Easy for me to say. But I
imagine 2008 U.S. Olympian, Race Director of the annual Eugene Marathon
and Road Events Director for Oregon22 Ian Dobson would wince at
the suggestion of doing anything more anytime soon. After all, he and
his team were responsible for staging six separate World Championship
events over the course of 10 days last month — the men’s and women’s
marathons, 20K and 35K race walks — plus a 5K fun run. Suffice it to say
that theirs was a remarkable accomplishment, well worthy of
consideration for hosting future global championship events.
Putting on the World
Championships Marathons has a lot in common with putting on any road
race – there are the usual course logistics, permitting issues, medical
needs, and police requirements to deal with, although the field sizes
are much smaller than the major marathons. The World Championships come
with their own headaches too, however, thanks to potential sponsor
conflicts, TV broadcast challenges, and World Athletics needs and
requirements. Ian Dobson was kind enough to sit down for an hour-long
interview with RRM a few days after the marathons and just prior to the
35K race walks to discuss the logistics of putting on the summer’s
highest profile marathons.
Permits
Road Race Management (RRM):
What was the permitting process? I would think that the City would say
you can have any course you wanted, but was that the case?
Ian Dobson (ID): Part of the challenge
was that we had to work across multiple municipalities. We had to work
through the City of Eugene, City of Springfield, Lane County and ODOT
(Oregon Department of Transportation). So those were the four main
entities whose land we were on. We learned a ton of lessons through the
process, but one that we learned the hard way was that we shouldn’t try
to get a “yes” from people. Early on, we got soft yeses from both cities
on the course that we had put together, but then when we got down to the
nitty-gritty, we and they started discovering a lot of the challenges
that would go along with what we proposed, so we ended up adjusting it
to essentially unlock some neighborhoods. Ultimately, I think it was a
really good adjustment, and we landed on what I think is a better course
and it worked better for neighborhoods. But it was not a carte-blanche,
do-what-you-want kind of thing. So the permitting from the cities was,
honestly, challenging.
RRM: More Eugene or
more Springfield?
ID: More Eugene. We ran
into what we felt like, and still feel like, was being held to a
standard with crowd control that didn’t feel consistent with what other
events in the area and past events had done. So it felt like there were
individuals that were making it really hard for us to get this event
permitted and get it set and go do it. It’s really too bad, because part
of the long-term benefit we hope to get from all this is an increase in
sport tourism in our area. And if all the same personalities were in
place, I would absolutely not want to start another event in Eugene
right now, because the traffic control piece was very demanding—the
person we hired to do it has done the Super Bowl, a bunch of other
things; the contractor that implemented it had to do two to three times
more volume of traffic control devices than they’ve ever done for an
event—and it just felt like we were being put through the wringer here.
That said, there were a lot of things that were really important to do,
like all the facilities that are just north of our start/finish line,
they’re 24-hour county facilities. So just opposite Autzen Stadium
[where the marathons started and finished], there’s a youth detention
center, there’s some housing, and I hadn’t considered that initially. So
we had to make sure they had two-way ingress/egress 24/7 during events.
That was a challenge, but a good one.
I’m not just complaining about
bureaucracy. A lot of that bureaucracy exists for a good reason. And the
vast majority of people we worked with were extremely helpful and
cooperative and understanding. A lot of it was kind of trying to get
ourselves, the communities, the cities, the people who are working
traffic control, the police, everybody, to understand the magnitude of
it. The fact we’d all worked on the Eugene Marathon previously almost
made it harder, because it’s just a different scale. I started talking
to people, saying, let me tell you what’s different about this from the
Eugene Marathon. It’s a marathon yes, but it’s going to feel very, very
different. It’s much smaller on the athlete side, but much bigger on the
production side. At the end of the day we’re going to walk away feeling
really good about how we got it done, but I do think there’s some real
constructive feedback for the cities—and I’m sure they have some for us
too—on how an event like this can be sustainable and productive. I think
of all the things we could have done from a look and feel and branding
perspective that we weren’t able to do because we’d spent so much of our
budget on traffic control. It felt like it was a little bit overkill.
RRM: Not a likelihood
that this will become an annual people’s course?
