It's 1 hr and 45 minutes from downtown Portland. Maybe a little less from southern suburbs…
It’s only 90 miles but I can tell you’ve never driven with Oregonians. 50% of the cars will drive exactly the speed limit in the right lane. 49% of the cars will try to pass in the left lane but 100% of the Priuses will also be in the passing lane going exactly one mile over the speed limit.
You aren't going to get big crowds for a non-olympic track meet in this country ever again.
It's a niche sport that is decreasing in popularity/relevance on a national scale.
It would take a big must see personality or rivalry to even move the needle at all. That would take major marketing by a major brand and showcasing a physical specimen of an athlete in ad campaigns is just not happening in running/track. They get way better marketing reach from influencers who don't know or care about pro running and brands don't need pro track athletes anymore to sell clothes and shoes.
Brands will feature "body positive" and focus on inclusion in their ads because that is what sells now or at least what they think they have to do to keep from getting "cancelled". They might show a pro runner but it won't be the focus of their marketing.
You'll still see many people participating in running as fitness but less and less will be interested in the pros.
Sitting through a track meet isn't the greatest experience. It's not like a football or baseball game where it's just one team against another. It's dozens and dozens of athletes in events you don't care about and you have to wait virtually all day for the events you do want to see. Those events might take minutes or even just seconds.
They used to pack the place regardless. The Tracktown moniker exist for a reason.
Tracks a very pure sport, there’s not a ton of chances for big show and display that get the normies pumped. Most races are literally over in 1 min. It’s just the way it is.
They gotta market the sht out of somebody unique and swaggy like Bolt. No normie cares about a guy like Rupp, or Hocker that doesn’t even speak to the media.
Most fans are like HS coaches and HS/college kids and their parents. How are they gonna afford to fly out there etc. You always see that contingent on Randall’s island because it’s easy to get to for the NY track crowd.
For something like the national championships you need a location with a certain number of people within travelling distance that don't require overnight stays. From what I can tell Eugene is too isolated so you're not getting those kind of fans - you're only getting hardcore fans (who will pay for overnight stays) and there aren't enough of them.
It's a shame because obviously the track is very nice.
It may do a lot better for the World Championships as obviously there's a different dynamic for that.
This right here, yes. If people could get a ticket and drive 2-3 hours and drive home- you could sell more tickets. At a meet like this, offer packages for families (your son/daughter runs track, the family goes to the meet. Give kids' tickets away of the parent(s) buy one or two.
FILL the stands at any cost and everything else will flow from there.
Sitting through a track meet isn't the greatest experience. It's not like a football or baseball game where it's just one team against another. It's dozens and dozens of athletes in events you don't care about and you have to wait virtually all day for the events you do want to see. Those events might take minutes or even just seconds.
Yep, and there's no connection between all the events. In football, what happens on first down impacts what takes place on second down. What occurred in the first quarter impacts what occurs in the 4th quarter. In track, the 100 meters has no impact on the hammer throw, which has no impact on the 1,500 meters. It's just a bunch of random, disconnected events. The meets go on for hours and hours and hours and there's to score to keep track of, no story line to follow throughout.
It's rather amazing that anyone buys a ticket.
It's incredible how a lack of knowledge of history impacts opinions.
If you find track and field boring, that's you. I find golf boring. I find MOST football games boring.
At one time, in this country (and especially around the world) people attended meets. Stands were full or near full and meets (or portions of them) were on TV. People watched.
NASCAR is dying, 30 years ago it was one of the most popular sports in the USA.
It's marketing. The world has changed since pre-2000.
110 million Americans watch the Super Bowl on TV. This year I polled my students- how many had the game on TV? How many actually watched?
93 had it on TV, 7 watched. That includes a number of football players.
It HAS to be an event.
We have a Double A baseball team with players going back and forth from NYC for injury rehab and just moving up and down. If they get 1000 at a game it's huge. They need 2000 to break even.
Track doesn't promote itself enough nor promote the runners, they do, only Olympians but Olympians rarely race.
There's many up and coming young runners right now that we could market and could potentially take track into new heights, popularity wise, I could name a few with a big following:
1. Matthew Boling, social media loves him
2. Cole Hocker and Cooper Teare duo has lots of fans and they have a youtube channel
3. Lex and Leo young has a great following too and runs a youtube channel
4. Nico Young also has a big following and is very invested in building his Instagram
5. Katelyn Tuohy has an enormous following and even has fan pages
Runnerspace, Flotrack, USATF should make a variety show to promote the sport and the runners, podcasts are pretty much useless and doesn't really do much good for the sport, just creates arguments and useless discussion on predictions. Look at F1, look at NBA, look at NFL, look at the big leagues, do they spend 3 days a week making hour-long podcasts on who will win? They don't. They make shows, they promote the sport by capitalizing on the athletes' popularity. Then maybe, people will find it worth paying for a subscription.
How many fans would have been there if held in an LA stadium?
Probably less. Have you seen the pictures of UCLA and USC football crowds? I suggest you look them up. Maybe a couple thousand in the stadium. LA doesn't care about non-pro sports.
You aren't going to get big crowds for a non-olympic track meet in this country ever again.
It's a niche sport that is decreasing in popularity/relevance on a national scale.
It would take a big must see personality or rivalry to even move the needle at all. That would take major marketing by a major brand and showcasing a physical specimen of an athlete in ad campaigns is just not happening in running/track. They get way better marketing reach from influencers who don't know or care about pro running and brands don't need pro track athletes anymore to sell clothes and shoes.
Brands will feature "body positive" and focus on inclusion in their ads because that is what sells now or at least what they think they have to do to keep from getting "cancelled". They might show a pro runner but it won't be the focus of their marketing.
You'll still see many people participating in running as fitness but less and less will be interested in the pros.
The Texas HS state meet gets plenty of people in the stands every year - always near the ~20,000 capacity Sat night, the SEC indoor champs were near capacity this year, the SEC outdoors in College Station where sold out last year, they literally were turning people away.
It was a complete afterthought to most Americans. In the past they had purposely marketed to only older, well to do demographic. They finally got new leadership and started marketing to a younger crowd, they established road races in various cities, they have Netflix specials.. That sport is growing like crazy.
I hope the LOC is losing tons of money on this. Having the 4 big domestic meets there is greedy and USATF & Nike were complicit and should foot the bill. Nothing says 4th tier sport like this and they deserve the egg on their face via small crowd optics for not doing better at growing the sport.
I think ticket prices for the event itself are near the bottom of the list of issues. Airline prices are definitely an issue since it usually costs more to fly to Eugene (or to Portland and rent a car) than a major city but it’s insane to fly anywhere right now so I’m not sure you can fault the organizers too much for that this year. The main issue is the price of accommodations. If you search hotels/Airbnbs for the dates of WCs and then search for the same days of the week a week later, the price difference is drastic. Eugene is so small that hotels/Airbnbs are much more price sensitive to big events coming to town. I did a very unscientific look at the populations of all of the past WC host cities and you can see just how much smaller Eugene is. Except for Helsinki in 2005, the last time the WCs were held in a city with a population of less than 1 million was in 1993. (And yes, I know that I’m using current population and so the populations of all of these places were lower in the past when they held the WCs but I think my point still holds true even if I tried to find historical population data for each city, which I don’t feel like doing.) Similar to what someone said above, I live in San Francisco and it might cost me as much, or less, to go to the WC in Budapest next year.