EUGENE, Ore. – Long before this Willamette Valley college town declared itself “Tracktown USA,” North Eugene High School vice principal Bob Newland and Bill Rau, like Newland an Oregon Track Club official, appeared before the U.S. Olympic Committee on August 11, 1971, in New York.
Newland and Rau had been invited by the USOC’s track and field committee to New York along with officials from Los Angeles to present their cities’ bids to host the 1972 Olympic Trials.
Los Angeles pitched a two-day competition at the Coliseum to the USOC and insisted a meet any longer than that risked the “profitability” of the Trials. Newland proposed holding the Trials in Eugene over 11 days to mirror the competition schedule of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.
“Properly staged,” Newland said, “a track meet is a thing of beauty.”
There was audible laughter from the Los Angeles delegation when Newland laid out the Oregon Track Club’s plan.
The USOC by a vote of 39-6 awarded Eugene the 1972 Trials. Those Trials were so successful that Eugene was later awarded the 1976 and 1980 Trials as well.
It was the last time American track and field failed to take the persuasive powers of Eugene and its allies seriously.
An unprecedented fifth consecutive U.S. Olympic Trials in Eugene open Friday at Hayward Field, extending and highlighting Tracktown’s grip on the sport that Newland and Rau could not have envisioned that day in New York more than a half-century ago.
Of this decade’s eight major U.S. championships – the Olympic Trials, the U.S. and NCAA championships – seven have been hosted by Eugene. Tracktown has been home to nine of the last 11 NCAA Championships and is scheduled to host the next three NCAAs as well. Or consider that in the Olympic Trials’ 104-year history, no other city has hosted the event more than three consecutive times and no location has held more than two straight Trials since 1928.
The driving force behind Eugene’s hold on the sport is Tracktown USA, a tax-exempt, non-profit that has reported more than $140 million in revenue since it was founded in 2013 to become along with one of its chief benefactors, Nike, perhaps the most powerful entity in American track and field.
Tracktown USA describes its mission as elevating “the sport of track and field in the mind of the American public and to enhance the profile of the Eugene-Springfield region and the entire State of Oregon as ‘Track Town USA’ – the premier destination for track and field meets in North America.”
Athletes compete during the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials Saturday, June 19, 2021, in Eugene, Ore. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)
But Tracktown USA’s reach is global. The organization has secured for Eugene the 2022 World Championships, last year’s Diamond League final, the 2014 and 2026 World Under-20 Championships and the 2016 World Indoor Championships for Portland. The group is also behind the annual Prefontaine Classic, the only U.S. stop on the Diamond League circuit and regularly rated as the world’s premier one day meet.
“The general philosophy is we believe we’ve gotten pretty good at the delivery of events but we have an amazing stadium here that’s specifically designed for the future of hosting great events,” said Michael Reilly, the former Stanford distance runner who is now Tracktown USA’s CEO. “It was designed to be a theater for track and field, that was the intention behind that. Well if we’ve got this amazing world class theater here, we really want to see great events coming. We’re of the mind, the belief, that events can be a great opportunity. One of the great pieces of growing of the sport of track and field is if you’ve got an opportunity to bring people in to connect them directly with the athletes and send them home with a smile on their face, that’s a tremendous part of growing fandom for track and field.”
Tracktown USA, bolstered by more than $40 million in government support between 2013 and 2022, according to Internal Revenue Service filings and other financial documents, has been so good at fulfilling that mission, that meet promoters and local sports commissions in major markets and in traditional track and field destinations said not only can they no longer compete with Eugene to land top U.S. meets like the Olympic Trials, but in some cases, they have simply stopped trying.
“Eugene is pretty tough to compete with these days,” said Greg Edwards, president and CEO of the Des Moines Area Sports Commission. “The Olympic Trials is a huge undertaking both cost-wise and in terms of sponsorship. And Eugene is so powerful, we feel like we can’t compete with them. So (bidding) becomes a, ‘Why are we spinning our wheels kind of thing?’”
Eugene’s landing the 2024 Trials is the latest and perhaps most glaring example of how Tracktown USA has scared off the competition.
