Flashes of Panic

There was a lot to like about how Eugene hosted the Olympic Trials last week.

Part of it, of course, was the Fan Fest, which was basically a holiday street fair without the carnival rides and with big video screens where people (even, or perhaps especially, people without actual tickets to the stadium) could sit and watch the video feed from the competition. There were plans to give the awards out there, rather than in the stadium, but somehow the logistics of that didn’t work out; the athletes frequently got out there pretty quickly, though. The meet was a sellout, over 20,000 people for each of eight days, but if you were somehow able to count everyone who came in to the Fan Fest, the numbers would be even higher.

What’s more, it gave the meet a different attitude. In Sacramento, when the meet was over, everyone piled into their cars, the lights shut out, and the meet just diffused into the night. In Eugene, when the meet was over, the party was getting started outside the stadium.

Also, I’ve never been to a meet (short of a World Championship) where so many fans stayed to watch every lap of the distance races. Or, for that matter, where the fans watched the discus (qualifying rounds!) and other throwing events so attentively. Eugene has a distance-running aura, and the great U of O teams of the past were built around distance runners, but the fans left no event unloved.

All of which makes the logo they chose more significant. The icon of Hayward Field is the East Stand, a big barnlike structure recognizable to anyone who has been to a meet there or seen one on T.V. But though it was originally Hayward’s main stand, the homestretch is now overlooked by the West Stand, a massive thing with a gigantic cantilevered roof held up by the biggest laminated wood beams I’ve ever seen. The east side was the homestretch once upon a time, but all the pictures you’ve seen of Pre finishing races have the West Stand, the house that Bowerman built, in the background.

So the East Stand has a double resonance. First, of course, it’s what you see from the West Stand, with the Hendricks’ Park ridge in the background. (One of the best stadium backgrounds I’ve ever seen, personally.) Second, well, it’s where the serious fans sit. They can’t see the finish line as well, their seats may be a little cheaper, and the horizontal jump runways are clear across the field from them. But they’re the ones who carry the athletes around the rough part of each lap, the ones the athletes reach first on their victory laps. They’ll put up with the not-so-great seats so they can watch a great meet.