ID: It’s not, but it’s
really a shame, because we have this template and I would love for us to
be able to bid for some of the U.S. championships, even the world
half-marathon. Our team, I’m really proud of it. I think we did a really
good job. We worked really well with World Athletics, all their partners
and suppliers, and I’m coming out of it feeling really good. I would
love to have more events like that here. Now we are talking before
Oregon22 is even over—like asking someone in labor if they want to have
another child—but give it a little space and it will be better. But
yeah, the permitting process was tough. The cities didn’t provide any of
the work of traffic control implementation, so, where like in Eugene
Marathon, their public works might do some of the [work]—and we might
pay them—but here it was clear that the cities were not going to do any
of the traffic management other than police. We had great police
support; they were phenomenal.
Crowd and Traffic
Control
RRM: How many
barricades does it take to put on a world-championship marathon?
ID: The
marathons were run on a 14K loop, and we used 4800 barricades to line
both sides of the course along 12K of the loop. We call them pedrail
barricades, because barriers describe traffic-control devices. Pedrail
is crowd control. We’ve all decided we’ll get pedrail tattoos as a
reminder of what never to do again. Setting them up twice in two days
was very hard work. We were really lucky because in Alton Baker Park, we
wanted to leave that as open and natural as possible, so we wanted this
city marathon look, you start, you’re on a main road, you’ve got pedrail
on both sides until you pop into the park and all of a sudden you
switch, part 2, and now you’re in something that looks very unique to
our area. So we go into these different chapters of the course that we
were trying to make it look and feel unique and distinct. I never ran a
marathon competitively, but I can imagine that a breakup of that, like
we’re going through this section and this section, and certain parts are
going to feel good and certain aren’t. It was fun to do that, and
logistically it helped us to have areas that were kept open, and that
made it a lot easier.
RRM: Where do the barriers
and pedrails come from?
A: They were actually procured
through the main procurement contractor for Oregon22. This company, GL
Events (GLE), is based in Florida. We were lucky to be able to send in
an order, and they just brought trucks and trucks of this stuff from
different places. It didn’t all match, which created its own set of
challenges, but . . . presumably it was mostly from the Northwest—but
there’s not anywhere near that much locally. Our whole course was broken
into eleven zones. Each zone had a captain, and that captain had a
volunteer workforce. One of our captains used to live in Boulder, and
they had a similar structure at Bolder Boulder, and he was, like, “oh, I
got this.” Bolder Boulder has even more of this stuff. He was not fazed
by having to put up a bunch, so it began to feel like we’re catching up
to a big-time event here.
RRM: Where do the
traffic-control barriers go, and who manages them?
ID:
Meridian was hired to manage traffic-control. That’s the brand of
barrier and the company that manages them. They were hired, but we had
security teams as well. A marathon course is not secure, but the point
of the Meridian barricades was so that a bad actor couldn’t ram their
car onto the course. There were any number of catastrophes that could
happen, and that was one that we could control by putting those
barricades in the right places.
Police/Service
Charges
RRM: Did you get
charged for more things for this event than you would for a Eugene
Marathon? More city services or police or whatnot?
ID: No, they were
actually quite good in that sense. A small example that is
representative is, Alton Baker Park is closed to vehicles for the large
part, but you can get a vehicle-access pass. When I’m doing work for the
Eugene Marathon, I just apply for a vehicle-access pass for the
day—costs $25, an insignificant cost—but for Oregon22 they waived all
that. I was able to work directly with the people at Parks and say
here’s when we’re going to be there, and we just communicated directly.
On the one side I’m saying, “oh gosh, this was really hard,” but on the
other, the large majority of people were all on the same page—we’re all
trying to make this thing happen—and I think it was fortunate that it
was our team that was doing it because we have really good rapport with
them, and I think we’re a trusted partner. I understand their concerns
about the park—I’m a park user, but I’m not going in there with my
four-wheeler, trying to make . . . you know, we’re respectful.
RRM: Who paid for the
repaving in Alton Baker Park?
ID: The city did. Parks
did that and it was fantastic. It was really, really nice. So, on both
sides, because we had two sections on the Eugene side of Alton Baker
Park, and the City of Eugene did both of those. Then we had one short
section on the Springfield side, where Willamalane, which is the Parks
and Rec district in Springfield, they did that themselves. So all of
those they paid for. And not expected necessarily. We asked how can we
get this done, and they said we’ll do it. Really cool.
