Q&A: USA Swimming CEO Tim Hinchey on the Paris Olympics

PARIS — The last time I had the chance to interview USA Swimming President and Chief Executive Officer Tim Hinchey in person, it was during eight hours of quarantine together at Narita Airport in Tokyo for the 2020 Olympic Summer Games. Three years after those pandemic-era Games, I had the opportunity to catch up with him in a much different environment — the Champs-Elysees in Paris, where the swimming team has wrapped up a successful event.

Team USA edged Australia of the most gold medals of the swimming competition on the final day and took a commanding lead in the overall medal count. In this interview, SportsTravel caught up with Hinchey to discuss the Paris Games, plans for Los Angeles and ways the national governing body intends to grow the sport.

Your team always has high expectations coming into the Olympic Games. And you were able to meet them in the pool. Give us your assessment on the success of the Games for your team so far.

Well, I’m just so pleased and happy and proud of the athletes and the team, the coaches, the staff, the volunteer staff. I mean, it takes a lot to go into preparing for the Games. Coming off just historic Trials, going to domestic camp in North Carolina, getting the folks to Croatia, having a great international camp there to be prepared for the Games and assimilate and then go from there to Paris.

It’s a lot. So to come through that process, start off with a bang — a little bit of some tough races in the middle, some really close calls — and then to finish with just the most unbelievable explanation point. As much as I love that, it’s scary and it certainly creates more gray hair than I have already. But for our women who were so exceptional the whole meet, to finish in world record fashion by a large margin with the best splits we’ve ever seen and then have a veteran like Lilly King finish the way she did. Those were all tremendous highlights for me.

We see this in a lot of sports where the U.S. has traditionally dominated that the rest of the world is catching up or becoming more competitive. Are those discussions that you and your team have on a regular basis?

What’s funny about that is that we do. I think we’re going to do a graphic with our team and have the head shots of them when they were kids at the USA Swimming clubs they were with, the current club you’re with and show that Olympic connection. Then let’s do one for U.S.A. swimmers that are on club teams, like, let’s say (Canada’s) Summer McIntosh, who trains with the Sarasota Sharks, who is a 17 year old, lives in Sarasota, trains in Sarasota, and there’s three gold medals that could be part of our tally at some point, right? And then, let’s see, take the college athletes that we train around the world and I can start with Leon Marchand and Hubert Kos, as an example, on what gold medals do American coaches produce for the globe’s athletes.

So it’s a Catch 22 in that, of course, we want to win, I don’t mind the target on our back, we want to be the world’s best and historically we are. We want to maintain that and we’ll want to get better in some ways. But at the same time, I think it’s great for swimming to see what our coaches and American coaches have done to bring other athletes forward.

And I think it’s great for the Olympics. If we’re going to want to be a sport that has high value and high demand, they want to see not just the Americans and the Australians but they want to see a meet that they saw this week, where they saw Italian gold medals, Irish gold medals, historic medals.

You hear a lot from NGBs about the Olympic bump, particularly for the lesser-profile NGBs that come out of the Olympics with sudden interest in their sport. You’re in a sport that’s obviously very popular, people participate in it. Are the Olympic Games still a benchmark for you and what you’re trying to accomplish as an organization?

That’s 100 percent correct. We’ve talked about the board level. We talk about it at the executive staff level. We see what we call that spike the year after the quad and it’s been a spike because it comes back down and settles. We need to take the spike and make it a bump all the way to L.A. So that is a keen focus for us going forward.

Let’s talk about the recent Olympic Trial in Indianapolis, your first time with that event in a football stadium. Give us your assessment on how things went.

It was historic. It was phenomenal. I was personally very, very proud of something that we dreamed about six years ago to make it happen to come fruition and to a level that got global recognition. And I can tell you that even this week, the president of World Aquatics and the president of European Aquatics, I’ve been in rooms where they thanked us for that event because that put the entire sport on a pedestal and got people excited about it. We talk about amplification of our brand, but it was amplification of the sport.

