World Championships will showcase Tracktown USA

EUGENE, OREGON » Like the river that runs northward through the heart of Eugene, the journey to the World Track and Field Championships this month is full of twists and turns, winding through parts of eight decades, a course steered by men defined both by their vision and defiance.

Men, who like the Willamette River, weren’t afraid to head in a different direction, taking their sport with them.

The most famous of those mavericks was the late Oregon distance runner Steve Prefontaine, who viewed the very act of racing as both a work of art and an act of defiance.

Prefontaine, forever restless and relentless, was frustrated through much of the first half of 1975, the final five months of his life.

Prefontaine, then American track and field’s most recognizable star, was tired of fighting with the Amateur Athletic Union, then the sport’s governing body. He was tired of being told by AAU officials when and where he could race internationally. He was tired of having to chase the world’s best across Europe each summer.

Why couldn’t the Africans, the New Zealanders and British, the Finns and the Belgians come to the U.S.? he asked repeatedly.

Prefontaine in particular was determined to lure Finland’s Lasse Viren, the 1972 Olympic champion at 5,000 and 10,000 meters, to Hayward Field on the University of Oregon campus.

So in the spring of 1975, Prefontaine, known to his friends and fans as “Pre,” put together a series of meets in the Pacific Northwest featuring Finnish athletes.

“Imagine 24 years old being a meet promoter,” recalled Pat Tyson, Prefontaine’s Oregon teammate and roommate. “You’re creating something.”

The tour’s grand finale was to feature a showdown between Prefontaine and Viren in Eugene, a rematch of their epic duel in the 1972 Olympic 5,000 final in Munich, a race driven by the American’s relentlessness over the final mile. Perhaps more than any other race, the Munich final epitomized a man who once said he raced “to see who had the most guts.”

Viren pulled out of the Eugene race at the last minute. Frank Shorter, the 1972 Olympic marathon champion and Viren’s last minute replacement, provided little competition for Prefontaine, who narrowly missed breaking his own American record in the 5,000, turning as he broke the finish tape to look back at an empty homestretch.

A few hours later he was dead, killed in a car crash in the hills above the Oregon campus. It would be another eight years before track held its first World Championships.

“Pre was way ahead of the time,” said former Oregon miler Mark Feig, another exteammate. “Think about it ‘75, putting on meets, getting the international athletes to come to Eugene.

”That was the beginning of international meets for Eugene.”

Prefontaine’s vision of bringing the finest athletes on the planet to a place that calls itself “Tracktown USA” will come to life with the World Championships which open Friday and will run through July 24 at the yearold rebuilt Hayward Field beneath a 10-story tower bearing Pre’s likeness.

The first Worlds ever on U.S. soil, and the most important track meet on the West Coast since the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles (the 1984 Games were depleted by the Soviet bloc boycott) will feature what Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics track’s international governing body, calls a “golden generation” of athletes, a glittering mix of world record holders, Olympic champions and rising stars who have shattered or are threatening records that for decades had been considered out of reach..

Those records are further endangered by what Gail Devers, the two-time Olympic 100-meter champion calls “the fastest track in the world” at the new Hayward Field, a $200-million plus state of the art facility largely financed by Phil Knight, the Nike co-founder and a former Oregon middle distance runner.

The meet, pushed back a year because of the International Olympic Committee’s decision to delay the 2020 Tokyo Olympics by a year, will also showcase this college town at the south end of the Willamette Valley that has held an outsized influence in the sport both nationally and internationally for decades.

“It’s not necessarily viewed here as the culmination of all these decades of track and field,” said Tom Jordan, Prefontaine’s biographer and the longtime director of the Prefontaine Classic. “That Eugene as the track capital of America will continue whether this is a complete success or complete failure but I think the excitement will build to where people take pride that after all these decades Eugene is going to be the center of the track and field world.”

It also comes at a critical juncture for both American track and field and Tracktown USA.

“There are some opportunities here that we cannot allow to slide by,” said Coe, a two-time Olympic 1,500-meter champion for Great Britain.

“Of those opportunities we mustn’t squander, Eugene, Oregon is a huge moment for us, and we should be absolutely aware of that.”