The U.S. Olympic Trials are the world’s second most important track meet in every Olympic season and the most valuable property in the American sport; track and field’s ultimate reality show played out in prime time over the course of 10 dream fulfilling and heartbreaking days with a sense of drama that often exceeds that of the Games themselves.
The Olympic Trials not only have the ability to shape the lives of their participants but they also impact the communities that host them. The 2016 Trials, the last Trials held before the coronavirus pandemic, had a $37 million economic impact on Eugene and Lane County.
To potential bid cities, hosting the 2024 Trials should have appeared especially attractive. The meet will feature the greatest collection of American track and field athletes since the trailblazing 1968 Olympic team or maybe ever. The field includes world record-shattering talents like shot putter Ryan Crouser and hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Noah Lyles and Sha’Carri Richardson, the world’s fastest fashion statements, and the deepest and most talented group of U.S. middle and long distance runners since Jim Ryun, Marty Liquori, Steve Prefontaine, Dave Wottle, Frank Shorter in the era of the early 70s.
“It is the golden generation,” said Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, track’s international governing body and a two-time Olympic champion.
Yet Eugene was awarded the Olympic Trials by USA Track & Field, the sport’s national governing body, last year after no other city chose to bid for the event including three cities that have either hosted the U.S. or NCAA Championships since 2008 – Sacramento, which also held the 2000 and 2004 Trials, Des Moines and Austin – as well as New York City and Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, which was awarded the 2020 Trials in 2017 only to have them stripped away from the school by USATF and the USOPC less than a year later.
In other words, Eugene, for all its history and investment and commitment to track, won the 2024 Olympic Trials by default.
“We’ve talked to a lot of meet directors and they all say the same thing: that you can’t compete with Eugene,” said Brian Yokoyama, Mt. SAC’s director of athletic events.
Yokoyama and Edwards’ comments were echoed in interviews with meet directors, local sports commission officials, Olympic and World championship medalists and world record-holders, top professional and college coaches, and agents from which a growing consensus emerged that even officials and promoters in major markets like Los Angeles and New York have given up trying to compete with Eugene for the top American meets like Olympic Trials, U.S. and NCAA championships.
IRS filings, other financial records, legislative documents, university and marketing studies, and interviews reveal just how wide the resource gap is between Tracktown USA and the rest of the sport.
Tracktown USA began 2022, the most recent year for which IRS filings are available, with $55 million in assets, or 100 times more than the Des Moines Area Sports Commission’s $555,395 in assets. Between 2016 and 2021, Tracktown USA spent $322,500 on lobbying, more than the $300,000 Mt. SAC spent in total on bidding for and then organizing the 2020 Trials.
“How can I compete with that?” Yokoyama asked. “I can’t.”
That other cities are reluctant to bid for major championships, athletes, coaches, meet directors and agents said, has further escalated concerns that U.S. track and field’s reliance on Eugene has hindered the sport’s growth at the very time when American track has a cast athletes with the potential to transcend the sport and attract a broader audience just as Michael Phelps and Simone Biles did for swimming and gymnastics.
In fact, athletes and coaches insist, that Eugene hotels, restaurants and businesses’ well founded history of price gouging and the expense of traveling to the city has driven away fans and made it increasingly difficult for athletes who don’t have large shoe contracts to afford to travel to Eugene in hopes of making an Olympic or World Championships team.
“You’d hate to see track turn into one of those sports where it’s pay to play,” said sprinter Gabby Thomas, a two-Olympic medalist and world champion in the 4×100-meter relay. “You want the best people in the country to have the opportunity to make the team not just because they have the support and the financial background.”
Thomas is one of a growing number of Olympic and Worlds medalists who are advocating that major U.S. championships be held away from Eugene.
“I think we would definitely all love to see that,” said Thomas, an Olympic bronze and Worlds silver medalist at 200 meters. “I definitely think it’s time. You see how easy it is to get to other cities. Eugene is really hard to get to and it’s not feasible for a lot of people to try and make their dream happen.
