Small town, big dreams: USA banks on hosting worlds to boost athletics

They call it TrackTown USA: a magical oasis where track and field is respected and revered, and given near-equal billing to the major sports. And for the next 10 days Eugene, Oregon will seek to conjure up an even greater feat: by making the rest of America follow suit.

To the outsider, Eugene appears a baffling choice to host America’s first world athletics championships. Especially when its population is only 170,000.

But this is where the American jogging craze was born in the 1960s, when the Oregon coach Bill Bowerman introduced it to the masses after a trip to New Zealand. It was Bowerman who then set up Nike, whose owner, Phil Knight, has largely funded the shiny new Hayward Field stadium.

If you build it, people will come, goes the line from Field of Dreams. That soon will be put to the test. The good news for organisers is that the event should start with a bang, with one of the few well-known US athletes, the 36-year-old Allyson Felix, expected to win the final medal of a glittering career in the mixed 4x400m relay on day one.

Then it will be up to others to pick up the baton, such as the 22-year-old Sydney McLaughlin, who last month shattered her own world record in the 400m hurdles in an extraordinary 51.41 seconds, and the 18-year-old Erriyon Knighton, who has run the 200m faster than Usain Bolt did at the same age.

The mission, says the World Athletics president, Sebastian Coe, is clear: to win fresh hearts and minds. “This is a very important market place for us, it’s the largest sports market in the world and we need to be there in higher profile,” he says. “We don’t want to come out of the world championships in Oregon without a very defined footprint for our sport in that country.”

The ingredients are