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Pre.

From cow pasture to TrackTown’s cathedral

Hayward Field started in 1919 as the University of Oregon’s football stadium, built on an old cow pasture and named for Bill Hayward, the Ducks’ track coach from 1904 to 1947. A six-lane cinder track went in two years later, and the place slowly became something more than a stadium — the beating heart of American distance running.

When football left for Autzen Stadium in 1967, Hayward went track-only. Three years later it got eight lanes and its first all-weather surface — just as a kid from Coos Bay named Steve Prefontaine arrived to make it famous. Over the decades it has hosted NCAA Championships, U.S. Olympic Trials and a long list of American records: the center of “TrackTown USA.”

The rebuild, 2018–2021

After the 2018 NCAA Championships, the 99-year-old stadium was demolished and rebuilt from scratch on the same site — funded entirely by private donations led by Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife Penny, reported at roughly $270 million. The new Hayward, designed by SRG Partnership, is built for one sport only: 12,650 permanent seats expandable to about 30,000, a nine-lane track, timber roof beams echoing Oregon’s fir forests, and the nine-story Bowerman Tower topped by a 128-foot observation deck.

It opened with the Hayward Premiere in April 2021, hosted the U.S. Olympic Trials that summer, and in 2022 welcomed the World Athletics Championships — the first ever held on U.S. soil.

Blue Ribbon Sports: shoes out of a car trunk

On January 25, 1964, Bowerman and Knight founded Blue Ribbon Sports in Eugene as the American distributor for Onitsuka Tiger, the Japanese running-shoe maker. Knight — who borrowed his $500 stake from his father — worked the track-meet circuit, selling Tigers out of his car. Bowerman stayed home coaching Oregon, pulling the imported shoes apart and rebuilding them lighter, with better cushioning and grip, then handing the prototypes to his runners to test.

The partnership worked because each man did what the other couldn’t: Knight ran the business, Bowerman reinvented the product. His cushioned design became the Tiger Cortez in 1966 — a best-seller — and BRS opened its first little retail store that same year in Santa Monica, California. In year one they sold 1,300 pairs for $8,000; within a few years, sales were doubling and doubling again.

1971: a new name, a $35 logo, and a waffle iron

When the deal with Onitsuka fell apart in 1971, Blue Ribbon had to become a brand of its own — fast. First employee Jeff Johnson suggested the name Nike, for the Greek goddess of victory (he said it came to him in a dream; Knight wanted “Dimension Six”). Portland State design student Carolyn Davidson drew the Swoosh for $35 — $2 an hour. Knight’s review: “I don’t love it, but maybe it will grow on me.” In 1983, Nike thanked Davidson with a gold Swoosh ring and 500 shares of stock.

That same year, over breakfast, Bowerman looked at his wife Barbara’s waffle iron and wondered what would happen if you flipped the waffle over: little rubber nubs that grip without spikes, light as air. He poured rubber into the iron — ruining it — and invented the waffle sole. His handmade “Moon Shoe,” named because its tread looked like the Apollo astronauts’ footprints, debuted at the 1972 U.S. Olympic Trials in Eugene, where Knight handed out Nike T-shirts to make the unknown brand impossible to miss. Refined as the Waffle Trainer in 1974, it powered Nike past Adidas to No. 1 in America by 1980 — the year the company went public. Air Jordans and “Just Do It” were still to come. It all traces back to a track coach’s breakfast table.

One last win at Hayward

On the evening of Thursday, May 29, 1975, Pre did what he almost always did at Hayward Field: he won. Racing at the NCAA Preparation meet against a visiting Finnish team he had helped bring to Oregon, he took the 5,000 metres in 13:23.8 — the final entry in his race log, and you can find it at the bottom of the Results section above. He was 24, unbeaten at Hayward at his signature distance, and planning a summer in Europe and a run at gold in Montreal the next year.

After the meet there was a post-race gathering with the Finnish athletes at the home of his friend and former teammate Geoff Hollister. It was the ordinary, happy end to a Eugene track night — Pre celebrating with the runners he had raced, in the town that had adopted him.

The drive home

Shortly after midnight, Pre left to drive home alone in his 1973 MGB convertible. On Skyline Boulevard, the winding road that climbs through the hills east of campus near Hendricks Park, his car left the road on a curve and struck a basalt outcrop. The car overturned and pinned him beneath it. He died at the scene in the early hours of May 30, 1975, of injuries sustained in the crash.

Eugene woke to the news the next morning. The runner who had filled Hayward Field, who had fought for athletes’ rights and carried American distance running on his back for five years, was gone at 24 — within a short run of the track where, hours earlier, the crowd had chanted his name.

How a crash site became Pre’s Rock

The outcrop was not torn out or fenced off. Instead, a memorial plaque bearing Pre’s portrait was set at its base, and runners began to come — first from Eugene, then from everywhere. They jog up the hill from Hayward, stand quietly at the curve where the road bends past the rock, read the plaque, and leave something behind: a race bib, a pair of worn-out spikes, a medal, a singlet, a note.

Nothing about it is official or curated, and that is exactly the point. The tribute renews itself with every visitor, biggest during Olympic Trials weeks and the Prefontaine Classic — you can watch it build across the years in the Photos section above, from the painted rock of 2007 to the pile of spikes and bibs left at the 2024 Trials. Nearly fifty years on, the pilgrimage Pre never asked for has never stopped.