I had another very close colleague of an Italian company and they said, listen, if that was a PR goal, well done, right? Because (previous Trials host) Omaha was phenomenal. We wouldn’t be in Indianapolis without Omaha. That put us on the map. But when the rest of the world heard “NFL stadium,” there was a different connection. There was a different ‘aha’ moment. Like, what do you mean by that? They assumed Omaha was in a swimming facility. They didn’t understand. We took the same type of investment plus to build pools in the NFL stadium. So I think that really puts it on a new level. I think that’s our expectation.

We’re certainly proud of the attendance world record. That was a goal of ours for sure. Our partners at Indiana Sports Corp were phenomenal. You know, this is your business. They put on some of the best events, sporting and non-sporting events in our country. Now, they’re an event city. They’re an Olympic city. But what they did to activate that the airport when he landed — our sport has never seen that kind of red carpet treatment. And I think I think that was phenomenal. The street signs named after Olympic swimmers. You name it. It was amazing.

You mentioned an NFL Stadium. It was recently announced that at the Los Angeles Games in 2028, swimming be held at SoFi Stadium. Was that in the works before Indianapolis or did what you saw in Indianapolis give you more confidence to proceed?

LA28 came to see me in Omaha in June 2021 and said, “Hey, we’re thinking about doing this. What do you think?” I said, hold a minute. And I put up my slides of the drawings we’ve already done for Indianapolis. So it was a proud moment that we both got to the same conclusion and I’m very proud we got to go first. I think (LA28 leader) Casey Wasserman may say the opposite, but he knows the truth and we have a good laugh about it now. His vision for what he’s going to do there is going to take it to a whole other level, which is total LA28 style. So we’ll be there to support that. We think it’s great for our sport. I think he’ll get to those 38,000 people, which I think is phenomenal.

LA 28 is going to be innovative. Tto be fair also, having an Olympics in Paris, in such a historic city, which the movement needed quite frankly, I think it’s going to push L.A. to even greater things. I think L.A. was already going to be great, but I think they’ve seen this, they’ve been inspired, we’ve been inspired as NGBs, so I think everyone’s excited and no doubt I think swimming will make it.

Swimming will take place after track and field in Los Angeles, a switch of the traditional Olympics schedule. Does that concern you at all from a competitive end?

We have a steering committee, which is our top Olympic coaches and top coaches in the country. And we talk often, we talk quarterly about all of our major high-performance objective strategy goals. We debrief, we analyze and we’ll obviously have a comprehensive analysis of this week, what went well, what didn’t go well as we prepare for L.A. So it’s part of that. They always talk within days and hours of what they want, things like how many days between Trials and Olympics. So in this case, it’ll simply sliding. So whatever date that they secure, if it’s we want 33 days, 35 days, 36 days, they’ll get down to the day. They know what they think is best for the performance for the athletes and we’ll plan it backwards. We’ll go back to Indianapolis or whatever market wants to host us and we’ll talk.

What’s your overall take on the Games in Paris? You mentioned we’re in a historic city, obviously venues have been able to benefit from that. What’s your take on the atmosphere?

Well, I enjoy doing interviews on the Champs-Elysees. I mean, I think that’s something that we need to continue to do. (Laughs) I’ve had lots of meeting with our partners, friends in the Olympic movement, internationally and domestically, NBC, you name it. I think all of us need to make the movement what we think it should be historically and spiritually. And I think COVID was tough on Tokyo as much as Tokyo would have achieved something great as well. Beijing and Pyeongchang are tough markets for an Olympics and Paralympics. For most people, they’ll tell you London was the last iconic Games. And I think Paris has delivered this. And I think all of us are excited. I can tell you that I’m even more excited about the future of the movement than I was coming into these Games after participating, walking around. The transportation, the operations, the customer service has been the next level. I think it’s been excellent. I think L.A. is going to do that, too. I have zero concerns about it. I’m just more excited about what L.A. Is going to bring us.

We’re having this conversation here in front of these crowds walking by. Doesn’t it feel like a million years since the last time we were together in Tokyo at Narita Airport waiting for hours to be cleared under COVID protocols?

Yeah, it does. Again, just looking around as we’re standing here today, looking at the Arc de Triomphe behind us, this is what the Olympic movement is all about. It’s bringing all these cultures together in a non-political way. I think Jim McKay has said that, so I’m stealing his quote, but I think that’s what it’s all about. And I think I really enjoy that. I have a couple of family members here, and it’s really been an honor to be here and represent USA Swimming.