Television Camera
Placement and Spectator Access Inside and Alongside the Course
RRM: Looks like most
of the television cameras had to be placed on the turns. Was that a
deliberate strategy?
ID: Yes. It was not us at
all. We took direction from World Athletics Productions in terms of
where their cameras were going to be, and then that information got
shared also with Dentsu and the branding partners. Sports Logistics is
the company that actually places the branding, so they had the
information: where are the camera positions, what are they shooting, and
then they place their cameras where they want. So, not me necessarily
making decisions, but being in the conversation so we could be sure that
we have the rail where they need it.
RRM:
I tried to get on the sidewalk on the inside of the loop, and I asked
the volunteer how does that affect being inside the loop to watch the
marathon. He said “yes, the sidewalk is closed here,” but thought I
might be able to go back and forth on the road that cut through Alton
Baker Park at the 28K mark. But when I got there, there were barricades
on both sides, and I realized there was no way to access the interior of
the course from there.
ID: So what you ran into,
well, depending on the volunteer, one might tell you that you can go
across. Another volunteer might tell you, “absolutely not.” We never
really, we—if we did that over again, we would do that better, because
there was little bit of question in people’s minds.
RRM: So, did you expect
all those cyclists and skateboarders, and were you freaked out by it?
ID: Not really. We had to
make last minute adjustments — truly around 1 am [before the men’s race]
— and because people didn’t have a way to contact the event at that
time, for lack of any other option, people were dialing the police at
911. Middle of the night, things are hectic, well, one thing we can do
to make sure we can open up the roads more quickly, is to remove some of
the pedrail we were going to have along Centennial and MLK. We still
need some of it for the sponsor boards we would have, but we have a
bunch of extra cones, so we could just replace some of the pedrail with
cones. So I wouldn’t have been nervous at all, but then because we have
cones, the question really goes to the police. Are you guys, you guys on
bikes, are you comfortable with those cyclists? And they were fine. It’s
a good example of the kind of two voices we’ve had in all these
conversations, the healthy push and pull is, like, security and
predictability and knowing what’s going to happen versus the fan
experience. There was a real voice of like let’s make sure people can
have fun, and also make sure that it’s not chaos out there and stuff. I
don’t think we ever did a great job of resolving those two.
RRM: Did you have to
scramble? On the finishing stretch where the bleachers were there were
so many people in the street that there weren’t so many bikes coming
through that area. Did you stop them? How did they get back so they
could do it again?
ID:
Most of that stretch, they turn off Rainbow just past 11K onto
Centennial, and Centennial turns into MLK, so there’s about a 3-kilometer stretch there that’s on a
main arterial road. Most of it is 5 lanes—two eastbound, two westbound,
and a median—and regardless of whether there are 4 or 5—some places the
median disappears—we kept the marathon runners in the south two lanes.
They were headed west in the eastbound lanes the whole direction, which
means we had two lanes to the north that were open, and the idea was
that that’s open for emergency services and broadcast. Broadcast had a
big truck with a Russian arm—don’t know if it’s called that anymore—but
it would go back and forth. The cyclists just did that: they rode back
and forth in those north lanes. They would get to the finish area where
it starts to be crowded, and you can’t keep going through there at 12,
13 miles per hour with the runners, so you’ve got to stop and that’s
your turnaround. I thought it was actually pretty cool. What we’re
trying to avoid is people who want to cause a problem. Those cyclists
were so clearly fans, why would we mess with fans? That’s exactly what
we want. It was fun to see, totally organic, like not something I had
any idea was going to happen.
Sponsorship
RRM:
Was
Oregon22 able to raise sponsorship money outside the WA sponsorships? I
would like to compare this situation with the situation at the U.S
Olympic Trials where the Local Organizing Committee (LOC) is virtually
unable to raise any sponsorship because of conflicts with USATF and USOC
sponsors. What was the situation in Eugene? I did see barricade signs
for the University of Oregon and Peace Health.
