Track and Field nerds unite! (next summer in Des Moines)

It appears that the 2019 USATF Championships will be held at Drake Stadium in Des Moines, probably during the final week of July.

Having recently spent a great four days at this year’s USATF Championships (also in Des Moines), I’m recommending that all track and field obsessives consider making the journey there next summer. Here’s why:

Drake Stadium is a fantastic place to watch a track meet. Did you ever go to a baseball game at the old Comiskey Park in Chicago or the old Tiger Stadium in Detroit? They were my favorite ballparks because they were built before team owners decided that the way to make money was to put the affordable seats ten stories up so that the big spenders could enjoy chocolate banana crepes in the comfort of their sky boxes without having to rub elbows with the proletariat. Old Comiskey and old Tiger Stadium had lots of affordable seats close to the action.

Drake Stadium is the same way. This year, a four-day general admission pass cost $60. A four-day reserved seating pass cost $80. And there literally is not a bad seat in the place. The reserved sections are close to the finish line, but you can see the finish line clearly from just about anywhere in the stadium. And it is easy to wander around. Something interesting happening in the high jump? Go take a look. Things heating up in the pole vault? It will take you all of two minutes  to make your way over there. 

And if things get really, really, exciting? No worries. There are tons of bathrooms.

America is really good at track and field. I’m not going to point fingers (Men’s soccer, anyone?) But there are certain sports where the top Americans are nowhere close to being the best in the world. Not so in track and field. At this year’s championships in Des Moines, the men’s shot put featured Olympic Champion Ryan Crouser, Olympic silver medalist and 2015 World Champion Joe Kovacs, 2017 Diamond League Champion Darrell Hill, and two-time indoor World Champion Ryan Whiting. And that was one event, folks.

Blank Park Zoo. Let’s face it, we humans cannot live by track and field alone. And in spite of what my wife thinks, it is totally not weird for an adult to get excited about visiting a zoo. Not one like Blank Park, anyway.

It’s a small zoo, so you can see everything in an hour or two. And it is full of delightful exhibits. I once saw an albino alligator at Blank Park. And my daughter took her first camel ride there.

2019 is a World Championship year. For fans of track and field, the World Championships are the Olympics minus all the sports you do not care about. For track and field athletes, winning a World Championship medal is as great an accomplishment as winning an Olympic medal, so they are going to show up in Des Moines in top shape because if they don’t…well, read on.

The USATF qualification system sucks for the athletes, but makes for great drama. Most countries look at an athletes’ body of work when selecting a World Championship or Olympic team. How have they performed throughout that season? How have they performed in previous Worlds or Olympics?  A committee considers these factors and decides who to send. Not us. With a few exceptions (in the past, defending World Champions have automatically been granted a spot in the next Championships) those seeking to represent the USA at the Worlds must finish in the top three at the USATF Championships. You can have the best time or distance in the world in your event going into the meet, but if you have an off night and finish fourth, too bad.This sucks for the athletes because it means that they have to try to peak twice in a single summer–once for the USATF meet and (if they qualify) once more a few weeks later for the Worlds. It also means that when they step up to the line next summer in Des Moines, their season and to a certain extent their career will hang in the balance. Fair? Not really. Dramatic? Without a doubt.

Jethro’s BBQ. The food is great. The prices are reasonable. The location is ideal–a couple of blocks from Drake  Stadium. And the dude from Man vs. Food was defeated by a sandwich there, so it has historic significance.

During my visit to Des Moines last month, I ate at Jethro’s three times in a twenty-four-hour span. I hope to build on that performance next summer.

Let’s face it, watching great athletes compete in person is a lot more meaningful than watching them on television. During the Jordan Era, I , like many Bulls fans, spent countless hours screaming at my television. In the in years since, I have come to accept the fact that my screaming probably made little difference. It is quite likely that the Bulls would have won those titles without me repeatedly calling Bill Laimbeer a “stupid idiot face” from the comfort of my living room. There was one game, however, that I can look back on and feel like…well…maybe I contributed. It was a playoff game at the old Chicago Stadium against Charles Barkley and the 76ers, the only playoff game I ever saw in person. I went with my brother. Our seats were lousy. We were in the back row of the lower level, and the second level jutted out so far over us that we had a letterbox view of the action. When someone launched a jumper, we lost sight of the ball until it came back down. But it was a great game, and we were part of it. Late in the second half, the Bulls started to pull away and the place went nuts. The Stadium shook with the noise that we helped make. Did our enthusiasm make it harder for the Sixers to make their shots? Did it help the Bulls fight through their fatigue late in the game? These are questions that no mere mortal can answer, but when we walked out of the Stadium that night, we sure felt like we’d participated in something special.

You can have the same experience next summer in Des Moines. Will screaming your lungs out for your favorite runner as they stagger towards the finish line help them make the World Championships? Will joining the rest of the crowd in a slow clap help lift your favorite high jumper to a new PR?  I cannot say. But it will give you something really fun to talk about during your many meals at Jethro’s.

After 2019, the USATF Championships are unlikely to come back to the Midwest. Here’s why:

That’s an artist’s rendering of the new Hayward field at the University of Oregon. It will be ready in 2021. It is being built specifically to host the 2021 World Championships, but if you think Nike (patron saint of the University of Oregon) is investing tens of millions in this project without a guarantee that it will serve as the permanent site of the NCAA and USATF Championships you are a person entirely lacking in cynicism.

To be fair, Eugene deserves to host a lot of meets. It has proven to be the only community in the US that can fill a stadium each of the four days it takes to run a championship. And they put on a great show. I made the pilgrimage in 1999, and I treasure those memories, especially now that the old Hayward has met the wrecking ball.

But think about this, fellow Midwesterners. Four round-trip plane tickets to Eugene would cost, what? Fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars? My three friends and I got to Des Moines and back for less than a hundred bucks worth of gas.

That’s an awful lot of great memories for very little money.

I know we’ll make the trip again next summer. Hope to see you there!