The Preserve
It was a week or two ago that two different stories caught my attention. They didn’t have an obvious link, but both referenced a place: Eugene, which hosted a spectacular Olympic Trials last summer and will host the USATF Nationals next month. (Yes, I’ll be there.)
Alan Abrahamson, in his “Open Letter to Doug Logan“, had this to say about Eugene:
Eugene, Ore., is a nice-enough place; Hayward Field there is rich with tradition. So what? You and I both know you’re not going to grow the sport from Eugene. Indeed, it’s not unreasonable to argue that going back time and again to Eugene – the Olympic Trials there last summer, the nationals there in a couple weeks and again in 2011, the Trials there again in 2012 – only reinforces the image of track and field as a niche sport in an eco-cute college town when what you need is instead an electrifying presence in New York, in Chicago and especially in L.A.
Earlier this month, Ron Bellamy at Eugene’s Register Guard quoted Pre Classic race director Tom Jordan:
“For a long time, rightly or wrongly, I had the feeling that the Pre Classic was kind of the last bastion of keeping the reputation of Eugene as a track capital going,” Jordan said. “And that’s no longer the feeling at all. It’s sort of like the engine’s firing on all cylinders and we have a great potential to create a whole new generation of track fans.”
With new leadership at USA Track & Field — CEO Doug Logan — Eugene can’t assume that what it’s been in the past, or what it became last year, will be immediately understood or appreciated. Or ignore the fact that there are track fans who want to see the Trials in larger cities after they return here in 2012.
The vision that came to mind was the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the blast shelter in the Arctic permafrost created in an effort to store a sort of backup for biodiversity–samples of seeds from around the world, so species might be re-established if they are ever lost. I imagined Eugene as this sort of preserve for track, hiding away in Oregon as a shelter from which the sport might re-emerge if it’s lost elsewhere.
It’s a nice idea, but it suffers from the same problem as the seeds: if the species is lost due to a hostile environment in the outside world, don’t we need to fix the factors which caused it to die out before we try re-establishing it?