ID: You can talk with
somebody else, but what I can comment on is the absolute pain in the ass
for us that we weren’t able to do whatever we wanted—and of course I
knew we couldn't do whatever we wanted—but two examples of that are
relevant. One is vehicles. Arcimoto is a local company that makes FUVs,
electric vehicles—they’re small, they’re nimble, we got to use them for
the Eugene Marathon. They’re awesome and they’re perfect for an event
like this. It was out of my realm, so I didn’t have anything to do with
that. I don’t know what went on, all I know is we couldn’t use them.
Couldn’t be out there. I don’t know where that decision came from.
Another example is water boxes — we had an absolute marathon of
stickering boxed water. Every box of water had to have a sticker put
over it. The brand is not a partner, so boxes of water had to be
stickered, in real time, out on the course. This is not a dig on
anybody, but it really was a real bummer. I understand the structure.
And I have a general understanding of how it came to be the case. It’s
just too bad that that’s the case. That said, Peace Health, the local
medical provider, came on as a provider sponsor.
[Note: The LOC
had a no plastic bottle policy, so the LOC brought in something like
250,000 boxes of water for the entire event. Per Ian’s sticker
reference, every box of water that would be in TV camera/public line of
sight had to be stickered — on the marathon course, in the mixed zone at
Hayward Field, etc.]
Dropouts and DNFs
RRM: What was the system for
handling dropouts and DNFs, both in regards to getting info back to the
finish, and transporting.
ID: We had a couple
different ways. We had three on-course medical stations, so if someone
had a medical issue, they could be transported from there. The medical
stations were not providing, though, non-medical transport, so if a
person dropped because they were having a bad day, medical is not
transporting them back. What they would do is hop in our tail vehicle,
and because the course is three loops, they didn’t have to ride as long.
For the most part what we tried to communicate is that if people are
electively dropping out, they should do it at the start/finish or at a
spot where they can self-transport back to the finish. Which I think is
what most people did. We saw a few people come in on
gators and golf carts—I don’t know how
they did that exactly—presumably the medical team called in and got
something, but yeah, we felt pretty good. The proximity to the stadium
was good. Just seeing how athletes typically behave, unless they’re
injured they’re going to want to just walk it off, get back, they’re
discouraged, they get back on their own.
RRM: What about from a
communications standpoint?
ID: What’s supposed to
happen, okay, an athlete wants to drop out, they unpin their bib and let
a referee know. So we had 25 referees out on the course, which means
you’re not going to necessarily see a referee right around the
corner—there’s some places where we have a bunch of them, where we have
athletes going in two directions, anywhere an athlete could cut the
turns—we have referees there. So what really happened often, we hadn’t
seen somebody for a while, they should have passed by, call goes out on
the radio: do we know what’s up with so-and-so? And we get a report
back, yep, they’ve left the course, they’re back through medical and
they’ve retired, essentially. So again, not a perfect system. Because it
was a small number of athletes, it worked fine, and we had line of sight
to every point on the course. So the course captains managing these
eleven zones had enough people on each zone to spread them out so there
was no point on the course where we didn’t have staff, volunteers, eyes,
which was how we felt confident that we would be able to respond to
anything medically as quickly as possible.
Course Design,
Certification, Record Validation, Signage and Supplies
RRM: The course looked
like a huge challenge to certify and to cone and barricade with no
curbing. Some sections were handled by cones, and others by barricades.
Sometimes it appeared the cones or barricades were not placed on the
center stripe of the roadway, but situated with no apparent reference.
ID: I feel extremely
confident that it was coned and barricaded in exactly the way that it
was measured. And I’m happy to share all the diagrams. So Jane Parks was
the official course measurer. Lee [Barrett] and another guy [Jeff Huber]
were also out doing this; I was tagging along mostly. We had a few
adjustments throughout. So they came out twice for measurements and then
measured again on-site before the races. Then we’d do a course drive. We
started at 5 a.m., an hour plus before the race, and drove the loop and
made sure that everything was set the way it was supposed to be set. So
there were certain places where the reference point is the reflective
plastic device that’s the second one in from this corner, so it starts
to look random, but those were pretty precise, and we had a lot of
painted reference marks and stuff. We ran out of time on the green
line—you often see a blue line on a course, but our blue line was
green—and we’re a small team and we undershot on some of our staffing
up. So it’s the night before, and we’re out all night trying to get as
much of that down as we could and trying to get things set before we ran
out of time. But there were a few places where it was like, okay, we
need to get out here because it’s going to help with this or that. It
was pretty dialed in.
