Field of dreams: Hayward Field, Eugene, Oregon. A general view of the venue for the 2022 World Athletics Championships, Hayward Field

I was surprised to learn this week that the United States had never hosted the World Athletics Championships before this year and today when it lands in Eugene, Oregon.

The 18th running of the biannual meet was delayed by a year because of last summer's Tokyo Olympics but now the postponement seems to be some sort of meant-to-be happenstance.

After all, just over two months ago, we had the 50th anniversary celebrations of the launch of Nike which was founded by the Eugene-based University of Oregon's most famous alum and financial backer, Phil Knight.

Knight has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars back into his alma mater off the back of the success of the iconic brand he developed out of make-or-break necessity over half a century ago.

Having been outmaneuvered by the Japanese shoe brand, Tiger, which he had been hawking around the Pacific Coast throughout the 1960s, his burning ambition led him and fellow co-founder Bill Bowerman to risk it all on a new venture in the early 70s.

Bowerman had been Knight’s running coach at the University of Oregon when he was a student there in the late 1950s. And Hayward Field was in many ways the physical embodiment of their tireless quest to improve the ability of athletes to excel.

From the facility's decrepit conditions during Knight's student-athlete stint through to the early 1971 upgrade of the track which was funded by a wealthy alum who had made his way up during a previous generation, an excessive amount of talent was churned out of an otherwise insignificant outpost town in a vast outpost state.

The generous benefactor threw in a million dollars to produce one of the world’s finest and most cutting edge tracks, using the same polyurethane spongy surface which was set to be used in Munich in the 1972 Olympics a year later.

Bowerman was at the coalface of all these developments while also operating as the head coach of the US track team headed to West Germany. His obsession with this innovative style of running surface led him to experiment with a new type of running shoe. He used an all-American tool to develop a sole that would bounce off the track surface quicker and lighter; the waffle-maker might be a cholesterol-causing machine for most Americans but for Bowerman, it was a helpful mould maker and breaker.

In Knight’s memoir Shoe Dog which he wrote around the time he departed the company as CEO six years ago, he describes how his genius coach and business partner was obsessed with shoes and “how human beings are shod”.

“In the four years I’d run for him at Oregon,” Knight writes, “Bowerman was constantly sneaking into our lockers and stealing our footwear. He’d spend days tearing them apart, stitching them back up, then hand them back with some minor modification, which made us either run like deer or bleed. Regardless of the results, he never stopped. He was determined to find new ways of bolstering the instep, cushioning the midsole, building out more room for the forefoot. He always had some new design, some new scheme to make our shoes sleeker, softer, lighter.” 

A decade later, away from the physical realities of the actual athletes, the swoosh branding emerged after Knight and his start-up crew paid a young graphic designer to develop a logo based around vague, frenzied ambition. What would they call it? The previous entity Blue Ribbon was now poisoned by the collapse of the partnership that had brought Tiger footwear from booming post-war Japan to the ravenous market of America, their wartime foe and postwar benefactors.

Jeff Johnson, Blue Ribbon's first employee, had moved past a failed attempt to muscle his way into a partnership with Knight and Bowerman. And it was his suggestion to call the new company "Nike," named after the Greek winged goddess of victory, Fifty years later, TrackTown, USA, as collegiate athletics refers to Hayward Field, enjoyed another upgrade, just in time for the arrival of the most prestigious track and field meet outside of the Olympics.

Funded largely but in an undisclosed way by Knight, the 12,650-seat stadium is expandable to nearly 25,000 for major events. It sits on the site of the old venue that first rose in the 1920s, "same address, same front door", as one of the designers described it.

It is the largest track and field-specific venue in North America but emphasis has been placed on atmosphere with seating pushed close to the track surface and a seating bowl which tips upwards on the finish line side so that the majority of seats gather around the most important section.

Although the Nike business concept was agonisingly gestated in a southern suburb of Portland, almost two hours north of Hayward Field, Eugene became the truest home of the company that would go on to rule the sports world. And top Nike executives and designers were as involved as the University itself in how the ultimate design of the arena would map out.

A 180-foot-tall tower marks out the new stadium - inspired by an Olympic torch - and if anyone who calls the small college town home was unsure of where the stadium lay, that imposing structure will remove any doubt.

The inclusion of a statue of Bowerman is of course a necessary nod to the mastermind who made so much of this possible, from the legacy of nationally and internally successful athletics teams to the design acumen that allowed Nike take on the European giants Adidas and Puma.

Knight always had his sights set on toppling them, describing his envy and admiration of the antics he heard about from Bowerman who saw the sales reps of the rivals chase each other like Keystone Cops around Mexico City during the 1968 Olympics, bribing athletes by stuffing cash in running shoes so as to grab an edge in the fast expanding world market.

Of course, Asics the official footwear of the World Championships are getting short shrift here by being an afterthought and it will be fun to see how they cope with the very imposing Nike shadow looming over their branding efforts this week.

In 2021, Nike's global revenue was almost $45 billion (apparently I don’t need to convert to Euros any more) and since Knight’s departure, they have leaned all the way into the fight for social justice across the United States.

It is therefore a bet that has paid off and one which appears to exist comfortably and in stark contrast to the latter part of his tenure which is of course marked by the sweatshop dependency Nike developed in order to maintain their bottom line.

It was perhaps inevitable that the quest for dominance would be far from perfect. Knight’s memoir paints a picture of the archetypal pioneering spirit which so defines America. After all, he did grow up three generations removed from the Oregon Trail migrants which landed into the remote state in the 1800s, hungry for new opportunity. When he calls Bowerman to get the lowdown on the brilliantly effective raised fist protest of the African-American Olympic medalists John Carlos and Tommie Smith as "The Star-Spangled Banner" was being played, he finds his business partner fully supportive of his track stars who are being roundly condemned elsewhere.

“Carlos and Smith were shoeless during the protest;” recalls Knight. “They'd conspicuously removed their Pumas and left them on the stands. I told Bowerman I couldn't decide if this had been a good thing or a bad thing for Puma. Was all publicity really good publicity? Was publicity like advertising? A chimera?” 

Nike floated on the stock exchange in the late 1970s and in the mid 1980s they made a company-defining decision to attach themselves to the Michael Jordan rocketship which has yet to return to earth.

Neither Jordan nor their subsequent revenue driver, Tiger Woods, seemed all that interested in anything other than their empires and it showed. These days, one of the most high profile Nike athletes is Colin Kaepernick, an ex NFL quarterback who signed a history-making deal two years after he was excommunicated from the league for kneeling during the same anthem for which Carlos and Smith raised their fists and lowered their heads. It is of course a gesture widely used elsewhere now, most noticeably at the kick-off of Premier League games.

No doubt the arena that Nike and Knight helped build will also witness athletes making statements on and off the track but realistically the stage won’t be as bright as it will be in Paris in two years and LA in six. The Olympics will never make it to Eugene but their 100-year journey to today will have been worthwhile in its own Oregon way.

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