by RBR AdminThis is Matt Wisner’s eleventh piece under the “From Lane One” title. Matt covers some interesting topics and lets us know that Oregon22 is halfway there on ticket sales. How will Eugene cope with being the host of the second largest sports championships in the world?
We have about six months to see how it goes!
Hayward Field, photo by World Athletics
The legacy Oregon22 wants to leave behind after the first World Championships ever held on U.S. Soil
With just six months remaining before the World Championships, over 100,000 tickets have been sold.
By Matt Wisner
January 25, 2022
Just six months from now, the World Championships will be held in the U.S. for the first time in history. The World Championships, the Olympics, and the other big meets every year don’t come together by accident. There are people behind the scenes carefully organizing the event for months in advance, sometimes even years. The local organizing committee for this year’s World Championships is called Oregon22. They don’t want this to be just another big track meet.
“We want this to be the best of all Worlds,” says Jessi Gabriel, the head of communications for Oregon22. Gabriel says while there are many things that must happen in order to make the event successful, the priority is always to sell out the stands at Hayward Field. So far, over 100,000 tickets have been sold. In order to win the bid to become a World Championships host stadium, it had to be proven that Hayward Field could sit 25,000 people, which means that just under half of all seats available over the ten days of competition have already been sold.
Oregon22 has strategically withheld tickets for certain days of competition so that some people can buy tickets closer to the event. Of the tickets they made available, some sessions sold out completely. A new wave of tickets will be made available for purchase in February.
Gabriel says the ideal World Championships in Eugene will entail, “a humongous stadium that is basically always full, with great performances, and an engaged community around the event.”
Of course, the meet will be remembered (or not remembered) by avid track fans based on how strong the performances are. Oregon22 can’t control that part. “It’s our responsibility to make sure there’s a crowd that’s excited, both in the stands and digitally,” Gabriel says.
It’s certainly much easier to perform well as an athlete when the stadium is full. Despite racing at Hayward Field many times over the past two years, probably because of the pandemic, I haven’t ever quite experienced the intense Hayward Magic that’s often referenced by the athletes and fans. By filling the stands, Oregon22 will have done their part to conjure up that Hayward Magic for the inaugural World Championships on U.S. soil.
Gabriel says she and her colleagues at Oregon22 are concerned with leaving behind a legacy after this World Championships concludes. To them, that means capitalizing on the opportunity to grow the sport and engage the broader community–manufacturing the feeling that something special is happening in Eugene for everybody.
It’s no secret that track and field is the high school sport with the highest participation but then there’s a dramatic drop-off when it comes to paying attention to the professional side of the sport. There’s a gap between participation and fandom; most people don’t have a stake in both. Many people run marathons and road races but are unaware that there’s an elite race going on at the front. Similarly, most high schoolers couldn’t name a single Olympian in their event.
The gap exists, in part, because you have to seek out a way to watch track and field. “You’d never just stumble upon a broadcast of a track meet,” Gabriel says. She says that it’s not easy to manufacture a hype around the event or even generate an awareness that Worlds will be held in the U.S. Oregon22, of course, holds part of the responsibility of building that awareness, but Gabriel says other people have so much more power to bring track into the mainstream.
She says, on some level, it’s about deferring to and highlighting the work of creatives and content creators in the sport. “Any time there’s a young creative mind putting out content about the World Championships, we should help amplify that,” she says.
A lot of the digital content within the sport is insular, and moments when the World Championships invade the mainstream are rare but powerful. She mentioned a recent discussion about Worlds on the Workaholics podcast. Anything that could draw in an average sports fan should be cherished.
The legacy of Worlds will also be about how engaged the broader Eugene community is. Eugene is the least populous host city of the World Championships in history. The people who live here won’t be able to live their normal lives as though something major isn’t happening around them. Tens of thousands of people will visit from out of town. Every hotel will be full–in Eugene and all its surrounding cities.
The legacy is about the feeling.
Gabriel says in her dream situation local breweries will make special beers for the event. Restaurants will offer specials. The city will hang banners from all the light posts. Everybody will be involved, whether they know anything about track or not. “If we do that part well then that legacy component comes into play,” Gabriel says.
Oregon22 has already begun their campaign to connect the event to the place it will be held–really trying to display what makes Oregon unique. On social media, they’ve tweeted about how the race walk and marathon will pass through Springfield, the Springfield from the Simpsons. They’ve highlighted Oregon’s state and national parks, multiple times tweeting photos of nearby waterfalls. They’ve also posted a bunch of photos of Eugene’s murals, which maybe will garner attention from some people.
“It’s very easy for events to come across as corporate because of how much tickets drive the strategy,” Gabriel says. But this kind of marketing and online communication will hopefully help to disguise their bottom line goal of filling the stands. They also hope to create content about the athletes–to provide some depth to coverage ahead of the meet that extends beyond a mere reporting of results. Ultimately, stories are what fans remember.
When July rolls around, Eugene will feel different than it’s ever felt during my two years of living here. I wonder if anybody will be desperate enough to stay in my unfinished basement. I wonder what Hayward Field will feel like completely full. I wonder what legacy the first Worlds ever held in the U.S. will leave behind, whether it’s what’s planned or not.
