Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Yared Nuguse racing the Bowerman Mile, 2023 Prefontaine Classic. Photo by Howard Lao
Written by Intern 343 from the TRACKLND Department of Tourism and Transportation
The Past Isn’t dead, it’s not even the past -William Faulker
The Graduate is a trendy upscale hotel that sits in Eugene’s Market District. The lobby is filled with mementos and nick-nacks drawing on the nostalgia of the college experience. The décor is referential, but knowingly modern, like a track sampling older beats. It is a modern encasement of craftsman design, like a dream inside a computer program where waking up coincides with the realization that you are not in the place you thought you were, but it really did feel like it. The regional relics sit on and inside shiny, bold-colored walls abutting glass and concrete. There are lots of old Nike shoes and old Nike posters from old Nike ad campaigns, because in Eugene more than any other place, those are regional relics. There is a solid wooden table stretching the length of the room with 5 golden lamps and 34 seats and throughout the room, at least 17 different styles of fresh fabric and leather upholstery wrap retrofitted accent chairs. We tried all of them. It is very cool. Sensing my excitement, Pinterest immediately sent me a push notification for library furniture- yet another reminder that we are not entirely in the world documented by the 1956 Eugene High School yearbook sitting on the treated cracked wooden coffee table, but maybe, with enough old fashioneds from the bar at the end of the room, we can still pretend. The hotel is taking full advantage of pointed community access as well as global interconnectivity. The Graduate Eugene is part of a chain of Graduates located in college towns across the United States and two in England, each one specific to its college town location. The Graduate chain is owned by AJ Capital Partners, and on any given football weekend in the fall, rooms go for upwards of $700. The Partners at AJ Capital know what they’re doing.
It is here, at the official meet hotel and Nike athlete hospitality headquarters of the 2023 Prefontaine Classic Diamond League Final that the press conference took place in a conference room behind a great hallway behind the lobby. It was there, in the room with neat rows of conference chairs and chewy bars and squeezable applesauce on the back table that Jakob Ingebrigtsen stopped flicking his microphone cord, pulled the mic to his mouth, turned to Yared Nuguse as he was answering whether the American Record in the Mile was in reach, and interrupted: “Stick with me as long as you can, and we’ll get you sub 3:46.” A feat neither man had ever accomplished, and only 3 men in history had.
On the other side of the conference room wall to the right of where Nuguse and Ingebrigtsen were sitting, Matt Parker had constructed a 1990’s teenage bedroom-themed photo shoot set. When athletes left the press conference, they passed through a semi-secret door flush with the foldable conference wall into the room to pose for photos amongst VHS tapes, a boxy black tv with a VCR, an old Macintosh computer, a Nintendo 64, CDs, retro Nikes, and posters of The Breakfast Club, Joan Benoit Samuelson and Steve Prefontaine.
The day after posing for photos in their 90’s teenage bedroom, Jakob and Yared would run the fastest mile in the world since the 1990’s.
Photo by Matt Parker
Photo by Matt Parker
In 1999, when Hicham El Guerrouj held off Noah Ngeny to run the current mile world record of 3:43.13, there was no social media. The internet was young. YouTube did not yet exist. If you didn’t see an event in person or on TV, you didn’t see it. You could not type it into the search box in your browser and be taken digitally to that place, where the time was run or the comment was made, not yet. You consumed and interacted with things that were of your time and your place. You could not see what everyone with a social media platform and blog thought and how many people ‘like’ their opinion. A few writers wrote about it, and if El G didn’t like what they wrote, he could simply discount it as one person’s opinion and go on believing that he was beloved the world over and everyone saw things exactly how he did. Now, every sound bite is clipped and splattered all over X. The pressure from the outside is high. Words, expressions, pauses by 22-year old’s are scrutinized. Slights are exaggerated, critiqued, and stamped with a democratized, agreed upon narrative then placed in a living archive accessible to all.
Throughout the 2023 season, Jakob seemed irked by the championship racing narrative that followed him. Two silver medals in the past 2 1500m championships somehow means that he is unable to deliver when the rabbits are pulled, despite winning 2 golds at 5000m and Olympic gold in the 1500m. He has an ax to grind and does it by anointing himself pacer to the media whenever he gets a chance. In his mind, he is trying to do something that only he can do, and the other runners in the race can only scuttle his mission. “What do you mean by… ‘the race’?” he asked Nuguse when the On Running athlete said that the possibility of running under the American record depended on how fast the race went out. In Jakob’s mind, the race is whatever he is doing. But there is a lot of noise created by opinions about what he is doing, and he can see it all.
When 3:43 flashed on the digital boards at Hayward Field, it was the first time anyone under 24 years of age had seen it in person. For 24 years, we’ve lived in a world where we knew the best we had didn’t quite measure up to the best ever. We can see the races of the best ever on our devices any time we want. We have better access to them than the people of their time did, encased in our modern devices. Because of the results of the Bowerman Mile last Saturday, the past seems more alive than ever, because going into next year there is the possibility that the mark we have known to mean greatness for so long could be eclipsed and we don’t know yet by whom. The talisman in the old wooden box is glowing.
Following his 3:43.73- third fastest mile of all time, Jakob said: “it would be nice if I had a pacer up until a lap to go… like the guys in the 90’s. He knows. He has watched.
Last Saturday, when Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Yared Nuguse came off the Bowerman curve having hit the 1500m mark in 3:28.7, a company with an American origin story bit their nails for a Norwegian athlete while an American athlete backed by a Swiss company fought down the stretch in a global stadium placed in a rural American town. We’re in a global age of inter-connectivity. This isn’t the 90’s anymore.
When El Guerrouj came to Eugene to run the Bowerman Mile in 2001, two years after he set the world record, The Graduate did not yet exist. The nick-nacks and collectables were still strewn around Eugene in craftsmans and bungalows and mom and pop running shops, yet to be collected by AJ Capital Partners who were yet to consolidate and spring franchises far and wide. AirBnb was not a thing. The Hayward Field record for the 1500m was 3:35 and the mile was 3:50. People did not come to Eugene to break world records. They went to Rome and Rieti. The Prefontaine Classic was a meet where the best Americans competed, and a few international athletes joined. They came to Eugene to wave at the crowd that witnessed Nike as a start-up and head back up to corporate to get their feet measured before flying back to more serious locations. Where did The King of the Mile stay back then? The Timbers Motel? A room that looked like Matt Parker’s photo set in meet director Tom Jordan’s house? There are people who know these things and they likely have Facebook profiles with default photos of flowers.
We tend to view history as a linear march forward, the future is bright and the past is dark, but the past isn’t dead, more than any other time before, it is still here, highly accessible. It is just encased in the new thing being constructed. History is pushing outward in an ever-expanding and inter-connecting world. It is a web, worldwide.
Hicham El Guerrouj 3:43.13
Noah Ngeny 3:43.40
Jakob Ingebrigtsen 3:43.73
Yared Nuguse 3:43.97
Pre Classic Diamond League Final Press Conference
Matt Parker’s 90’s Teenage Bedroom photo set
Photography & Creative Direction by Matt Flynn Parker
Produced by Hayward Magic
Set Decoration & Styling by The NEST
Photo Assist by Sarah Northrup
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