Halfway through the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials, decathlon champion Bryan Clay gave Eugene its midterm report card Monday night in front of 20,949 spectators at Hayward Field and thousands more watching on television.
“I’ve never been to a track meet in the United States like this one,” Clay said, drawing a roar from the crowd.
Few athletes to compete in front of the record crowds so far haven’t commended the event organizers on the show that has been Eugene 08. Even in a track-centric city like Eugene, a smaller community of track enthusiasts has made sure fans, and athletes alike can’t stop raving about the Trials.
“The atmosphere was amazing,” Bernard Lagat said. “The fans here are incredible.”
“I can’t thank the people enough who put this on,” Rachel Yurkovich said. “The fans, the support they give us, is amazing.”
When Eugene received the bid for the Trials in 2005, organizers knew it would take more than a city to put it on.
Almost a city of people volunteered.
More than 2,300 volunteers have been charged with everything from on-track support to event management. They were organized by legions of committees – 42 to be exact – that were headed by some of the 300 people on the main organizing committee. They complement the hundreds of paid staff working the Trials from the community.
The sport, brought into the spotlight in the last 40 years because of the efforts of coach Bill Hayward and continued by Bill Bowerman, had gone astray after the 1980 Trials. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it began to do the unthinkable, losing favor with influential track and field boosters at the University who were unhappy with the program’s direction.
Then Sacramento claimed two straight Olympic Trials, putting them on with excellent reviews.
Whispers of losing the unofficial track town title made the circles.
Desperate to bring the Trials back to Eugene, Nike fronted much of the money.
Without the thousands of unpaid volunteers, though, the competition’s first five days might have been a different story.
“Everybody has a different role,” athletic department spokesman Dave Williford told the Emerald in May. “Everybody is sort of pitching in.”
Event organizer Greg Erwin, a past Oregon Track Club president and UO runner, called the event one of the most unifying events in the area’s history.
Bret Wilson grew up in West Eugene’s Bethel area, a junior high schooler during Steve Prefontaine’s peak. A top high school distance runner at Willamette High, Wilson snuck into Hayward Field on countless occasions during his childhood to watch the “Men of Oregon” run. He had a pair of original Nike ‘Pre Classic’ spikes, and confessed to an armoire filled with nearly 1,000 pieces of Oregon track and field memorabilia.
Like the sport, he returned to Eugene for the duration of the meet from his home in San Diego, knowing he had come back to the right place. As one of 60 officials hand-chosen by U.S.A. Track & Field for the meet, he’s seen decades of track. He’s a coach now at San Diego’s Santana High and an assistant at San Diego State.
Nothing he’s seen rivals how the track community, and the larger community of the region, has handled the Trials so far.
“It’s like a homecoming for me,” Wilson said. “There’s no place this should have been than in Eugene.”
Finishing second place in Friday night’s 10,000m final, Kara Goucher, a recent transplant to the Portland area to train with Alberto Salazar, said her time in Eugene, at that point only a couple of days, confirmed her love for the area – and vice versa.
“It was great to really be accepted here; I feel like an Oregonian,” Goucher said.
The thousands of volunteers in green shirts are more than happy to oblige.
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