U.S. Hoping to Stage World Outdoor Track Championships

Published by the NY Times on October 24, 2014

The United States, long the leading nation in track and field, has never staged a world outdoor championship in track and field.

This is both hard to fathom and far from ideal, but for the first time, the possibility of ending that streak looks strong.

Eugene, Ore. — no world city but a definite track hotbed — is one of three candidates bidding to stage the 2019 world championships, along with Barcelona, Spain and Doha, Qatar (yes them again). And on Sunday and Monday, members of the evaluation commission of the International Association of Athletics Federations will be in Eugene to take an in-depth look, with a final decision to come next month.

Eugene, a college town with a population of just 160,000, has its drawbacks: a shortage of infrastructure, including hotels, and an intimate but undersized stadium that even when expanded would be small compared with some of the recent venues in major cities like Berlin and Moscow.

But Hayward Field also has its charms and above all its American address. If Eugene is chosen — and both the I.A.A.F. president, Lamine Diack, and the heir apparent, Sebastian Coe, have made it clear in the past that they believe the United States should get an event of this magnitude — the Pacific Northwest will have both the world indoor championships in Portland in 2016 and the world outdoor championships three years later.

That is the sort of one-two punch that track and field could really use in the United States, where it was once a major diversion but now seems to get major exposure only during the Olympics and when one of its American superstars turns out to be a fraud (see Marion Jones and the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative doping scandal in the 2000s).