By Jack Pfeifer
photos courtesy Kim Spir / OR.Milesplit.us
EUGENE, Ore. – With a flourish under a shockingly clear blue sky, this Northwest college town put on the country’s best one-day track meet Sunday, the annual Prefontaine Classic, as a final dress rehearsal for the upcoming Olympic Trials. They will start here at the University of Oregon’s spiffed-up Hayward Field in just 18 days.
There were plenty of exclamation points in the international competition, as some athletes made a final testament to their good condition – such as Brad Walker scaling an American record in the pole vault and actually putting the bar above the untouchable Sergey Bubka’s world record, higher than 20 feet – and others left behind more questions than answers, such as when Alan Webb finished far back in the men’s mile.
For many other Americans, it was one of the final times to test limbs, lungs and nerves before the U.S. Olympic selection meet begins in this same building on Friday, June 27. That meet, being held here for the first time since that ominous Olympic season of 1980, the year President Jimmy Carter prevented the team from going to Moscow, will run for 10 tension-filled days, until Sunday, July 6.
Some events began to sort themselves out. This is the moment, for example, when some “elite” competitors who have been missing in action through the spring either looked sharp in their final preparation – Alice Schmidt, for example, running smartly to 2nd place behind the venerable Maria Mutola in the women’s 800 and finishing just ahead of two of her rivals for the Olympic team, Hazel Clark-Riley and Nicole Teter – or simply vanished, such as the 37-year-old Allen Johnson a no-show in the men’s highs, a hint that his long Olympic run may be over appearances in three Games; or Webb, who ran lethargically in the Bowerman Mile, finished 7th out of 9 and lost to two Americans, the Sudan-born Lopez Lomong, and UCLA’s Jon Rankin. Webb ran a good time, 3:55.47, but did not show form that would put him on the American team in the 1,500.
That continues the trend in American distance running toward runners who are naturalized citizens.
At 9:30 in the morning, Meet Director Tom Jordan had assembled two record attempts in the distances, one at the men’s 10k, one the women’s 5k. Several thousand people showed up, lined up at the gate at 8:30 waiting to get in, to cheer on Ethiopians Kenenisa Bekele in the men’s 10 and Meseret Defar in the women’s 5. They are the Olympic champions in those events, so it was a remarkable coup to have such stars in a small American community, preparing to run their best. For Bekele, the world recordholder in the 5 and 10, it was his first time running outdoors in the United States.
They made valiant efforts, with the help of pacesetters through the halfway point, the crowd’s rhythmic clapping as the runners passed in front of each grandstand resounding off the quiet, verdant hills that surround the beautiful old stadium. It was Sunday morning, after all.
A team of Louie Luchini, Boaz Cheboiya and Abreham Feleke took Bekele through the 5k mark in an astonishing 13:09.6. When Luchini couldn’t keep up the requested 63-second pace, he stepped off and Cheboiya charged to the front. When he faltered a mile later, he stepped aside and Feleke started running not 63s but 62s! (After all, they had slipped below the needed pace.) Feleke, also Ethiopian, has run 12:54 for 5,000 meters when, they say, he was 16 years old. (That means he would lap excellent U.S.-born 16-year-olds two or three times.)
Suddenly left alone, Bekele soldiered on, but he couldn’t sustain the breathtaking pace and ran merely 26:25.97, nearly a minute faster than any American has ever run, faster than anyone has ever run on American soil, the first man to break 27 minutes on U.S. soil. It was just 8 seconds short of his own world record. Behind him came six runners who ran between 27:13 and 27:16 – three more Ethiopians, three Kenyans, and an American, Abdi Abdirahman, who narrowly missed the American record, running 27:16.99. The record is 27:13.98, by Meb Keflezighi.
Abdirahman, a Somalian who attended the University of Arizona, and Keflezighi, an Eritrean who went to UCLA, are two of the favorites to make the U.S. Olympic team at 10,000 meters. One of the favorites for the U.S. team in the 1,500 and 5,000 is Bernard Lagat, Kenyan-born, who won the 2-mile here in 8:12.45. He won both those events at last year’s World Championships. At the 2004 Athens Olympics, still wearing a Kenyan singlet, he narrowly lost the 1,500 to Hicham El Guerrouj.
If Abdirahman, Keflezighi, Lagat and Lomong make the U.S. team, it would mean the squad would include athletes born in Eritrea, Somalia, Kenya and Sudan, and it would give the United States formidable medal threats in all those events.
With just a few weeks until the Trials, excitement is in the air. Modern, full-color posters abound all over town – hanging from lampposts, on the side of Hayward Field, in store windows – announcing that the meet will be starting soon.
Across Franklin Boulevard from campus, Track Town Pizza no doubt was laying in an extra stock of mushrooms and tomato sauce, getting ready for thousands of extra customers in what is normally the slow season in a college community. Yes, there is a store named Track Town Pizza.
There’s also a shiny new Nike store in the fashionable part of downtown, for Eugene after all is where Nike was born, created by a former Oregon runner, Phil Knight, and his then-coach, the formidable Bill Bowerman. The thousands of joggers and bikers who crowd the footpaths and streets here don’t all wear Nikes, but it was Bowerman who literally invented jogging, and Knight has been more than happy to clothe them ever since.
It may be a bit of a company town – Knight frequently donates money to his alma mater with plenty of strings attached – but this place does not pay lip service to its support of track and field. It somehow senses that track is their “thing,” unlike any other community in the country. They are proud of that distinctive note, and you can almost hear the hosannas ready to rebound off the sides of Spencer Butte, just up the hill from campus, where Steve Prefontaine used to train in those old gray sweats Bowerman handed out to his young lions.