsx2 and it was equipped with removable headwalls, starting blocks on one side and 4 recessed staircases. The same equipments were present also in the six lane warm-up pool, that measured m 25x16x2. Both swimming pools had furthermore the exclusive Strahlenturbulenz water recirculation system, based on a network of wall inlet fittings that allow for a rapid and total recirculation of water in the tank, without leaving slack areas.
