Oregon Produces Olympic Runners Like No One Else

RIO DE JANEIRO - During the Opening Ceremonies, they would have waved a green flag that featured a cartoon duck and marched between the small Olympic teams from Oman and Pakistan. They would have had more athletes than either country.

In fact, had the University of Oregon seceded from the union or somehow been granted sovereignty and entered these Rio de Janeiro Olympics as an independent nation, it’d likely fare quite well. With 18 current and former Ducks competing in track and field events here, the school can lay claim to more Olympic athletes than 113 countries. Its team - which comes from a student body that includes barely 20,000 undergraduates - would be more plentiful than countries with much larger populations: Mozambique, for example, is a nation of more than 25 million and only six are competing at these Games. And Afghanistan has 30 million people and just three Olympians.

How did this happen?

“It’s like how Kentucky or Duke is for the NBA,” said Devon Allen, a junior at Oregon and a gifted hurdler for the U.S. track and field team. “You go to Kentucky to go to the NBA; you go to Oregon to go to the Olympics.”

Track and field gets underway Friday, which means Ducks past and present will take center stage at these Olympics for much of the next nine days, including Allen, who competes in the men’s 110-meter hurdles; javelin throwers Cyrus Hostetler and Sam Crouser; sprinters English Gardner and Jenna Prandini; decathlete Ashton Eaton; and distance runners Galen Rupp and Matthew Centrowitz.

The track and field mecca is actually much larger than the placid Eugene, Oregon, campus. Some of the country’s top clubs are based in Oregon - the Nike Oregon Project, Oregon Track Club Elite and the Nike Bowerman Track Club - and there are at least 41 track and field Olympians who train and live somewhere in Oregon and will compete at these Games for a handful of nations.

“Oregonians are proud people with strong and long-standing connections to athletic excellence,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said in an email, “and there’s nothing better than watching Oregon’s members of the U.S. Olympic team compete at a worldwide level. Also, I hope the commentators at Rio 2016 will take the opportunity to set the record straight: The correct pronunciation of our state is ORY-GUN, not ORY-GONE.”

None of this is by accident. The school’s track and field teams were led for years by legendary coach Bill Bowerman and have a rich history of distance runners - most notably Steve Prefontaine - who became stars running at historic Hayward Field. It certainly didn’t hurt that Bowerman is credited with making the first pair of Nike shoes and the footwear giant set up shop in the Portland suburb of Beaverton, pouring millions of dollars into the sport over the years.

“It’s all been part of a strategy to be able to give U.S. track and field a home,” said Vin Lananna, the Ducks’ former track coach who is now an associate athletic director at the school and coach of the men’s Olympic team, “somewhere where it’s really respected, valued and revered.”

Tracktown USA was established as a nonprofit entity that has helped build the sport, luring big events to Eugene, including the past three U.S. Olympic trials. In the process, running culture began to seep into every corner of the state, from the fans who volunteer at events - 4,000 signed up for 2,000 slots at the most recent trials - to the state government, which raised Oregon’s lodging tax to help pay to host the 2021 world championships at Hayward Field.

“I’m very excited about what I’ve seen,” Lananna said. “We have the whole state engaged.”

An obvious benefactor is the state’s flagship university. Robert Johnson, the head track and field coach, is able to recruit the nation’s most promising high school athletes and show them that competing for Oregon opens doors.

“We gravitate to the kids who want to be in our program, who know our history and understand what we’re doing as coaches,” he said. “It’s definitely one of the things that’s attractive when you’re out there recruiting: the ability to continue after college, to pursue professional opportunities.”

Once young athletes arrive on campus, they quickly learn that Oregon is unlike any high school program. The athletes are recognized on campus and deal with big expectations. Gardner, a five-time NCAA champ for the Ducks, says she trained like a professional every day. “I wasn’t there to have fun. I was there to do my job,” she said.

“We hold ourselves to a different standard. If you’re not trying to be great, you kind of get lost in the sauce,” Gardner said.

When she was being recruited, Gardner obviously knew of the school’s legacy of distance runners and struck an agreement with Johnson: They wanted to turn the Ducks into a sprint powerhouse as well.

The result: Five of the Ducks at these Games are female sprinters, including current students Ariana Washington and Deajah Stevens.

“It takes only small match to light a fire, and we wanted to create a bonfire,” Gardner said.

Rick Maese is a sports features writer for The Washington Post.