The 1972 U.S Olympic Track & Field Trials at Hayward Field was a culmination of decades of momentum for the Oregon Track and Field program and a celebration of distance-running dominance by Eugene-area athletes. By the end of the Trials, five Eugene-area runners would make the Olympic team, a remarkable number considering the depth of the field.
The 10,000m final was where Jon Anderson, son of popular Eugene mayor Les Anderson, would make his bid for the 1972 Olympic team. No one, not even Anderson himself, could have predicted the outcome of a race that would become a lasting part of Hayward Field lore.
Among the five Eugene runners who made the 1972 team was Steve Prefontaine. He lived up to his hype, cutting seven seconds from his American record in the 5,000 meters with a 13-minute, 22.08-second thrashing of a talented field that included three-time Olympian George Young. In the steeplechase, Wisconsin native Mike Manley, who had moved to Eugene to train with Bill Bowerman and has remained ever since, won in 8 minutes, 29.7 seconds, and Florence-born Steve Savage turned in an unexpected performance, taking third behind Tennessee’s Doug Brown to make the team. Kenny Moore loped calmly through the finish line of the marathon with Florida Track Club star Frank Shorter at his side to secure his place on the team.
“There were five distance runners on that Olympic team with pretty deep roots in Eugene, Oregon, and that’s pretty rare,” Anderson said. “And we’re all running in the same uniform and so forth, and the people, I think, tended to know that. So that was part of it too; it wasn’t just Pre, it was other athletes as well.”
But the most compelling finish, and the most emotional for Eugene track fans by many accounts, was in the 10,000m final – in part because of Anderson’s ties to the community, but also because it was a true underdog story and a dramatic finish.
In the first heat of the Trials’ 10,000m, Anderson showed flashes of what was to come, beating renowned distance runner Gerry Lindgren and garnering some attention in the Register-Guard, which published a piece focused on him shortly afterward. It set the stage for the final.
The favorite in the 10,000m final was Shorter, who would be running with fellow Florida Track Club runners and training partners Jeff Galloway and Jack Bacheler. The three devised a plan where Shorter would set a quick pace that would “break” some of the other runners early, and then Galloway and Bacheler could pick them off as the race wore on.
The day was hot, in the mid-90s to Anderson’s recollection, and Shorter’s rapid pace at the start strung the field out quickly. Anderson hung back, not out of strategy, but because he wasn’t confident in his keep-up with such a talented group of runners off to such a torrid pace. The cautious start paid off, and by the third mile Anderson was kicking comfortably and starting to pick off the runners ahead of him, who were tiring from trying to match Shorter’s pace. With about two miles to go, Anderson passed Tom Leris for fourth place. Leris must have known he didn’t have the kick left to contend, and had some words of encouragement for Anderson, as well as a friendly pat on the backside, as he went by.
At that point, the reality of being able to challenge for a spot on the Olympic team finally crystallized in Anderson’s mind.
“All of a sudden I was in fourth, and I consciously was saying to myself, ‘What’s this good for?’ And so essentially I started running as hard as I could,” he said. Anderson found himself at the brink of becoming an Olympian, and after just five years of competitive running.
Anderson was by no means a track prodigy, though he grew up on Villard Street in the shadow of Hayward Field. Some of his earliest memories are of being “dragged along” to Oregon track meets, where his father was first an assistant judge at the pole vault pit and then spent about 25 years as the head high jump judge.
Despite his early exposure to the sport, Anderson said he never considered running track as a youth. In fact, his favorite activity was downhill skiing, and despite his father’s deep involvement in the Emerald Empire Athletic Association (later the Oregon Track Club) and Oregon Track and Field, he described his family as a “skiing family.” Anderson family vacations were often to ski resort destinations, and by the time Anderson enrolled at Sheldon High School, skiing was his first and only love.
He and some classmates put together a ski team at Sheldon, and staged ski competitions with some Medford- and Portland-area ski teams. The team was somewhat of a loosely-formed squad, and may not have been fully recognized by the OSAA, but, as Anderson noted, “High school athletics at that time wasn’t anything close to what it is now.”
No matter how informal the ski team and its competitions may have been, Anderson took it very seriously. Near the end of his junior year at Sheldon he decided to start “dry-land” training for the winter ski season, and spent that spring and summer running a three-mile loop from his parents’ house on Palamino Drive around Sheldon High. He started entering some of the local all-comer meets and also tried out for the cross country team in the fall of his senior year. Once he decided to try running competitively, his father sent him directly to long-time family friend Bill Bowerman.