RRM:
I observed one pickup truck and three motorcycles—one with a cop and
two had cameras on it—as lead vehicles, was there anybody observing how
the course was actually run?
ID: So we didn’t have
anybody in that pickup truck but Jane [Parks] was in an advance vehicle to a) give a visual to the marshalls, police, everybody, that okay, the race is imminent, and b)
for it to be far enough ahead so that if something had changed from our
course drive, that she could jump out and fix it, that we would have a
couple minutes to troubleshoot any major bumps that were out there. But,
there was no one immediately in the front of the race verifying it was
run as it was intended to be other than what we had from broadcast.
Presumably that’s sufficient.
RRM: Did the runners
actually cross the finish on the first two loops?
ID: Yes.
RRM: Were there mile
markers on the course?
ID: There were no mile
markers. [All the intermediate splits were in kilometers.]
RRM: And I noticed
that kilometers were clearly marked, and had to be changed depending on
what loop you were on. Did you guys take down the start arches?
ID: Yep, the start arches
came down right away. All the kilometers were . . . kilometer one was
the same point as kilometer 15; they were identical points. The
mechanism here was we had the arches, what I call skins and socks. The
whole arch was aluminum frame with a quarter arch, the skin on the whole
thing says, Kilometer One. The racers pass by, you tip the thing over,
you put a sock on the top, the whole top is white with just the
kilometer mark, that sock now says Kilometer 15. They pass by, you take
that sock off, put the next sock on, and so on—not exactly rocket
science.
RRM: Who manufactured
all that stuff?
ID: I did all that
locally. Coincidentally, I had actually put all that together for the
Eugene Marathon last year. It was just a little bit out of our budget,
so I thought, yeah, we can do it. But the design and everything and the
quotes we got from Stretch Shapes—so we got down the road with budgeting
and procurement, and based on how everything went, that became our cheap
option. I was able to do it locally, so we just used the exact same
design we used for Eugene Marathon in terms of the structure and
replaced the branding, obviously, and went ahead and did it that way. So
they’re all made four miles from the course, and the guys that do the
stretch shapes do it all over, but those were custom for us.
RRM: What big items
will you be able to reuse for the Eugene Marathon?
ID: We hopefully will be
able to reuse those aluminum structures. We hadn’t purchased those for
the Eugene Marathon because they were a little bit expensive. But
hopefully now, we will be able to reuse them. The synergy between Eugene
Marathon and this was interesting because a lot of the things, we ended
up essentially providing a lot of things ourselves—cones, tables,
etc.—but we just took the opportunity to purchase those things
ourselves, and rent them back to the event. So basically, we can both
come out ahead. We were able to rent them back for a lot cheaper than
they could rent through a general contractor, and we were able to take
this opportunity to stock up on some of those things that we took to
rent. We just moved into a new office space that has warehouse storage
with it, so we’re able to accommodate some of the stuff now. There are
some really good synergies there that I think we all feel we all came
out ahead on it.
Personal Drinks and
Boxed Water
RRM: A few times water
station volunteers were handing water boxes to the runners. What were
their instructions? Most times the runners had to fetch them.
ID: Semantics-wise, we
had water stations and drink stations. Water stations, they were
instructed to place the water; volunteers should not have been handing
water to runners. I don’t know that that’s a hard-and-fast rule, but the
instruction was to place the water on the table and they take it
themselves. So it’s unscrewed, the top’s off, etc. Drink stations, they
are able to hand — most of the federations have a coach or person there
who is handing water. We had volunteers there to manage that for
federations who didn’t have a person onsite.
RRM: But you let
federation people do it.
ID: We encouraged
federations to do it. We would rather federations take the bottles out
for us, do all that stuff, so that’s what ended up happening. All the
federations did their own transport and management. We helped transport
the federations out there, but we weren’t collecting or distributing
everyone’s bottles.
Uplift Oregon 5K
RRM: Let’s talk about
the mass participation Uplift Oregon 5K, which was held during the Men’s
Marathon on July 17. First of all, was the 5K course certified?
