EUGENE. – This city loves athletics!
A native of Eugene Julie Anderson Bailey interrupts his terrace lunch to talk about his relationship with athletics. His enthusiasm was sparked already in the 1970s, when he went to watch the US Olympic qualifiers in his hometown as a child.
Now Eugene is preparing for the biggest athletics event in its history, the World Championships, for which Anderson Bailey says he feels “boundless pride”.
Nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the rugged Cascade Mountains, Eugene is the first US city to host the World Athletics Championships. The second largest city in the green state of Oregon has about 170,000 inhabitants.
What is the secret of this small American town? Why is this place called the mecca of American athletics?
To find out, we’ve traveled to the U.S. Championships, which are held in Eugene a few weeks before the World Championships.
On a Thursday afternoon in June, the atmosphere in downtown Eugene is relaxed, even sleepy. Dog walkers and cyclists pass unhurriedly through the green center. In Eugene, people who move with muscle power have clearly been taken into account, which is not a given in this land of the promise of private cars.
The country guitar music coming from nearby fits the idyllic street scene perfectly. The caller can be found in the shade of the trees, in front of the colorful tea room.
However, in the vicinity of the man with the straw hat, there is no kippo where you can throw a couple of bucks.
– I’m just calling for my own pleasure and maybe for others too, the man grins, greets with a firm handshake and introduces himself as Jeff Roberts.
Roberts, who moved to Eugene in 1985, believes that the athletics boom that started in the city fifty years ago is still going strong.
Enjoying the respect of the track and field community, Eugene has proudly accepted the title of track and field capital of the United States and the nickname Tracktown USA.
– The competitions bring a lot of wonderful people from every corner of the world to Eugene. It’s fantastic, says Roberts.
Locals Elizabeth Fine and his daughter Irene Fine describe the city as relaxed and just the right size.
According to them, Eugene residents are united by being outdoors and supporting the sports teams of the University of Oregon located in the city.
– This is a university town, which makes it lively. A lot of young students live here. The city is world famous for athletics, which is cool. The university plays an important role as a financier of local sports, says Irene Fine.
The University of Oregon has produced sports superstars, such as the former ME man in the decathlon Ashton Eaton. In these World Championships, one of the USA’s hopes for success is the hurdler-Yankee Devon Allenwho rose to the top during his college years in Eugene.
– The people here are well versed in athletics. They know the statistics well. Athletes say it’s fun to run here because the public support is huge, says Elizabeth Fine.
What luck! All four randomly selected interviewees in downtown Eugene turned out to be fans of athletics.
The sample is small, but it bodes well. In the previous athletics World Cup cities in Doha, London, Beijing and Moscow, the result would hardly have been the same. While in cities with millions, the World Cup has little effect on the street scene, in Eugene, everyday life changes in the middle of July.
The last World Cup host city with less than a million inhabitants is Helsinki, where the unforgettable rain games were organized in the late summer of 2005. However, Eugene has almost half a million fewer inhabitants than Helsinki.
It is not appropriate to compare Eugene to Helsinki, but a better comparison target is Turku, which is in the same size class. The cities have a lot in common: both have a river flowing through them, both are university cities, both are the unofficial athletics capitals of their country, and both have an endurance running legend that has left their mark on athletics history.
The Turku running legend is, of course, a nine-time Olympic champion SpongeBob Nurmi. Eugene’s own running greatness Steve Prefontaine was born on the Oregon coast in Coos Bay in 1951.
Although Prefontaine never won an Olympic medal, he emerged in the early 1970s as a phenomenon unlike anything seen in US track and field since Jesse Owens.
How on earth can a young man in his twenties make such an impression on people by running that he is still talked about half a century later?
Lasse Virén’s rival
Finns may remember Prefontaine from the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. Only 21 years old, the star runner from the University of Oregon led the way for the Olympics with an unprejudiced hair craze. Already won ten golds Lasse Virén led the crowd by the tail.
Prefontaine, who fought aggressively for the medal, settled for fourth, when Virén decided the memorable championship with a huge win.
– In his own opinion or in the opinion of the Americans, he was probably the early favorite. He was relatively brave and made his own run and tried to lead. At the end, he tried to take the seat. Sometimes he won and sometimes he lost, Virén recalls with a laugh.
