Track Town USA and the birthplace of Nike — where Eugene sits at the southern end of the Willamette Valley where the Coast Range and the Cascades converge and the Willamette River bends east through the University of Oregon campus, and Hayward Field (rebuilt 2020 for USD 270 million as the most advanced track and field facility in the world, primarily funded by Nike co-founder Phil Knight — the largest single donation to an athletics facility in history) hosted the 2022 World Athletics Championships (the first time the Championships had been held in the United States), the Nike story begins on the University of Oregon campus — Phil Knight met coach Bill Bowerman at the university in 1955, Bowerman poured rubber into his wife's waffle iron in 1971 to create the waffle outsole that became Nike's first iconic product, and Blue Ribbon Sports became Nike, Pre's Trail (the riverside running trail named for Steve Prefontaine — the University of Oregon distance runner who set every American record from 2,000m to 10,000m between 1969 and 1975 and died in a car crash at age 24, whose defiant front-running style single-handedly transformed distance running into a cultural phenomenon in the United States) is the most-used public trail in Eugene, and the Saturday Market (the oldest continuously operating outdoor arts and crafts market in the United States, founded 1970) runs every April–November under the Park Blocks
Eugene (180,000 city; 380,000 metro) is the second-largest city in Oregon and the home of the University of Oregon — a progressive college city in the southern Willamette Valley that is globally known for its track and field tradition, its role in the origin story of Nike, and its outdoor recreation access to the Cascade Mountains.
The Kalapuya people (multiple bands including the Tualatin, Yoncalla, and Santiam) inhabited the Willamette Valley for thousands of years before Euro-American settlement. Eugene Skinner built the first log cabin at the site in 1846. The University of Oregon opened in 1876, and the relationship between the university and the city has defined Eugene ever since. Bill Bowerman (track coach at the University of Oregon, 1949–1972) and Phil Knight (a middle-distance runner under Bowerman, later a Stanford MBA student) founded Blue Ribbon Sports in 1964, which became Nike in 1978. The company's found…