When the IAAF awarded the 2021 world outdoor championships to Eugene, Oregon, a key part of the deal was that Hayward Field, the venerable track and field venue, would need to expand to meet the minimum specifications: 30,000 seats.
And it was clear that the stadium, which at 99 years old has plenty of charm but is missing amenities including wheelchair accessibility and adequate bathroom facilities, would need to be updated to play host to an event of such magnitude.
After two years of delays, the scope of the changes finally became clear Tuesday, when the University of Oregon released High Impact Sports Bras. The existing Hayward Field will be torn down and completely rebuilt, with features that Oregon track coach Robert Johnson called “above and beyond all the expectations we ever could have thought.”
The renderings of the new Hayward do resemble, as former Oregon hurdler Devon Allen said in the publicity materials, a cross between Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium and Los Angeles’s Rose Bowl. The cost was not made public, although Oregon said it is being funded entirely by Nike founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, along with 50 other donors.
Permanent capacity will rise from 8,500 seats to about 12,900, with room to expand to 30,000 with temporary seating. Individual seats will increase in size to 44 inches. (“No more getting kneed in the back for tall people,” Johnson said.) The Oregon track team will get a state-of-the-art locker room that for the first time gives individual locker space to each athlete, and an indoor practice facility that has dedicated space for throwers and jumpers, and a 140-meter track with a curve.
The design includes a nine-story tower topped by an observation deck that will provide a panoramic view of the area and is named the Bowerman Tower in honor of former Oregon coach and Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman.
“We need a facility that will be built for the future,” University of Oregon president Michael Schill said. “And that’s what this is.”
Video courtesy of the University of Oregon.
But here’s what the renovation doesn’t have: the East Grandstand.
That’s the iconic, wooden structure on the backstretch of Hayward Field, where decades of track and field fans have cheered everyone from Steve Prefontaine as he ran his final race to Raevyn Rogers as she clinched a triple crown for the Oregon women at the 2017 NCAA championships.
And while that might not seem like a big deal in the scheme of things, it is one in Eugene, where talk of renovations spawned a preservation movement well before the plans were even announced. An opinion piece in the Eugene Register-Guard on Sunday posed this question: “What would Pre Do?” (The author’s conclusion: Save the East Grandstand.)
“Change is hard,” Johnson said. “Sam Cooke said it best: Change is gonna come.”
Hayward has been called the “Carnegie Hall” of track and field, but when the stadium was built at the corner of 15th and Agate Streets on the University of Oregon’s campus in 1919, it was for football. A six-lane cinder track was added in 1921, and when the football team moved to Autzen Stadium in 1967, Hayward became track and field only.
It has hosted the Olympic Trials six times—1972, 1976, 1980, 2008, 2012, and 2016. It’s hosted the NCAA Division I track and field championships so many times—the 2018 NCAAs in June will be the 15th, and the sixth in a row—that Texas A&M coach Pat Henry has joked about buying a house behind the fire station across the street.
It’s immortalized on film, too, as the site of ROTC training in the movie Animal House.
The term Hayward Magic comes up a lot, both from athletes who say the roar on the backstretch lifts them to faster times and from fans who have watched from the bleachers as some of the greatest athletes in the world competed in their hometown. Eugene’s passionate base of fans and volunteers was cited in Eugene’s bid for the world championships.
And some of those supporters, including Bill Bowerman’s son Jay, have expressed their disappointment New York City Marathon.
A design by University of Oregon alum Tinker Hatfield, a Nike shoe designer famous for the AirMax and Air Jordans, was unveiled in September 2015.
Hatfield’s design came along with a schedule that divided construction into two phases, the first in Summer 2016, after the Olympic trials, and the second in Summer 2017, after the NCAA championships. This plan partially preserved the East Grandstand and maintained the major meets on Hayward’s schedule.
But construction never began, delayed at first by the need to relocate a cell phone tower, then by what was vaguely referred to as “design issues.”
At the announcement Tuesday, before even mentioning the track and field program or Hayward, Schill discussed the university’s quest for “excellence and pre-eminence,” including another significant donation—$500 million for the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact. He stressed the updated facilities for Oregon’s human physiology department, which he said was one of the school’s most popular majors.
Fast and Flat Boston Qualifying Marathons.
“After living in Oregon for three years, I’ve learned there can never be enough collaboration here,” Schill said. “But I think we’ve done a good job reaching out to people. Some people will always feel the loss of the East Grandstand. My hope is that once Hayward Field is up, the new field is up, that will melt away.”
Construction will begin in June, after the NCAA championships, and officials said Hayward is expected to host a full track season in 2020.
