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Vin's The President; Can He Get The Sport Out Of Eugene Now?

Vin's The President; Can He Get The Sport Out Of Eugene Now?

Dec 2, 2016 by Dennis Young
Vin's The President; Can He Get The Sport Out Of Eugene Now?
One of the juiciest storylines of the 2016 USATF Annual Meeting fizzled immediately, as Jackie Joyner-Kersee withdrew from the presidential race and Vin Lananna was elected USA Track & Field president by acclamation on Thursday night. 

Lananna is universally regarded as a skilled administrator, and that led to his candidacy being supported by an unusually broad group of athletes that wasn't limited to Nike or Oregon-connected folks, and even included frequent Nike critics. Lananna, a longtime coach at Stanford and Oregon, has been running TrackTown USA since 2012. (According to The Oregonian, he was also drawing an annual salary from Nike as of January 2016.) At TrackTown, Lananna has been wildly successful in bringing events to Eugene--the home of the Ducks semi-permanently locked down the NCAA and USATF outdoor championships, and won IAAF bids for the 2014 world junior, 2016 world indoor (in Portland), and 2021 world outdoor championships. For better or worse, Lananna's run at TrackTown led to Eugene, Oregon having a near-monopoly on America's best track meets.

The central promise of Lananna's ultimately unopposed campaign was that he could do for the rest of the country what he did for Eugene. Lananna explicitly made that case last week, saying "What we've built in TrackTown and at the University of Oregon can be used as a model for the rest of the country. Now is the time for it to be transportable." And just today, he was exactly right when he said, "Everything can't happen in Eugene, Oregon. We have to have a bigger footprint for the sport of track and field."

Can that promise be kept? Can we really get great American track meets--the real championships--outside of a tiny polled-packed corner of the United States that's two hours from any major airport?

Where meets go obviously isn't the only or even necessarily the most important item on Lananna's agenda. He's taking on leadership in an organization and a sport that have multiple serious problems. And how much power Lananna will have right away is unclear; unlike past presidents, he won't chair USATF's board of directors. Steve Miller is chairing the board through at least 2018.

But it's the single question that will give the clearest signal to how independent the new USATF president will be. Ken Goe reports tonight that Lananna will continue working as the president of TrackTown USA and as an athletic director at the University of Oregon. At some point, Lananna will have to make a decision in one of his jobs that hurts the other.

We'll be in Orlando through the end of the Annual Meeting, and which job the new president will prioritize is one of the most interesting questions of the weekend.