ID: The truth is that it
probably wouldn’t have been certified. By my measure, it was 5K. I think
Strava says it’s 3.11, but it was a loop, and the chance of a loop being
exactly 5K is low, so I think it’s within a very reasonable margin of
error, where I didn’t . . . I feel, like, in good faith it was 5K. I
don’t think it would have been certifiable. We would have needed to
offset the start and finish, and the logistics around how quickly we
needed to get the start down and up for that probably were not going to
allow for a separate start and finish.
RRM: Seemed like a
fantastic experience for everyone.
ID: We felt really,
really good about it. I think it was fantastic in a lot of ways, yeah.
There’s a unique opportunity, and it was really fun—I would have loved
to do it as a runner, coming behind those [elite] guys, and being able
to be at the finish and watch them come through the second and third
time. And it really served the purpose of making sure it felt like a
World Championship event, and it felt like there were a lot of people
there, because there were. I think we intentionally put the start line
of the 5K in front of the marathon start line [and staged the 5K runners
alongside the pedrail barricades (see Photo below).]We didn’t want to line all these 5K runners up behind the
marathon start where they wouldn’t see it. We put them in front where
everyone could see everything. When the marathon runners came out all
the 5K runners were cheering. We didn’t know how many people wouldn’t
make the time cutoff, because we did have a time cutoff. [5K runners who
were not at a pace to finish in 31 minutes were held up at the 4K mark
so the championship runners could come through. Any stopped runners were
allowed to continue their 5K once all the championship runners had
passed.] Their time didn’t reflect their running time; it was their
running time plus 8 minutes, something like that, but it was maybe only
15, 20 people that got stopped. And we had our party pacer, a guy who’s
got a big stroller with a huge speaker—he’s making it fun and making
sure we had some energy there. And they were fantastic sports about it,
and they all knew going in, too, that this was the case.
There’s an element of luck, too.
Like, somebody could have gotten injured in the last 800 meters.
Unlikely, but that could have happened, and then we would have had to
manage getting them off the course. You could have somebody who’s just a
jerk and trying to mess things up. We would have had to manage that.
Those things didn’t happen; we got lucky with that. We felt like it was
a calculated risk. We think it would be really cool, but I don’t think
I’ve seen that exact scenario done before. But the number of times that
I checked my spreadsheet to ask: Am I right about these numbers? Am I
sure? Just double-checking, triple-checking, making sure about the
timing. Far from rocket science, but . . . don’t screw it up.
RRM: Were you pleased
with the usage of the 5K fan experience area?(The video below
shows the fan experience area for the 5K.)
ID: I was on the other
side. Eugene Marathon team was kind of divided on this. Two on our team
were working primarily on this, the 5K. I was primarily not working on
it, just making sure it synched up properly. I think I would have heard
if people or if Asics was not happy about the fan experience, but
everything I’ve heard is that Asics was happy as clams about it.
Everybody felt good. I know registration was a little lower than we’d
hoped. We capped it at 2000, and I think it ended up being more like
1200. I don’t know the final number. But it reflects that this is a
different market than maybe brands might be used to doing in a pop-up
event. In Eugene a 1000-person 5K is actually a pretty good 5K, so like
I think their marketing could have been a little better, their messaging
a little better. But at the end of the day it totally accomplished the
primary point of doing it.
RRM: Did you know that for 5
or 6 minutes, between 19 and 26 minutes in the men’s race, the live feed
went away and this was on the board?
ID: I didn’t know that.
I’m not super surprised though, and I say this with some amount of
affection, but the event presentation, EVP, the screen, the audio, it
was extremely last minute in coming. We had no idea—this was a
combination of USATF and LOC, but it was outside our Eugene Marathon
contract of teams’ responsibilities or purview—and we were waiting and
waiting. It was the absolute last minute this stuff got scheduled, came,
and we had problems with it. There was no audio for the second race walk
on Friday. The men were second on that first day of competition, there
was no audio. So the venue announcers that were great for the women’s
race walk and have been great since, there was just complete silence. I
was really frustrated by that because it meant that the fan experience
was not what it could have been.
RRM: How many paid
staff did you have on this race?
ID: We had 8 paid staff.
RRM: Was that more
than you would normally have?
