Where the Stands Quake

Photo by Howard Lao

Where the Stands Quake

Words Jeff Merrill

“I love coming here. It reminds me of old Hayward”

-Pat Tyson, Gonzaga men’s XC and Track coach, class of the University of Oregon ‘73 and Steve Prefontaine’s college roommate walking into Lewis and Clark’s wooden grandstand.

“Sparrows used to sit on the rafters” he pointed up at the Douglas Fir beams in the Portland stadium envisioning Hayward’s old east grandstand. “Bowerman used to climb up there and paint owls and snakes on the wood to try and scare them away so that they wouldn’t poop on people’s heads in the stands.”

Photo by Howard Lao

Midway through the Hot Window Women’s 5,000m, the rumbling in the stands started up again. As Katelyn Tuohy made her way up the home straight, the bright green lights under the trackside rail illuminated hers and the packs’ pistoning legs. Fans in the grandstand stomped their feet, clapped their hands in unison and batted their bright red thundersticks together. Emblazoned on the thundersticks: ‘KEEP PORTLAND RUNNING!’

Prior to the 5,000m, the grandstand nearly blew its top when Donavan Brazier made the kind of move down the backstretch that no one in the world had witnessed since his peak years of 2019 and 2020, shifting into high gear and eating up the entire field to get to first with 200m to go. He would then launch himself into a final 200m of 25 seconds, smooth and strong.

Photo by Howard Lao

Before that, Olympic 1500m silver medalist Jess Hull roasted a final lap of the 800m to claim victory and become the only athlete in PTF history to have won both the 800m and 5,000m (she won the 5k in 2021). Her very first pro race, in fact, was an 800m at Griswold Stadium, affectionately known as the ‘Electric Forest’ at the 2019 Stumptown Twilight. Following the meet, she said: “The energy here is awesome. This is like a gold level meet”, referencing the top tier World Athletics meeting level on the Continental Tour.

Tuohy tightened the screws on the pack in the final laps, going 72, 71, 70, 69, 68 for her final 2k and crossed the line victorious. The time on the clock was 21 seconds from Sifan Hassan’s meet record set last year, but there was a sense of importance to the proceedings, knowing how the race was executed and also, because Tuohy was able to claim the victory and hoist the log round trophy toward the crowd. It means something simply to win at the Portland Track Festival, which is due in no small part to the effort of the team who put the meet together.

Photos by Amanda Gehrich

Drew Hunter overtook 2023 PTF 1500m champ Amon Kemboi down the final straight in the Hot Window 5,000m and thrust the log round skyward as the stands erupted. After, he said to reporters, his round tucked under his arm: “All I was focused on was winning.” Having come second to Clayton Murphy at PTF in the 2018 1500m, he’d now finally done it.

The balance between racing and time pursuits is a delicate act, cultivated by careful tuning, storytelling, pageantry and coordination. The 1500ms cap off the evening in Portland and have done so since 2023, when due to their historic excellence at the meet, they were moved to the end of the schedule as the pinnacle races.

Photos by Amanda Gehrich

Sinclaire Johnson controlled the latter part of this year’s Bandit Running 1500m to win in a World Standard 4:01.46. Her home crowd delighted with their athlete taking the victory for their city in her city.

Oklahoma State’s Fouad Messaoudi rocketed to a personal best of 3:33.93 to add his name to a list of champions that includes Evan Jager, Craig Engels, Andrew Wheating, and Yared Nuguse.

Behind him, Owen Powell and Josiah Tostenson became the 2nd and 3rd fastest high school 1500m runners of all time, running 3:36.49 and 3:36.85. PTF now lays claim to the top 3 high school 1500m performances of all-time, with Powell and Tostenson’s times ranked just below Hobbs Kessler’s 3:34.36 5th place performance in 2021. At last year’s meet, Daniel Simmons clocked 13:25 to shatter the high school 5,000m record in the Hot Window race.

Photo by Howard Lao

Balance, tuning, careful planning and time to let it evolve. It takes a city, and passionate, dedicated people to make it happen.

The Portland Track Festival was founded in 2008. It was created as a replacement for the famed Oregon Track Classic after its sponsor pulled funding in 2005 and the meet was moved to Carson, CA before it ceased to exist entirely. This is a common fate for track meets around the country, and why so few make it past a decade of existence. Track meets are quite literally the embodiment of the sport. If they didn’t exist, athletes would have nowhere to race and fans would have nowhere to watch them.

Meets should be a celebration of the sport and a showcase of creative energy, broadcasting amazing feats in innovative and artful ways, and cataloguing and building on performances from year to year. This takes time to build and time for people to develop a sentimental attachment.

