Swimming Toward Olympic Gold in Santa Clara

By Luke Muyskens

The path to Olympic glory is all about training. Every athlete yearning for that podium puts in countless hours of work, usually at a facility where they draw from the energy, determination and support of their sporting community.

For the U.S. Figure Skating Team, one of those home bases is the LPA-designed Great Park Ice & Fivepoint Arena in Irvine, California, where gold medalists like Nathan Chen and Ilia Malinin cut their teeth, and where athletes from the 2026 winter games trained.

When it comes to the icons of the summer games, Mark Spitz — the legendary swimmer who won seven gold medals at the 1972 Munich Olympics, each in world-record time — honed his skills at the George F. Haines International Swim Center in Santa Clara, California. The first American woman to win gold in swimming, Donna de Varona, trained there, too. All told, the swim club that calls this center home has earned more than 50 gold medals.

Since its glory days, the facility had fallen into disrepair. Concrete was crumbling, rebar was breaking down and the dive tower was structurally unsafe. It had to close, and the Santa Clara Swim Club’s stable of powerhouse swimmers scattered across various pools around the Bay Area.

After assessing the damage, LPA developed a two-phase plan with the City of Santa Clara and the Santa Clara Aquatics Foundation to save the iconic pools. The first phase will include rebuilding the dive platform, bringing three existing pools up to World Aquatics standards, installing new lighting, and constructing a new mechanical building. These updates will allow the facility to reopen before the Olympics come to Los Angeles in 2028, offering a potential training ground for local and international athletes as they prepare for the biggest competition of their lives.

“The main goal is to bring this historic facility up to safe, modern standards as soon as possible,” says LPA Design Director Helen Pierce. “We know how eager the Santa Clara community is to get back in the water.”

As the facility prepares to dive into its next chapter, LPA has other Olympic-related projects in the pipeline. Stay tuned to future issues of Catalyst.