“We sat down at the Bowerman’s dining room table and Bill wrote me a program and explained to me his method,” Anderson said. “He kind of set my path. He wasn’t an individual I saw daily or even weekly because of where I went to school and so forth, but he was certainly my advisor and mentor, if you will. I adhered to his principles of distance running, and then when I had a problem or needed advice it was often times, ‘turn to Bill.’”
The Sheldon team was, as Anderson puts it, “not very good.” By the second meet of the season Anderson was the lead runner. He would ski that winter, continue training, and cap his senior year with an eighth-place finish at the state meet – in his first year of competitive running. “I discovered late the ability that became more evident,” Anderson said. “Running, up until that time, was not something that I even knew was in me.”
It would seem the next logical step for the son of a prominent Eugene family, and given the dominant state of distance running at Oregon, for Anderson to attend his father’s alma mater. Anderson, however, had been raised to look outside of the small community he grew up in to seek out life’s opportunities.
“My parents had raised my brother and me to leave Eugene, to get out, and we traveled throughout growing up and found out that there were other places besides Eugene and Oregon,” Anderson said. “My brother ended up going to MIT and I applied to a bunch of schools and actually got into Cornell and picked that one.”
It was off to the Ivy league for Anderson, and Bowerman supported the decision. “If you’ve read the stories about the recruitment of Steve Prefontaine you get a little flavor of how Bill approached things. He did not want to be called coach. Coaching was part of what he did. He was a teacher,” Anderson said. “I suspect along the way he told some other relative youngsters, ‘Gosh, maybe you ought to go do that instead of come here.’”
Anderson ran at Cornell to modest success. He took third at the NCAA meet at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, his junior year and won the cross country heptagonal meet in the fall of his senior campaign. An injury in early spring of his senior year put an end to his college career before he had another chance at the NCAA meet.
Despite missing out on being trained by his friend Bowerman and the success that may or may not have brought his career, Anderson doesn’t regret his decision to leave Eugene for Cornell.
“It worked out great for me because the level of competition in that league is nothing close to the Pac-10,” he said. “People ask me why I didn’t go, but if I’d have come to Ore
gon I might have got lost and chased girls or whatever instead of being a runner.”
After recovering from the stress fracture that ended his college career, Anderson came home to Eugene to train for the Trials with the Oregon Track Club. Part of his preparation included running in the Amateur Athletics Union National Championships in Seattle, about six weeks before the Trials. Anderson took sixth in a fast-paced race, but still didn’t have any real expectation of making a run at the Olympic team.
“I was doing pretty well, especially after I placed at the NCAA a couple of years earlier, but there was no indication that I was going to end up doing what I did,” he said.
What Anderson did in the final laps of the final brought a level of excitement to Hayward Field that was rare even in the track-crazed 1970s. When Anderson passed Leris for fourth, none of the Florida runners were visible to him, so large was the gap that separated them from the rest of the field. The Florida runners’ strategy had paid off to that point, with Shorter leading, and Galloway and Bacheler second and third, respectively.
But somewhere in the last few miles Bacheler’s times started to drop off and Galloway left him behind. Anderson inched closer to the struggling Bacheler with each passing lap, and the crowd started to respond.
“The crowd got into it, and the noise just built considerably because they clearly must have seen that I was closing this big gap,” Anderson said.
The gap continued to close until finally, with three laps to go, Bacheler became visible to Anderson as he came onto the straightaway. This, combined with the raucous crowd, spurred Anderson forward through the final laps. Anderson was closing the gap rapidly as the final lap began, and an already loud Hayward crowd became somehow even louder with about 200 meters to go. Anderson kicked for all he was worth in that final 200 meters, passing Bacheler with 50 meters left to take third place and a spot on the Olympic team. When the dust settled, Anderson had made up a staggering eight seconds in that final lap, running a 63-second lap to Bacheler’s 71 seconds.
“I got this goofy kind of theory that your brain can only take so much sensory information, and the noise from the crowd kind of blocked out the physical sensation,” Anderson said of that last lap.
The race changed his life, Anderson admits, as it kept him running competitively when he might have otherwise hung up his spikes. Despite setting a personal best in his heat at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, he failed to qualify for the final. The success he achieved at the Trials, however, would keep him interested in competitive running, and Anderson went on to win the 1973 Boston Marathon in the first international event won in a pair of Nike shoes. He would later win the Antwerp Marathon in Belgium in 1981 and the Honolulu Marathon later that same year. His final victory came in a Sydney, Australia, marathon in June of 1984. The success, Anderson said, can be traced back to that July afternoon at Hayward Field.
“It kept me interested in running. Who knows what I would have done (had I not made the Olympic team)?” Anderson said. “That level of success keeps you interested, or helps keep you interested. I won the Boston Marathon the next year, and who knows if I would have done that?”