Every time a meet dies, the sport has to reinvent itself. Institutional knowledge is lost, momentum, history and culture. It all has to be built again from scratch, like starting a new game of Tetris. This phenomenon keeps the sport from realizing its true potential. Overnight successes are a rare occurrence in any field, and though they are successes, oftentimes they lack the foundation to last. The pop up of a new meet either influencing or following the collapse of another is not unlike a pro team relocating to a new city.

“Relocation rips far more than just a team from cities. With the team go the community spaces it supported, the shared languages it provided. The utility of those things can be difficult to quantify, in part because they’re so intangible; they’re like a sheet of glass you only see when it breaks.” - Dan Moore, The Long Sad Story of the Stealing of the Oakland A’s, The Ringer

This kind of true love of a meet is something track fans and athletes dream about.

Photos by Amanda Gehrich

We have a tendency to cast things out or remove ourselves from things that we deem ‘not working’ or ‘not what they should be’ instead of digging in, realizing the value of their nuts and bolts and attempting to improve them. I’m not advising anyone to stay in an unhealthy situation. If something isn’t working for you, it is important to take a hard look at whether it’s worth it to cut bait and chart a new course, but it’s also worth it to look at whether you can be the difference in making something that exists better. That kind of work takes time, dedication, collaboration and service. That devotion is the fundamental piece of being a contributing member of a community. It is important for us to have communal gathering places, and projects we work on and celebrate together. We owe this pursuit to each other and to ourselves.

Portland Track is an organization made up entirely of volunteers that put in a tremendous amount of work year-round in order to make the meet special to everyone who experiences it. The team takes a long term approach, building little by little each year to develop rituals and elements that come to life at the intersection of organic and intentional.

Photos by Amanda Gehrich

The drum line, The Unipiper, PDX v SEA… and now SFO. The couch on the infield, log rounds as trophies, the Hot Window, the construction of the meet to build on itself and be broken up into blocks so that people can choose which parts they’d like to attend. ‘Paradise Alley’ and the ‘Electric Forest’. They have all been added over time, because everything you want to happen can’t happen immediately and you also can’t imagine everything at the beginning. It takes time to bring people along and to have them become involved as fans and collaborators in creativity and formation of culture. It also takes time to allow people the space to create on their own and contribute their own rituals and traditions. The intersection of organic and intentional creation is a wide crossroads that spans years. The Tour de France wasn’t constructed in a single day, or year, or 50.

In its 17th year, Portland Track is mighty proud of what PTF has become, and excited about what the future holds. It is a meet rooted in and representative of the city, and one of the oldest meets of its size in the US not organized by a high school or college. It is community-based, for the people and by the people.

Inside the Portland Track board, a discussion was had 5 years ago about whether we should focus on community or the elite side of the sport. We decided that in order to fully reach our potential, we had to do both. The performances of elite athletes are catapulted to another level of meaning when they're tied to the community. You have to develop the love of an event and the culture of participation and fandom year-round. When you do that, you have a deep-rooted, meaningful bond and a stadium full of track-loving fans who belong to something special. We also decided to pursue areas of funding that would allow us to build sustainably, year over year- to make sure that our efforts and our offerings matched the contributions to Portland Track, and methods of reach that were as inviting and open-ended as possible. If anything became unavailable to us, we didn’t want what we could offer athletes and fans to suffer.

The meet is a gift we share with athletes and fans who come to Portland and tune in from far and wide. Showing up and bringing the electricity is your gift to us.

Ringing the outside lane of the track at Griswold Stadium, inside the grove of old Douglas Firs are small potted topiary trees. Meet founder, Craig Rice began purchasing these trees early on, every year and leaving them for the staff at Lewis and Clark College to plant around campus following the meet. For years, the Portland Track Festival planning committee would discuss whether we should purchase the trees heading into the yearly event or save the money. The decision to purchase always won out. After a while, the trees became a symbol for focusing on the details, doing the little things and when faced with a decision, to do the right thing and not the easy one. Decisions to cut small details are gentle shoves that slide a meet toward losing its identity and becoming just like any other meet. That is the road to extinction.

Photo by Howard Lao

There is a moment in the meet, when the sun sinks low in the late Oregon spring sky and the lights come on. The air becomes extra still and the landscape takes on a golden hue. When the stands fill up, the grove where the stadium sits, cut into a hillside high above the Willamette River becomes smaller. It is transformed by the energy of the crowd, becoming a place that is wholly its own, and owned by everyone sharing in the experience. It’s almost supernatural. It comes to life in a window of time and at that point it feels as if anything is possible. It means something, and it means a lot to us that it means a lot to you.

Come on out to the Electric Forest… where the trees shake, the legs ache, and the stands quake.

June 13th & 14th, 2026 ⚡️🌲

Photo by Amanda Gehrich