“But also just for interest (in track). The public wants to see the Olympic Trials. They want to know when it’s happening, where it’s happening and they want to be able to buy tickets if you put it in a city people will be excited to go to.
“For people who just want to go and support (the sport). If I don’t want to go to Eugene, why would anyone want to?”
Although LA 28 is expected to bid to host the 2028 Trials at the Coliseum as a test run for the Olympic Games, many in sport see the possibility of a Los Angeles Trials as a brief aberration more than a change in direction. An LA 28 spokesperson said it is premature to talk about a bid for the 2028 Trials but privately LA 28 officials are confident in landing the event.
Even after 2028, athletes, coaches and meet directors, expect all roads will lead back to Eugene.
After Los Angeles in 2028, Yokoyama said, the Olympic Trials “are never going to be in a major market again.”
Reilly said the concerns and criticism are misinformed and misguided.
“Well we all have to acknowledge that not everything is in Eugene,” he said. “There’s an entire track season that doesn’t take place on the West Coast. There is the LA Grand Prix that USA Track and Field has started. There’s a New York Grand Prix.
“I don’t know that it’s fair to say that everything is taking place in Eugene. I think there’s truth in the bigger statement that growing the sport of track and field, it’s a huge task that involves a lot more than hosting events. I believe we’re doing our part with the events we bring here and how we host them.”
But Eugene has hosted nearly two-thirds (62.5 percent) of the Olympic Trials, U.S. and NCAA championships since 2008, 72.2 percent of those meets in the last decade, or more than twice as many times as all the other host cities combined.
The University of Oregon, having already secured the next three NCAA meets, is also bidding to host the collegiate championships in 2028 and beyond.
“People haven’t been shy about wanting to be like Omaha,” said Andy Vobora, Travel Lane County’s vice president for stakeholder relations, referring to the longtime home of the College World Series. “We want to be the home of that championship.”
Tracktown USA is bidding to host the 2025 U.S. Championships and when asked if they thought the 2028 Trials would be awarded to Los Angeles just as they were in 1984 when the city hosted the Olympic Games, Reilly said, “We haven’t started thinking about the next Trials yet.”
An expensive trip for athletes, fans
“You go to Eugene all the time,” said long jumper Tara Davis-Woodhall, the world indoor champion. “It’s a sh** show, yes.”
Davis-Woodhall was asked which location was easier to get to from her Fayetteville, Arkansas, training base: Paris or Eugene?
“Paris,” Davis-Woodhall said laughing without missing a beat.
A survey of flights last month from Fayetteville to Eugene showed coach fare prices ranging from $1,610 to $2,186. The latter fare is more than $200 more than the cheapest fare from Fayetteville to Paris during a three week window surrounding the Olympic Games. At 6-feet-7, 320 pounds, Crouser, the two-time Olympic shot put champion and Oregon native who also trains in Fayetteville, isn’t likely to fly coach to Oregon. The cheapest non-coach fare from Fayetteville to Tracktown is $2,252.
But athletes don’t only have to pay for themselves to get to Oregon. Athletes not affiliated with clubs also have to get their coaches, massage therapists, physical therapists, agents and family members there.
And it’s not just the cost of traveling to Eugene that frustrates athletes – and fans.
Orlando International Airport is the closest major airport to Clermont, Florida, the training base of Lyles and Richardson and other top sprinters. The average travel time from Orlando to Eugene is 8 hours and 32 minutes.
The expenses continue to pile up once athletes and their teams and coaches reach Eugene.
A ticket on Hayward Field’s last row on the home stretch cost $130 for this Saturday’s session which features the women’s 100 meters and men’s shot put final.
“Nowadays it’s so expensive and I guess you guys know how expensive Eugene is and it sucks that we have to do that to our sport,” Davis-Woodhall said. “Tickets to see the best of the best in our entire nation just to make us spend 2 grand out of pocket just to watch a sport and then on top of it charge a $100 per day, per ticket.”
Then there’s the hotel expenses.
World class price gouging by local hotels and restaurants is as synonymous with Eugene as track, liberal politics and the ever-present aroma of marijuana.
