Eugene, the spiritual heart of track and field, will host the sport’s biggest party in July.
And the numbers are daunting.
Nearly 2,000 of the world’s best runners, throwers and jumpers will converge on the city in July for the World Athletics Championships. Organizers expect 200,000 visitors will come to Oregon from more than 200 nations for the event, which runs from July 15-24.
Globally, the audience will approach 1 billion, boosters claim. Oregon’s battered hospitality industry has already assembled video of the state’s most beautiful places that they hope will be featured prominently in the world championships telecasts.
After a rocky beginning and a year’s postponement due to the pandemic, organizers say all systems are go.
Early ticket sales have been strong, the brilliant new Hayward Field stadium is battle-tested and ready, the organizing committee’s coffers are full, thanks largely to Gov. Kate Brown, who made good last month on her promise to deliver $40 million to the event.
“We’re on track,” said Jon Ridgeon, CEO of World Athletics, the sport’s international governing body. “There’s an experienced team in place in Eugene. In terms of things we can control, I feel fine.”
The Eugene event marks the first time the World Championships will be staged in the United States. Ridgeon and other leaders of the sport hope it will prove a pivotal moment for track and field to gain the same high profile in the U.S. that it enjoys in much of the rest of the world.
Track and field epicenter
The question now is: Can Eugene, Oregon’s tie-dyed second city, pull it off?
Eugene is not Paris, London or any of the other world capitals that have hosted the event in recent years.
It is not Doha, the glistening new city on the Persian Gulf that hosted the 2019 World Championships. When athletes and coaches voiced concern about the intense desert heat, Qatari officials tapped the petro state’s immense treasury and built an air conditioned outdoor stadium.
What Eugene does have is a track and field heritage unmatched in even the biggest cities. It is where legendary distance runner Steve Prefontaine, pioneering coach Bill Bowerman and champion decathlete Ashton Eaton came to prominence. It is where future Olympic gold medalists Otis Davis and Joachim Cruz got their start. More recently, Olympians English Gardner, Raevyn Rogers and Jenna Prandini all competed here.
Perhaps no other city in the world has so often proven that it can put on state-of-the-art track meets. Plus, with a population of just 177,000, it’s a place where the knowledgeable, appreciative fans can get up close and personal with competitors who might go unnoticed in a bigger city.
“You can be sitting at the Wild Duck after a meet and (shot put world record holder) Ryan Crouser walks in with a gold medal around his neck,” said Jesse Williams, founder of Sound Running, a prominent track and field promoter. “If you’re an obscure javelin thrower from the Netherlands, there will be some people in Eugene who will know you, recognize you and root for you.”
But if the last two years have proven anything, it is that unexpected, unprecedented events are the new norm. How do you plan an event like the world championships in the era of COVID-19, wildfires, social unrest, heat domes and who knows what else?
“Man plans, God laughs,” cracked Niels de Vos, head of Oregon 22, the local organizing committee.
Yet de Vos is bullish about the success of the event. “It’s a jigsaw of a million pieces. But I can see it all coming together. My job is to make sure no pieces go missing.”
Impact of the Swoosh
Hardcore track and field fans are salivating at the possibilities. The 2021-22 indoor season has already seen new personal, national and even world records at an extraordinary rate.
Thanks to the University of Oregon and Nike, sponsor of three different squads of elite professional runners, some of the best of those athletes reside and train in the Eugene and Portland areas.
Jerry Schumacher, head coach of the Nike-funded Bowerman Track Club, gets positively giddy about the World Championships. “Just the fact that it’s here in Eugene, it’s such a cool thing,” he said. “It will be like a home meet.”
It’s hard to overstate the vital role the Beaverton-area company, and particularly its co-founder Phil Knight, have played in the Worlds.
Knight was the lead donor of the new Hayward Field, which according to some estimates cost more than $400 million. Without the rebuild, World Athletics would never have considered Eugene.
Moreover, the whole ecosystem of professional track and field wouldn’t exist without the income the top athletes receive from their endorsement contracts with Nike and other athletic shoe companies.
“Clearly Mr. Knight has been the funder and the inspiration behind the wonderful stadium,” Ridgeon said. “But it goes beyond Nike. The footwear companies are the lifeblood of the sport. We couldn’t have a sport without them.”
Born in notoriety
It was Vin Lananna, then the head coach of the University of Oregon track and field team, who in 2015 secured the Eugene bid in the first place. In a series of events still mired in mystery, Lananna in 2015 got a one-on-one, private meeting with Lamine Diack, the elderly Senegalese bureaucrat who then headed track and field’s international governing body.
Afterward, Diack unilaterally announced the federation was awarding the 2021 Worlds to Eugene. In so doing, he ignored the normal competitive bidding process. Losing bidders, most notably Goteborg, Sweden, cried foul.
Lananna was hailed as a hero. But things soon got complicated.
Allegations of corruption are commonplace in big-time sports. Practically every recent Olympics and World Cup host selection has been marred by claims a city paid off a sports bureaucrat in exchange for their vote.
