EUGENE, ORE. — Speaking with running legend Alberto Salazar late last week I noted that I was heading off to the Prefontaine Classic, the celebration of track and field held each year in Eugene, Ore. This, I told him, would be my first "Pre."
"You're going to love it," Salazar replied. "It's condensed. Just a few hours of nonstop action. Incredible fans . . . If it's going to catch on in this country, this is the way track should be."
It didn't take long on Sunday to see that Salazar was right, on all counts.
The 35th edition of this meet was something like the man it posthumously honors: the dashing, daring, iconoclastic Steve Prefontaine, a middle-distance star at Oregon in the early 1970s.
This was a memorable day. A day that featured a top-flight international cast -- more than 30 Beijing Olympic medalists -- and was, as it is every year, short and sweet. Unlike most track meets, some of which slog on from dusk to dawn and even extend for half a week, there weren't any preliminary heats or frivolous competition. Everything counted. This was roughly 120 minutes of final races, final jumps and final throws.
Maybe most impressive was the vibe: for two hours at Hayward Field, as iconic a track stadium as exists in America, a sold-out crowd of nearly 13,000 rocked-and-rolled with applause and rhythmic clapping. Close your eyes and you could imagine you were at a college football game. Better yet, maybe a track meet in Europe, where the sport receives the full measure of respect it deserves.
One of the few American places where track matters like this, maybe the only place it does year-in and year-out, is Eugene. The forest-shrouded college town brought the world not only Prefontaine but Salazar, Nike and Bill Bowerman, the legendary track coach who took over at Oregon in 1948, winning four NCAA championships while coaching scores of All-Americans and Olympians. Eugene has steeped in track for so long now that the sport is simply a part of the overall DNA. (Full disclosure: my cousin, Libby Tower, helps market the sport there.)
Eugene is the kind of place, said Jim Imamura, an Oregon physics professor on hand for Sunday's meet, where you go to dinner, stop by a cafe or hang around the office cubicle and people are just as likely to start a conversation about track as they are about the Rose Bowl. "Football has gotten pretty big here, but track is still the core, the center of this place," he said, noting that this year he's also attended the recent Pac-10 championships and the NCAA regionals.