According to a survey of travel and hotel websites, 12 hotels in the Eugene-Springfield area are charging $400 or more per night, with 10 hotels asking for $500 or more and five setting rates as high as $600. A night at the Residence Inn will run you $677 per night. The LaQuinta Inn is charging $530 a night. A two-star hotel in Eugene is asking for $583 a night, or more than $200 more than what a room costs at the Beverly Hilton, home of the Golden Globes. Hoping to save with an Airbnb? Think again. A one-bedroom rental can cost you as much as $710 a night.
“It’s difficult just getting myself to Eugene,” said Thomas, who is sponsored by New Balance. “It’s so expensive. It’s pretty far out of the way. And I think about that a lot, thinking about my recovery. Getting my team there is extremely expensive, coaches, physios, agents, my family. It costs thousands of dollars to get everybody there, especially when they jack up the prices. I was just talking about this with a couple of my teammates, a couple who are unsponsored and talking about how you’re making this dream happen but it’s only feasible if you have the money to do that.
“It’s insane.”
Reilly and Vobora acknowledge the criticism.
“I think we’re empathetic to that,” Reilly said. “We don’t set hotel prices. We don’t set airline prices. Eugene is located where it is. We work very hard with Travel Lane County and the local industry to do the best we can to get the hotel prices down. We’ve had lots of conversations about that, but in the end, we don’t set those prices. What we can do is put forward a strong compelling bid. We can put forward the fact that we have a great stadium, we have an experienced and knowledgeable workforce, volunteers here and we have a strong, vast network of community partners that make sure the experience is great. That’s what we put forward when we bid and we’ll continue to try and do that.”
Vobora said Travel Lane County continues to have ongoing conversations with local businesses, warning them about trying to “make hay on a handful of big events.”
“We’ve heard that for a long time,” Vobora said referring to Eugene’s reputation for price gouging.
“If people take a look at other markets, it’s supply and demand.”
Vobora said local hotels have been better at setting aside blocks of rooms at lower rates especially for the NCAA Championships.
But Vobora also admitted the price gouging label has stuck to Tracktown.
“It’s something we have to overcome,” he said. “It’s a perception that needs to be addressed.”
But officials from rival cities say Eugene’s price gouging illustrates why it has become so difficult to compete with Tracktown USA.
“It’s a big, big huge factor in that,” Mt. SAC’s Yokoyama said.
The argument from rival cities goes like this: Tracktown USA can afford the bid fees and other bid related costs because it receives state and local funding, which those governments and tourism agencies can justify by pointing to tax revenue generated by events like the Trials or other major meets. Markets like Los Angeles with other tourist attractions and a much larger hotel inventory have a harder time making the case for local funding based on economic impact projections for the Trials or NCAAs.
“We have five major airports,” Yokoyama said. “There’s no way to price gouge.”
Tracktown USA spent $120,000 on lobbying in 2016 and 2017, according to IRS filings and other financial records. Tracktown spent another $112,500 on lobbying in 2019 alone.The lobbying paid off. The Oregon legislature voted twice to increase the state’s transient lodging tax, creating tens of millions to help fund the 2021 World Championships. The $40 million in state funding made up more than half the event’s $75 million budget.
“Certainly the World Championships could not have gone forward without that support,” Reilly said.
When Tracktown USA had a cash flow problem leading up to the 2016 Olympic Trials, the City of Springfield granted the organization $75,000 in subsidies from the city’s hotel tax revenues.
The state and local governments have received a significant return on their investment in Tracktown.
The 2022 World Championships had a $153.4 million economic impact, including $45 million in local accommodation revenues and $19.3 million in media exposure for the state of Oregon, according to an analysis by The Nielsen Company.
The Southern California New Group reached out to USA Track and Field for this report seeking an interview with Max Siegel, the organization’s CEO, about the pros and cons of having so many meets in Eugene and to answer the following questions: How many cities applied to host the 2024 Olympic Trials? Has the host site for the 2025 U.S. Championships been selected? If so, who was selected? And was there an application fee for cities to post to bid to host the 2024 Olympic Trials? And if so, what was the fee?