ID: Yes, that’s double
what we usually have. We’re a small team. We usually staff up a little
bit for the Eugene Marathon on race month, but we’re four core full-time
staff. We doubled up for this. And I’m going to guess that that’s a
couple orders of magnitude lower than what it has been for other
organizing committees. We didn’t know what we were getting into, part of
it, but also, we’ll make it happen. You know? I’m really proud of us.
RRM: You should be
proud. It was fantastic.
ID: Thanks.
RRM: Any last
thoughts?
ID: I think it would be a
real shame, speaking personally, my goal career-wise is not to end by
running the marathons for World Athletics. I’m really happy to stay here
and do what I’m doing, and I think it would be a big missed opportunity
for our Eugene Marathon team if we didn’t continue to develop as a
company and develop some more events, and bid for global championships
and national championships. I think it’s important for the identity of
Tracktown—this can’t be the end of it, right? And nobody is suggesting
it is. Prefontaine Classic is carrying a huge load there and doing a
good job, all kinds of things to contribute, but I think there’s a real
tension between events like this and—I don’t know how to articulate the
tension that’s in my head—but like, this type of Championships event is
not financially viable. It requires a huge amount of state public
funding. Atlanta, I don’t know the half of it, but their hosting the
Olympic Trials was wildly expensive. And until the federations and local
governing bodies figure out how to do this in a financially responsible
way, they’re just going to be better off going to places where suitable
authoritarian governments can just make things happen that we can’t
here. The level of frustration that World Athletics broadcast had with
us, not being able to lay out 14 kilometers of dark fiber that—we’re
talking about millions of dollars of infrastructure—that’s not even a
possibility. I think in their minds, it was like, you should just do
this, you should make this happen. And these are good people. The
expectations are just not realistic in a financially responsible way.
The funding for these events—I don’t know enough about it to have an
educated perspective—but I do know that we did not, would not right now,
try to bid for the Olympic Trials marathon. You’re just going to lose
money. We’re just an LLC; we’re a business. Maybe that needs to go to a
nonprofit, maybe that’s the model. Maybe it has to rely more on lobbying
than organizing. It’s just discouraging to me to think that this may be
the only time we do something like this here because USATF or World
Athletics hijacks or holds hostage any of the revenue that comes in for
it. Partnerships are a huge piece of that, but we could not do this
again in the way that we did it. And to be clear, I would have done this
for free. I learned so much. It was really hard, but I had a really good
time. We would only do this again if we could hire the staff we need to
hire. Two of our staff had to tap out last night because they’re sick
and exhausted and they’re beat up; our staff just took a beating.
Keith Petersfirst organized running events for students at the University of Tennessee, Martin in 1978, and was involved in producing the Cascade Run Off from 1981-93. Over the past 14 years, he has worked with scores of road races seeking verification and recognition of their efforts to become more sustainable. He is currently a board member of the Council for Responsible Sport.
ID:
Meridian was hired to manage traffic-control. That’s the brand of
barrier and the company that manages them. They were hired, but we had
security teams as well. A marathon course is not secure, but the point
of the Meridian barricades was so that a bad actor couldn’t ram their
car onto the course. There were any number of catastrophes that could
happen, and that was one that we could control by putting those
barricades in the right places.
RRM:
I tried to get on the sidewalk on the inside of the loop, and I asked
the volunteer how does that affect being inside the loop to watch the
marathon. He said “yes, the sidewalk is closed here,” but thought I
might be able to go back and forth on the road that cut through Alton
Baker Park at the 28K mark. But when I got there, there were barricades
on both sides, and I realized there was no way to access the interior of
the course from there. 
ID: I didn’t know that.
I’m not super surprised though, and I say this with some amount of
affection, but the event presentation, EVP, the screen, the audio, it
was extremely last minute in coming. We had no idea—this was a
combination of USATF and LOC, but it was outside our Eugene Marathon
contract of teams’ responsibilities or purview—and we were waiting and
waiting. It was the absolute last minute this stuff got scheduled, came,
and we had problems with it. There was no audio for the second race walk
on Friday. The men were second on that first day of competition, there
was no audio. So the venue announcers that were great for the women’s
race walk and have been great since, there was just complete silence. I
was really frustrated by that because it meant that the fan experience
was not what it could have been.
