A CLOSER LOOK: The World Athletics Championships will be held in the U.S. in 2022, but is that a good thing?

Outside of the Olympic Games and football’s World Cup, there may not be a bigger event on the global sporting calendar than the World Athletics Championships.

Held every two years between the Summer Olympics, the World Athletics Championships brings together the finest track and field athletes in the world, and in 2022 they are coming to America for the first time.

Nicknamed “Track Town USA” Eugene, Oregon will play host to the 18th World Athletics Championships from July 15-24, 2022. They were originally scheduled for this year, but the postponement of the Tokyo 2020 Games meant they had to be pushed back a year as well.

Bringing the World Championships to the U.S. for the first time makes a lot of sense, and also raises a lot of questions as well. World Athletics president Sebastian Coe is excited for the opportunity that lies ahead, but is fully aware of the challenges.

“The U.S. is the global powerhouse in track and field, there’s no question about that, but the majority of American athletes that would be considered household names in the sport, across Europe and much of the world, can still walk around in relative anonymity in their own hometown,” Coe told Around the Rings last week.

“It’s vital we improve the perception of track and field in the U.S. because it will help us grow the sport globally.”

Eugene has a long history with track and field having hosted the 2004 AAU Junior Olympic Games, the 1989 World Masters Athletics Championships and the U.S. Olympic trials six times, most recently in 2016. It also hosts the annual Prefontaine Classic, one of the premier track and field meets in the U.S., named after Eugene native and 1972 Olympian Steve Prefontaine who died tragically at the age of 24 in 1975.

With a population of just over 150,000 people, Eugene will be the smallest city, by a wide margin, to ever host the World Championships. Hayward Field, the host stadium, was recently renovated in 2020 but only has a natural capacity of 12,900 people, though it can be expanded to fit 30,000 for the World Championship. Recent editions of the championships in Moscow, London and Beijing were held in stadiums which could easily hold 60,000 spectators or more.

“This is going to be a challenging championship. The stadium is smaller than we are used to,” Coe said last week. “It’s a jaw-dropping stadium but it’s relatively small. But Oregon is a really important moment for our sport. We are into the United States. It’s the largest market for us and other sports, and we need to leave with what I have described as an indelible footprint.”

The popularity of athletics continues to climb after the Tokyo 2020 Games. According to research commissioned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), athletics had the highest number of broadcast viewing hours in Tokyo, the largest number of media articles written and the highest number of shared articles across social media, roughly 700 million which led to over 62 million conversations on social media which were centered on athletics.

On paper, those numbers sound great, but in the U.S. the Tokyo 2020 Games averaged 15.6 million television viewers per night, making Tokyo the least-watched primetime Olympics, Summer or Winter, on record. There could be any number of reasons for the drop: lack of fans in Tokyo, 12-hour time difference, the pandemic or just lack of interest. The previous low mark was the previous Olympics in PyeongChang. The 2018 Winter Games were watched by 19.8 million viewers.

Getting American viewers to tune in next summer won’t be an easier task as the 2022 World Championship will compete directly for attention against golf’s Open Championship at St. Andrews (and a possible Tiger Woods return to PGA Tour action), Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer as well. Coe is undeterred by any such problems, and in fact thinks it could work to athletics’ favor.

“We can market into and promote into the golf coverage the fact track and field will be coming on afterwards,” he said. “I know the challenges of promoting the sport in the U.S. and we are coming from a fair distance back.”

“We need to make sure we leave Oregon with all the fruit. It’s the opportunity to create more competition events that allow there to be more of a two-way street for European and African athletes to be competing in the U.S. It’s a way of promoting the sport more generally in the U.S. so we have a growing trajectory for it. It will be a runway into the LA28 Games.”

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