A USATF spokesperson responded by saying, “We are fully focused on preparing for the upcoming Olympic Trials so do not have any interview availability at this time.”
The spokesperson also provided a statement from Siegel:
“When selecting host sites for events, USA Track & Field’s priorities are to provide athletes with the ultimate environment to perform at their best and fans with an unmatched viewing experience. The host of the 2024 Olympic Trials, Eugene, is known as the heart and home of track and field and has tried and tested infrastructure for our sport. Hayward Field is a world-class venue and fully equipped with best-in-class broadcasting capabilities. It has provided excellent conditions for athletes, fans, and officials and the city’s passion for track and field creates an atmosphere that consistently elevates our sport. TrackTown USA is a great partner, and we genuinely appreciate and value our strong partnership with them and the great city of Eugene.
“Our effort in finding cities to host USATF events starts with a bid process, whether it is a masters, youth, elite or road race championship event. It is not a secret that hosting such events is both incredibly complex and costly and must have the commitment of many in a given community. USATF is fortunate to have cities all across the country hosting our events- indoors, outdoors and on the road. We look forward to working with even more locales as more facilities are built and become available to host at various levels of our competitions.”
Influential friends
Tracktown USA has also benefited from having influential friends.
“We also don’t have Uncle Phil to bankroll (a bid),” Yokoyama said.
“Uncle Phil” is billionaire Phil Knight, a former Oregon middle distance runner who co-founded Nike with legendary Ducks track coach Bill Bowerman.
Vin Lananna, then Oregon’s head track coach and president of TrackTown USA, and Paul Weinhold, the University of Oregon Foundation’s president, in July 2014 first pitched Governor John Kitzhaber a $40 million state subsidy for a bid to host the 2019 World Championships.
The Tracktown USA proposal was met with skepticism in the governor’s office.
“There are a lot of hurdles to get over before it becomes much more than a pipe dream,” Vince Porter, a Kitzhaber economic adviser, wrote in an analysis of the Tracktown USA plan adding that the proposal included “probably as much as $20 million that we would never want to consider subsidizing. I don’t think the state should be even considering something larger than $20 million” to fund a track meet.
Yet by November, Tracktown USA’s presentation at a bid meeting to the International Association of Athletics Federations (now World Athletics) at the organization’s Monaco headquarters included a video message from Kitzhaber and Kate Brown, Oregon’s secretary of state and later governor, in which the governor pledged to “use all the means at my disposal to deliver the financial support needed for the championships.”
In between Porter’s skeptical report and Kitzhaber’s public pledge, Kitzhaber received nearly $400,000 in campaign contributions from Knight, Nike, the company’s CEO Mark Parker, and four University of Oregon board of trustees members.
The IAAF narrowly voted to award the 2019 Worlds to Doha over Eugene in November 2015. Three months later, in a surprise announcement, the IAAF awarded Tracktown USA the 2021 Worlds without holding a bidding process and after a secret meeting between Oregon bid representatives and IAAF officials
The chairman of the IAAF evaluation commission for potential Worlds sites was Coe, an IAAF vice president since 2007 who was elected the organization’s president in August 2015.
Coe was also hired as an ambassador by Nike in February 2013, nine months before the governing body awarded the 2016 World Indoor Championships to Portland. Nike has described his role as wide-ranging. After becoming president, Coe initially refused to give up his role with Nike, dismissing charges of conflict of interest before finally cutting ties with the company amid public pressure in November 2015.
Nike is USATF’s leading corporate sponsor. USATF and Nike agreed in 2014 to a 23-year extension of Nike’s sponsorship deal worth $400 million.
Lananna, who was also president of USATF, and Reilly were both interviewed by federal investigators as part of FBI and Internal Revenue Service investigations into the awarding of the 2021 Worlds to Eugene.
USATF placed Lananna on “temporary administrative leave” pending the outcome of FBI and Internal Revenue Service investigations. The FBI and IRS were investigating possible fraud, racketeering and money laundering charges, according to media reports. There is no indication that Lananna or Reilly were targets of the investigation. There has been no indictment or public action taken by the Justice Department in the case.