The Eugene bid was no exception. Specifically, Lananna’s role came under scrutiny by people who wondered what he said and what he offered to convince Diack to veer off normal procedure.
Suspicion ran thick in part because of Diack, who was plagued by rumors of rampant corruption. He was eventually charged with extorting millions of dollars from Russian athletes in exchange for concealing positive doping tests. He was convicted in 2020 and died in December.
In June 2017, the British press broke the news that the FBI had launched its own separate investigation into the award of the bid to Eugene.
Reports surfaced that Lananna had been subpoenaed, followed by documents showing he’d been interviewed by the FBI. He insisted he’d done nothing wrong, and his lawyer said Lananna was a witness, not a target of the investigation. No one was ever charged with wrongdoing.
In July 2018, Lananna quit the World Championships local organizing committee, and eventually he left Eugene altogether.
The organizing committee brought in de Vos, a veteran event organizer who had led the 2017 London World Championships.
Sebastian Coe, the standout British distance runner, replaced Diack at the top of the international governing body and has led a thorough house-cleaning.
“He inherited an organization whose previous president was corrupt and did some very bad things,” Ridgeon said. “Seb reviewed this organization from top to bottom. Today, it’s a well-run, efficient organization.”
Staunch support
Two years ago, Gov. Kate Brown traveled to steamy Doha to watch the end of the 2019 World Championships and to play a bit part in the closing ceremonies. She took a symbolic relay baton from a Qatari sheikh signifying Eugene’s role as the next host.
Brown has been all in on the World Championships through thick and thin. She insisted that the state follow through on the promise of $40 million in state funding for the event made by her predecessor, John Kitzhaber.
It is “an incredible opportunity for Oregon,” Brown said. “This is welcome news for our tourism, hospitality, and leisure industries, which have been among the hardest hit from the pandemic. I am pleased that the state is investing $40 million in these games to not only highlight Oregon on an international platform, but to drive customers back to our small businesses and ensure Oregon tourism comes back strong.”
Not everyone shared her enthusiasm. Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney wanted no part of the championships and in 2019 predicted that organizers will come back to the state for additional millions. Courtney did not return phone calls for this story.
Brown managed to get $20 million from Travel Oregon, the state’s tourism commission. But then fundraising seemed to stall.
Things got moving again in 2021, when the legislature directed $10 million in Oregon Lottery money to Oregon 22, the local organizing committee. Brown grabbed $1 million from the state strategic reserve. And Travel Oregon successfully applied for a $9 million grant from the U.S. Economic Development Organization.
The state contribution is by far the largest to the Eugene event. Organizers are counting on total revenue of $75 million. Besides the state’s contribution, de Vos said they will get $10 million from USA Track & Field, the sport’s national governing body, $10 million from individual donations and $15 million from ticket sales.
It’s unclear whether organizers have raised the money from individuals. De Vos refused to say how many tickets have been sold.
Logistical challenges
Organizers reportedly expect 20,000 to 25,000 people per day at Hayward Field during the Championships. That’s considerably less than the 50,000-plus for a home football game. But unlike a game at Autzen Stadium, most of the visitors will be staying several nights.
Lane County boasts about 5,900 hotel rooms total, and local officials say it’s likely that some World Championship attendees will have to stay in Corvallis, Salem and possibly Portland.
One thing Eugene does have is 4,000 dorm rooms. And those small, no-frills rooms, some lacking air conditioning, is where many of the athletes and team officials will stay.
Even if Oregon manages to avoid another heat wave, July will still be high summer in Eugene, which can be plenty warm.
But the dorms do offer several big benefits. They are within easy walking distance of Hayward. In other, larger cities, athletes have had to stay in hotel rooms two hours away from the stadium.
The setup will also promote a sense of an Olympics-style athlete’s village, where competitors can hang out and meet their counterparts from other countries, de Vos said.
The city of Eugene is hoping all those athletes will venture out from that village, perhaps down to the Willamette River, where it is preparing a giant party in conjunction with the World Championships.
City officials will hold the first annual Riverfront Festival in a new 3-acre park about a mile from campus. Admission will be free and feature food, drink and a video screen with live action from the World Championships.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Oregon and the city of Eugene to showcase itself,” said Stephanie Scafa, the city project manager for the World Championships.
Some city leaders are concerned that the national and international media will focus not just on the scenic beauty but also on the poverty, homelessness and other social problems that are all too evident on the streets.
“Downtown is not a pleasant place. It’s not a comfortable place,” said Eugene City Council member Emily Semple at a Jan. 10 council meeting. “Crime is increasing. How can we have the world come if we can’t get our living room cleaned up? I’m really worried.”
Randy Groves, another member of the council, echoed those concerns. “There are some pretty scary things happening downtown,” he said. “I hear about it every day.”
In hopes of dressing up parts of town, the city has overseen the move of the local farmer’s market to new and improved quarters. It also prepared kits for business owners to decorate their storefronts that include banners, flags and other items commemorating the world championships. The banners read “The Home and Heart of Track and Field.”
Semple’s concerns weren’t alleviated. “This is going to be really challenging to make it look safe and spiff,” she said. “And if we can do that, why haven’t we done it already?”
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