EUGENE, Ore. — Newly renovated Hayward Field sits in the middle of the University of Oregon campus, its futuristic exoskeleton rising above the aging brick buildings like a spaceship. It cost Phil Knight and friends $300 million, and it includes a 5,000-square-foot video board, a 10-story tower with a hall of fame, luxury boxes for Nike execs, covered training areas under the seats, a three-lane urethane running track circling the concourse, majestic curved wooden beams supporting the roof.
This is where the World Athletics Championships — the colonists call it track and field — opened Friday with nearly 2,000 athletes from 190-odd countries in 48 events and continue through the following weekend. This marks the first time in the event's 39-year history it has been in the United States, the best track meet on U.S. soil since the 1996 Olympics, the best on the West Coast since the 1984 Olympics — or, if you discount that because of the Soviet boycott, since 1932.
But it's what is immediately outside Hayward Field that symbolizes the importance of these 10 days for the sport in this country.
On the north side, rising starkly behind the enormous video board, is a giant yellow crane erecting new student dormitories.
On the west side, behind the warm-up area, is a cemetery.
Are they building something? Or is it already dead?
A christening, or a cadaver?
Resuscitation, or R.I.P.?
Track and field in the United States is a little like its men's 4x100-meter relay team: world-record potential but it keeps dropping the baton.
The first question at Thursday's news conference with U.S. athletes here was how "it is possible" that Americans have won 170 world titles across the championships' 17 editions, 110 more than any other nation and a staggering 22% of the total, yet had not hosted until now.
Another question noted that track and field remains the No. 1 participation sport among high school girls and No. 2 for boys behind football, yet the recent U.S. championships at Hayward Field drew 13,306 spectators … total … over four days … in a place dubbed Track Town, USA.
"I mean, that's a tough question to answer," said Allyson Felix, the most decorated U.S. track athlete in history who likely will run her final major international competition here. "There are a lot of issues that we could address. But I hope that hosting events in the U.S. will bring in new fans, that people will understand the sport and be drawn to it."
The key word in all that: hope. The sport doesn't have much else at this point.
Consider: Sixty years ago, a USA-USSR dual meet at Stanford Stadium drew 150,000 over two days.
Workouts drew 5,000. Track was a big deal.
The downward slope was greased at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, when NBC was deciding which sport schedule to move to the morning in Australia so it would be live in prime time in the States. It picked swimming and left track, with events contested in the middle of the night back home, to wither on tape delay — a body blow in the internet age. Same at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.
Other wounds have been self-inflicted. Agents controlling the sport. People asked to buy tickets without knowing who's showing up to compete. Doping scandals. A dearth of rivalries. An older fan demographic dying off. Sponsorship money drying up and athletes going broke (one competitor at the U.S. nationals admitted he was sleeping in his car). The international circuit bypassing the U.S. other than the annual Prefontaine Classic in — where else? — Eugene.
This year alone, Hayward Field has hosted the Pre meet, the state high school meet, the Pac-12 Championships, the NCAA Championships, the U.S. Championships and now the worlds, where finish-line tickets for the men's 100-meter final Saturday night are $910. It has had four of the last seven U.S. Olympic Trials, eight of the last 10 NCAAs.
In a college town of 178,000 with only a handful of full-service hotels and no major airport within 100 miles.
"If I'm being blunt," World Athletics President Sebastian Coe told reporters recently, "we've got to get into the L.A.s, the Chicagos, the Miamis."
So why here? Why now?
Because Uncle Phil, a runner at Oregon in the late '50s and Nike's co-founder, wanted them. World Athletes ignored its 40,000-seat minimum capacity and awarded them to Track Town in 2015 without a formal bidding process but with two key figures — Coe and USA Track & Field president Vin Lananna — secretly on Nike's payroll, a detail that later drew the attention of federal fraud investigators. Nike also has kept USATF afloat with a 23-year, $400 million deal that reportedly accounts for 60% of its annual revenue. And Knight pledged the money to rebuild the creaky wooden stadium that, after media and athlete seating, will hold about 13,000.
Then again, where the heck else were they going to go? Who would even want them?
Hence, track's great conundrum.
"Stop having every meet in Eugene," Nick Symmonds, a 2013 silver medalist at 800 meters who trained in Oregon, told the Orange County Register. "To say Oregon is the mecca of track and field, to think that this thing is somehow going to save track and field, is absurd, right? This tiny town in the middle of nowhere."
The man who gets to figure that out is Willie Banks, the former world record holder in the triple jump and an Oceanside High alum. Coe appointed him chair of the World Plan Working Group charged with elevating track and field's global popularity to just below soccer by 2030.
With the enthusiasm that defined his jumping, Banks talks about initiatives creating a living wage for track athletes, about tripling the number of international competitions, about holding individual events in untraditional venues (shopping malls, train stations) to attract new fans, about integrating legalized gambling to the sport. He talks about working for the 1994 World Cup organizing committee and how it launched Major League Soccer, how Eugene and the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles can do the same for track.
He sees the yellow construction crane abutting Hayward Field. He doesn't see the cemetery.
"It's just like in 1994," Banks said. "We all planned that the World Cup would be the springboard for soccer in the United States, and everybody knows soccer now. It's going to happen, it's going to happen. This is the springboard."
The 10-story tower on the stadium's northeast corner sticks into the Oregon sky like a relay baton. In a promotional video, the project's creative director says that's by design: "Hey, here's the baton. Energize tack and field for another 100 years."
Noble intentions, if you don't keep dropping it.
