For athletes everywhere, 2020 was supposed to be a gold medal year. Dreams of Olympic glory plagued track and field athletes and, among the University of Oregon and Eugene community, many were looking forward to the opening of a brand-new Hayward Field and the 2020 Olympic Trials.
The pandemic upended these dreams. In March, the International Olympic Committee announced its decision to postpone the 2020 Olympic Games and later decided to push it back until July 2021. For the athletes and Eugene community, this meant waiting another year to watch some of the world’s best track and field athletes compete for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team.
Along with the postponement, however, came a question: How would TrackTown USA, the local committee organizing the trials, find the necessary funding amid an economic recession?
“The flow of revenue and the flow of expense are always very, very tight,” said Michael Reilly, the CEO of TrackTown USA. “But I feel very confident that we’re going to be able to deliver a fantastic Olympic trials.”
“I’m not concerned,” he said.
Reilly said TrackTown USA will fund the Olympic Trials, with an expected $10 million price tag to host, through ticket revenues, private and public partnerships — such as Springfield’s $75,000 pledge and Eugene’s $200,000 contribution — and retail sales during the event. Of these revenue streams, tickets will account for approximately 70% of the budget.
After opening a 90-day window to refund tickets when the pandemic hit, Reilly said, 80% of people chose to keep their tickets. TrackTown gets emails weekly from people asking when they can buy more tickets, he said.
“I think the demand and interest in the Olympic Trials is as high as we’ve ever seen,” Reilly said.
Despite occurring four days after UO’s scheduled 2021 graduation, he is not concerned that the two events will overload the city’s hotels and infrastructure.
In nine months, Hayward Field will open its gates to a national crowd. Yet, this event will act as a staging ground for an even bigger event — the 2022 Track and Field World Championships.
The Track and Field World Championships are normally held in sprawling metropolitan cities with millions of people like London and Beijing. The World Championships in Eugene, with its roughly 150,000 residents, is seen as a state-wide event, according to Stephanie Scafa, the city’s liaison to the Oregon ‘22 World Championships.
According to Scafa, people will stay up and down the I-5 corridor and in other parts of the state to attend the event. Additionally, she envisions a sustained impact from people staying in the region for a number of days and visiting places around Oregon.
“It’s really a huge amount of opportunity for us to showcase the community,” Scafa said.
The 10-day event, which will be the first World Championships held in the United States, is expected to have around 13,300 participants and attract almost 55,000 spectators and visitors, according to the city of Eugene website.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the infrastructure projects required for the event are continuing as planned, said Scafa. These include projects such as fixing roads, improving the airport and constructing the new 16-acre Downtown Riverfront Park.
But with the state budget drained from COVID-19 and the economy in “a Great Recession-sized hole,” according to the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis, funding for the championships could be even more difficult to secure.
The Oregon State Legislature pledged $40 million toward the World Championships in February, when legislators in the Oregon House of Representatives passed a bill funding the event. Before the house passed the bill, there was some contention among Oregon lawmakers over whether or not to fund the World Championships in a historically cash-strapped state.
The bill stalled when Republicans walked out of the legislature in protest over a cap-and-trade bill. When COVID-19 hit, state legislators were forced to focus on more urgent matters and it remains stuck in the senate until a further date.
The bill would permanently keep the state’s transient lodging tax at 1.8%, up from 1% in 2016. Since then, the increased tax has created an additional roughly $57.6 million, of which around $17.3 million has gone toward tourism programs, tourism-related facilities and events such as the World Championships.
To date, the Oregon Tourism Commission, which is responsible for handling state funding for the World Championships and getting the state ready for the event, has committed $20 million toward it.
Jaime Eder, a spokesperson for the commission, said in an email that half of the funding has gone toward Oregon ‘22, the local organizing committee, and the other half has gone toward the commission’s own operation and program budgets.
According to Niels de Vos, the CEO of Oregon ‘22, the postponement of the World Championships has not negatively impacted the ability of Oregon ‘22 to deliver the event nor increased the cost.
“Key to the agreement to postpone was securing a commitment from World Athletics that the overall cost of the event to Oregon would not increase despite the costs of the delay and we have already achieved that,” de Vos said in an email.
The postponement was easier to deal with due to the small scale of the organizing committee, which had not begun scaling up staffing for the event, he said.
“In some ways the delay has been an opportunity for us,” de Vos said. “We have been able to use the extra time to work with World Athletics to plan to deliver an even better event for the community and the State when we welcome the world in 2022 than might have been possible in 2021.”