Lananna, now the head track and cross country coach at Virginia, was reinstated as USATF president in December 2019.
“I’m not going to speak on any of those things,” Reilly said in an interview earlier this month, referring to the FBI and IRS investigations. “We were asked not to comment on those things so we’re going to honor that request.”
IRS filings and other financial documents also reveal Nike’s influence on Tracktown USA and its subsidiaries. The non-profit was set up by Lananna, Reilly, who ran for Lananna at Stanford, David Taylor, a former Nike vice president and Oregon All-American, and Greg Erwin, another ex-Duck runner. Between 2019 and 2022, Tracktown USA paid $2.99 million to Mixed Zone Media, a sports marketing firm operated by Liz Dolan, a former Nike vice president for global marketing and member of the board of directors for Oregon 22, the organizing committee for the 2022 Worlds and a subsidiary of Tracktown USA. (The Oregon 22 board of directors also included Olympic gold medal-winning Sanya Richards-Ross, who also worked as a broadcaster for NBC’s coverage of the 2022 Worlds).
Tracktown USA in 2021 and 2022 paid a total of $2.4 million to Wieden +Kennedy, the Portland advertising agency which created the “Just Do It,” Air Jordan and “Bo Knows” campaigns as well as the yellow Livestrong braclets for Nike.
The Tracktown USA board includes Chris O’Donnell, who held a series of executive positions during his 31 years at Nike.
(Tracktown USA paid Joe Reilly, Michael’s father, $34,000 in 2019 and $56,000 in 2020 for management consulting, according to IRS filings. “All board approved,” Michael Reilly said. The elder Reilly, a retired IBM executive, is a consultant to a series of companies.)
The current model for holding an Olympic Trials over a more than week-long period was the brainchild of Bowerman, who pushed the U.S. Olympic Committee to hold the 1968 Trials in Echo Summit on the same competition schedule as the Mexico City Games.
Three years later Newland pitched a similar plan to the USOC for the 1972 Trials. Newland was right – the 1972 Trials were indeed a thing of beauty. Bob Seagren and Dave Wottle set world records in the pole vault and 800 meters. But the event will perhaps be best remembered for Prefontaine shattering his American record in the 5,000 while some in the sold out crowd wore “Stop Pre” t-shirts, a sort of tongue-in-cheek response by a pair of local track fans – and Prefontaine supporters – to the popular “Go Pre” shirt worn by so many of the rebel runner’s fans, an almost cult-like following known as “Pre’s People.”
The 1972 Trials were also a hit at the box office. The meet generated a then-record $160,000 in revenue for the USOC and had an economic impact of between $600,000 and $800,000 on the Eugene-Springfield area, according to a University of Oregon study.
Four years later Eugene held the first Trials where the men’s and women’s competitions were held at the same location. The Trials returned to Hayward Field again in 1980, dubbed the “Trials to Nowhere” because of Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the Moscow Olympics.
After Los Angeles hosted the 1984 Trials a month before the Olympic Games, a Eugene to Indianapolis to host the 1988 Trials. Eugene lost in part because of a shortfall in funding Hayward Field improvements required for the Trials. Converting the stadium’s track from 440 yards to 400 meters and updating the iconic East Grandstand came with a $3.5 million price tag. With the university undergoing budget cuts it was left to the Oregon Track Club to pick up the tab. The OTC, however, was only able to raise “$1.9 million.
It would be another 20 years before Eugene hosted another Olympic Trials, a group of Oregon Track Club officials following the footsteps of Newland, Bowerman and Rau securing the meet in 2005.
“The 2008 Olympic Trials was envisioned by the local organizing committee to be a catalyst for what happens after the 2008 Olympic Trials,” Reilly said. “It’s wonderful to have an amazing 10 day spectacle and everybody goes home feeling awesome about that. But what do you do the morning after, what comes after that?
“The impetus behind it was to try and create a company that could not only attract the largest national events but at the time it was very important for us to be thinking about international, bringing in international events, which at the time the ultimate crazy idea was to try and host the World Championships.”