In the following years, Prefontaine competed several times in Finland and ran the two best times of his career in Helsinki. The American youth saw the best endurance runner of his time, Virén, as a kind of arch-enemy.
– Just an ordinary American, let’s say that. It didn’t mince its words much. At that time, I didn’t understand much English at all, but we always got along, Virén says.
The Oregonian’s charisma and entertaining style of competition appealed to the American sports crowd. Prefontaine gave a face to the running boom that reached the United States in the 1970s. Around the same time, Eugene’s rise as the capital of athletics was also accelerated by the growth of local company Nike into a global sports equipment giant.
In 1975, Prefontaine invited the Finnish cross-country team to Oregon to compete. Prefontaine, who broke American records on all distances from two to ten tons, wanted to take revenge on Virén.
Virén canceled the trip at the last minute due to a leg injury. Prefontaine won the fifth game on his home field at Hayward Field in front of a full crowd.
That same evening, in May 1975, Prefontaine was returning home from a party when he lost control of his car on a winding road in Eugene. The running star’s life ended tragically when he was only 24 years old.
– I have sometimes wondered if it would have been my fate that time too, if I had gone to the Yankees. I could have sat in the same car and gone anywhere, says Virén.
Prefontaine’s monument, Pre’s Rock, is one of Eugene’s biggest attractions today. Commemorative items suitable for the theme, such as running shoes and race numbers, are still brought to the place of death of the great runner.
When the annual Paavo Nurme competitions are held in Turku, Eugene hosts the Diamond League competition, which goes by the name Prefontaine Classic.
– He left a running culture and his name carries quite well. Prefontaine’s name is still on display quite a lot. I guess he has also given kicks to others. He brought color to the competitions, says Virén.
The crowd is closed at the US championships
Paavo Nurme’s games in Turku were organized a week before the US track and field championships held in Eugene on Midsummer, where also qualified for places in the World Cup home games.
I was on the spot in Turku, and the athletics night was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. Great weather, functional arrangements, a full stadium and a high-level coverage of competitors electrified the atmosphere. by Oliver Helander almost 90’s winning throw in the men’s javelin spurred the crowd, but even without that the atmosphere would have been high.
This is athletics at its best, I thought on the way home at the end of a breathless four hours. I believe that this is what the more than ten thousand other people who watched the games in the Turku sports park thought.
After Paavo Nurmi’s games, I traveled to the American championships on the spot. Expectations were in the clouds after what I experienced at Paavo Nurme’s games. Apart from the high score level, I also expected the American fans to create an enchanting atmosphere at the iconic Hayward Field.
I hadn’t been to Eugene before, but I knew the city’s sports history and reputation as the mecca of US track and field.
Although world stars hang out at Hayward Field, not everything is bigger in America: not even the athletics culture.
On the third day of the U.S. championships, Midsummer Saturday, only 3,664 tickets were sold at Eugene Stadium, according to the National Association of Athletics Federations. A total of 13,306 tickets were sold for the four-day event.
Benches in different shades of green could even be seen empty in the main stand, when Sydney McLaughlin clocked a world record 51.40 on a fenced track lap. Even one of the sport’s brightest superstars didn’t even pull half of the stadium.
The advertising sheets covering the upper stands made the stadium look fuller than it was. The sight was bleak, when the stadium has almost 13,000 seats and for major events it is possible to increase the capacity to 25,000 with the help of temporary structures.
In any case, the atmosphere at the games was decent, thanks to the enthusiastic field announcer and the hard-fought battles, which the audience enjoyed.
But who would have thought that the championships of the best athletics country in the world would attract fewer spectators every day than the Tampere Kaleva Games in August of last year? More than 5,000 spectators followed the games in Ratina on the final day of the SM Games. The number of viewers was still limited as a corona precaution.
Based on the US championships in June, one could conclude that Hayward’s magic has faded somewhere in the last fifty years, although American athletes are perhaps doing better than ever before. The level of the country’s athletics or the lack of megastars is by no means a factor in the fading of popularity.
At the previous World Championships in Doha, the topic of discussion was the poor audience numbers, which in itself was not a surprise, as Qatar’s athletics culture is on a shaky footing.
Instead, the fact that Hayward Field has to be filled until the start of the Games is undermining Eugene’s reputation as a track and field mecca. However, in these World Cup races, Eugene has the opportunity to show that his worries are in vain and carry the Tracktown nickname with honor in the future.