Coe, an International Olympic Committee member, is among those who believe a successful Worlds could be a launching pad to raise the profile in this country of a sport whose popularity at the high school and youth levels and Olympic and World Championships success has not translated into television ratings, box office or marketing success at the professional level.

The World Championships also present Eugene with an opportunity to live up to its claim as Tracktown USA with a global television watching, a chance to solidify its place in the sport’s domestic and international histories while silencing critics who doubt a city with a population of 170,000 can pull off a major international event and those who insist the sport’s over reliance on Eugene has hindered American track and field’s growth.

“It takes its shots from what I call Eugene haters among the track and field followers,” said Jon Anderson, a Eugene native and the 1973 Boston Marathon winner. “But where would we be without Nike and Eugene in track and field?”

Nike’s roots are in Eugene. Longtime Oregon head coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman in between coaching Olympians and NCAA champions produced the prototype to the brand’s iconic shoe tread.

Nike is USA Track & Field’s leading corporate sponsor, the parties agreeing to a $400-million 23-year deal in 2014.

The Worlds, Anderson said, are “certainly the result of what Bowerman started back in the late 50s.”

It was Bowerman, a quarter-miler under legendary Oregon coach Bill Hayward in the 1930s, coaching Bill Dellinger, a future threetime Olympian, who would launch in the mid-1950s the greatest middle and long distance dynasty in college history. It was Bowerman who first brought the NCAA Championships to

Eugene in 1962, Ducks winning the team title by more than doubling runner-up Villanova’s score.. It was Bowerman who convinced the U.S. Olympic Committee to hold the 1968 Olympic Trials in Echo Summit, California on an eight-day schedule to mirror the Olympic Games program. And it was Bowerman and his close friend Bob Newland, the North Eugene High School principal who doubled as a meet director, who in 1972 brought the first of seven Olympic Trials to Hayward Field.

The 1972 meet transformed the Olympic Trials, smashing records on both the track and at the box office.

The 1976 and 1980 Trials in Eugene continued to set records on and off the track and in the case of the 1980 meet challenged–or shamed– the sports powers that be to increase competitive opportunities for women. This upcoming Worlds, Jordan added “in terms of vision it’s certainly worthy of Bowerman. He thought big and Vin also thinks big. So I think it’s not a straight line trajectory up but I think there is kind of a comfort zone with the idea that Eugene is big enough to host the Worlds.”

Vin would be Vin Lananna, the Oregon head track and field and cross country coach from 2005 and 2012, who led the way in returning the Olympic Trials to Eugene and securing the 2022 Worlds.

Lananna, who led Tracktown USA, the non-profit local meet organizing committee from 2008 to 2018 and has been president of USA Track & Field, the sport’s national governing body since 2016, paved the way to Oregon ‘22 by first landing the 2014 World Junior Championships for Eugene. and 2016 World Indoor Championships for Portland.

But the awarding of what was supposed to be held in 2021 and Lananna and Coe’s roles in the decision have been the sources of controversy.

World Athletics, then known as the IAAF, awarded Eugene the World Championships in April 2015 without a formal bidding process. The no-bid process for such a high profile major international event was unusual but not unprecedented. Osaka was awarded the 2007 Worlds without an open-bid process.

Eugene in November 2014 had earlier been edged out by Doha to host the 2019 Worlds. Both the Eugene bids for the World outdoor championships and Portland’s campaign for the 2016 World Indoor meet were bankrolled by Nike. Coe, an IAAF vice chairman since 2007, at the time was the chairman of the IAAF’S evaluation commission for potential World Championship sites. He was also a paid global ambassador for Nike, hired by the Beaverton-based company in February 2013. Nine months later Portland was awarded the World Indoor meet.

Even after being elected as World Athletics president in August 2015, Coe initially refused to give up his role with Nike, which came with a reported six-figure salary. He finally cut ties with Nike in November 2015.

USA Track & Field placed Lananna on “temporary administrative leave” pending the outcome of FBI and IRS investigations into the awarding of the 2021 Worlds to Eugene. The FBI and IRS were investigating possible fraud, racketeering and money laundering charges, according to media reports.

Lananna and Coe have denied any wrongdoing. Lananna was reinstated as USATF president in December 2019. He did not respond to requests for an interview.