“Being awarded that event in 2005, renovate Hayward Field and figure out what does it take to deliver the Olympic Trials, that was the primary focus. We didn’t have a playbook at the time. We had to make up a playbook.”
A year after Eugene hosted a second straight Trials in 2012, Tracktown USA was formed.
That first year Tracktown USA reported $1.7 million in revenue and $3.1 million in assets. A year later the group received their first government grants totaling $681,996. The 2016 Olympic Trials helped bring the organization $15.1 million in revenue. Tracktown USA reported $55.6 million in revenue in 2022 with a budget of $74 million. Oregon 22 LLC and Track Town Events LLC, another Tracktown USA subsidiary, posted $45.59 million and $9.8 million in revenue respectively in 2022.
“For the first several years of the company, kind of, Tracktown 1.0, the goal was what do we need to do to be in a position to have the best shot at bringing the World Championships to the United States,” Reilly said. “And you know you don’t go from hosting nothing to hosting the largest championship in track and field. So we first did the World Under 20 Championships in 2014. Did the World Indoor Championships. Along the way there was this notion of OK we’ve got to keep doing the next step on the ladder but once we were awarded the event the mindset changed very much to a mindset we had with the very first big event in this community in recent times, the 2008 Olympic Trials.”
But USATF awarded Mt. SAC the 2020 Trials in June 2017 over Eugene and Sacramento against the backdrop of concerns over whether the funding of the renovation of Hayward Field needed to hold the 2021 World Championships. A month earlier Knight had pulled out of the Hayward renovation project. At the time Mt. SAC was in the midst of a $87 million renovation of Hilmer Lodge Stadium.
“The board, and especially our active athletes, were clear in their desire to take the Olympic Trials back to Los Angeles,” said Steve Miller, USATF board chairman, in announcing Mt. SAC’s selection. “Mt. SAC has long been one of the top meets in the country, from an athlete performance perspective as well as from an organizational perspective.”
In April 2018 Knight recommitted to an updated plan to rebuild Hayward Field overseen by the former sports agent Howard Slusher, a longtime Knight confidant.
A month later the USATF pulled the Trials from Mt. SAC and reopened the bidding process, contending that two lawsuits regarding the stadium renovation filed by citizens groups against the college had created “resulting delays on planning for a successful 2020 U.S. Olympic Team Trials.”
But the USATF move came just weeks after Walnut’s city attorney signed a stipulation on lifting a preliminary injunction that was preventing grading on a renovation project and a Los Angeles Superior Court judge denied a citizen group’s bid for a preliminary injunction that would have prevented the college tax-payer funds on a stadium renovation project. In issuing her temporary ruling denying the United Walnut Taxpayers request for the injunction, Judge Holly E. Kendig said that group was “not likely to prevail” at trial.
The 2020 Trials were awarded to Eugene and then after being pushed back to 2021 because of the pandemic, were held in the House that Uncle Phil Built.
The original Hayward Field was built in 1919 on a pasture for the cows that provided milk to the University of Oregon dorms across the street. The first track was made up of gravel and sawdust. A six lane cinder track was built in 1921.
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A century later Hayward Field is a $270 million state of the art stadium largely funded by the Nike co-founder, not a cow in sight. The stadium is anchored by a nine-story tower that resembles an Olympic torch adorned by Prefontaine’s image forever looking forward.
It is a constant reminder to Reilly that he and a place that has proclaimed itself Tracktown USA now carry the torch passed down from Bowerman and Newland.
“After 2008 we ended up hosting the U.S. Championships several times, the NCAA Championships that put us on the path to have confidence in trying to bring international events here,” Riley said. “I think we took a similar mindset to the World Championships are going to be a spectacular event, but if we don’t think about what happens after the World Championships then all it was was an extraordinarily expensive track and field meet that didn’t move the needle at all.”
He recalled the meetings nearly 20 years ago when the Oregon Track Club was trying to bring the Trials back to Eugene.
“Every meeting was, ‘What is the vision for this event?’ and, ‘What is the vision for what comes after?’”
