Other Sporting Events Held At The Indianapolis Motor Speedway
Since 1977, the city of Indianapolis has hosted a half marathon, which includes one lap around the Speedway. Known as the OneAmerica 500 Festival Mini-Marathon, this event usually starts the official events that occur prior to the Indy 500.
From 1960 to 1968, the Speedway Golf Course, originally built in 1929, hosted a PGA Tour event, the 500 Festival Open Invitation, in conjunction with Indy 500 race week. In 1968, it also held an LPGA event. From 1991 to 1993, the course was demolished and changed from a 27-hole layout (18 holes outside, 9 in the infield) to an 18-hole championship course designed by legendary golf architect Pete Dye. The new course, renamed the Brickyard Crossing Golf Resort features 14 holes outside, and 4 holes in the infield, along with an infield lake. A Champions Tour event, Brickyard Crossing Championship, was hosted there from 1994–1999.
At the 1987 Pan American Games, the speedway hosted opening ceremonies and the speed roller skating competition.
During the three-year Centennial Era, announced on May 23, 2008, special festivities which will include a balloon festival to commemorate the first event, will be held at two of the major races at the speedway, the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400. In February 2012, the facility will be used to host events during Super Bowl XLVI that will be held in Indianapolis.
Since 2009, the Speedway has hosted United States Auto Club quarter midget racing on an infield oval, called the "Battle at the Brickyard".
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Famous quotes containing the words sporting, events, held, motor and/or speedway:
“I once heard of a murderer who propped his two victims up against a chess board in sporting attitudes and was able to get as far as Seattle before his crime was discovered.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over
upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my
feet.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“What shall we do with country quiet now?
A motor drones insanely in the blue
Like a bad bird in a dream.”
—Babette Deutsch (1895–1982)
“The improved American highway system ... isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway ... he had no contact with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson’s nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)