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<\/p>\nThe city witnessed Carl Lewis win four Olympic gold medals, cheered Valerie Brisco-Hooks\u2019 historic golden double and watched Edwin Moses extend his 400-meter hurdles unbeaten streak. L.A. has history with track and field.<\/p>\n
Now when Ato Boldon, a UCLA Hall of Famer and four-time Olympic medalist for Trinidad and Tobago, looks to this weekend\u2019s L.A. Grand Prix and the city\u2019s future with the sport, he wonders what it holds.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always felt like L.A. needs a signature event,\u201d Boldon said, \u201cand with the Olympics coming up in two years, you look at the quality of this event this weekend, and you\u2019re like, yeah, this is the kind of meet they should have all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the halfway mark of the Olympic quadrennium, the USA Track & Field event serves as an important checkpoint for the sport\u2019s hope to break out of the four-year popularity cycle.<\/p>\n
The two-day event, which begins Saturday with the women\u2019s hammer throw at the South Bay Athletic Club, features 18 Olympic or world champions competing primarily at USC\u2019s Allyson Felix Field. Sunday\u2019s marquee competition beginning at 1 p.m. will be televised on NBC.<\/p>\n
With USA Track & Field building toward a home Olympics, L.A. has been a critical but stubborn market to conquer. Last year\u2019s L.A. Grand Prix, which would have been the third edition of the meet, was canceled in April. The decision, USA Track & Field Chief Executive Max Siegel said, came down to another meet scheduled in the same venue within the same month.<\/p>\n
But that competing event, part of Michael Johnson\u2019s upstart Grand Slam Track league, was canceled only weeks before it was set to take place at UCLA\u2019s Drake Stadium, leaving L.A. without a major track competition last summer.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe knew last year when we canceled the meet that we had every intention leading up to the Olympics to be present in the L.A. market,\u201d Siegel said.<\/p>\n
The city knows great track. UCLA boasts legends such as Rafer Johnson, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Florence Griffith-Joyner. USC, which boasts more Olympians than any other U.S. university, had athletes win nine Olympic medals in track and field at the 2024 Games in Paris, including double gold medals for Rai Benjamin in the 400-meter hurdles and 4×400-meter relay and a 4×100-meter relay championship for TeeTee Terry.<\/p>\n
After Terry ran the second leg of the relay, Sha\u2019Carri Richardson\u2019s stare down at the end of her anchor leg became one of the iconic shots of the Paris Games, where 70,000 people packed Stade de France and millions more tuned in for one of the most-watched Olympics.<\/p>\n
But the sport is back in the shadows like it always seems to be outside of Olympic years, said Boldon, now NBC Sports\u2019 track and field analyst. There have been several attempts to penetrate the U.S. sports consciousness since the successful Paris Games. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian launched Athlos, a women\u2019s track and field meet that began in New York City in 2024 and added a stop in London to its 2026 schedule. Grand Slam Track, founded by the Olympic legend Johnson and touting major names including Gabby Thomas and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, filed for bankruptcy last year, after completing only three of four planned events in its first season, and is only now emerging from it.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s inaugural USATF Tour aims to organize the fragmented sport by streamlining the calendar and working with existing event coordinators to provide resources, including prize money and travel for top athletes, marketing and drug testing. The tour, which was in College Station, Texas, last week for the Lone Star Grand Prix, has 17 events in 10 states.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
American Tara Davis-Woodhall after winning the women\u2019s long jump at the 2025 world championships in Tokyo.<\/p>\n
(Ashley Landis \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like LA28 gives the country something to organize around,\u201d said Siegel, who hopes track and field can rise to be among the five most popular sports in the United States. \u201cPeople are paying more attention to athlete stories in anticipation of what\u2019s going to happen on U.S. soil.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is no shortage of stories at the L.A. Grand Prix. Almost everyone who matters in American track and field will be there, Boldon said. Kenny Bednarek, the silver medalist in the 200 meters in Paris, will line up in the 100 meters against Botswana\u2019s Letsile Tebogo, who took gold in the 200 in 2024.<\/p>\n
Tara Davis-Woodhall, the reigning Olympic long jump champion, will compete in her signature event and race in the 100-meter hurdles for just the second time in the last five years. Her husband, Hunter Woodhall, will race in the 400 meters on Saturday, when Para athletes will be among those competing in the L.A. Distance Classic at Allyson Felix Field.<\/p>\n
Richardson will run her first 100-meter race of the season. The 2024 Olympic silver medalist could be in line to end a three-decade gold medal drought in 2028. No U.S. woman has stood atop an Olympic podium for the 100 since 1996, when Gail Devers won in Atlanta.<\/p>\n
Such a stacked field outside of an Olympic year on U.S. soil could be a sign of a changing tide for track and field, Boldon said. The L.A. Grand Prix is a gold-level event on the World Athletics Continental Tour, the second-highest tier of single-day international competition. As athletes vie for world ranking points, the event could be a true Olympic preview two years before the Games begin at the Coliseum.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis,\u201d Boldon said, \u201cis not a normal week in our sport.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The city witnessed Carl Lewis win four Olympic gold medals, cheered Valerie Brisco-Hooks\u2019 historic golden double and watched…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[6948,146202,1409,1043,6308,2303,146203,48,52,51,7036,47,50,49,72935,7496,2829,146204,146205,1557,72],"class_list":["post-359197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-athlete","tag-ato-boldon","tag-city","tag-event","tag-field","tag-l-a","tag-l-a-grand-prix","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-last-year","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-meet","tag-sport","tag-track","tag-ucla-hall","tag-usa-track","tag-woman","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}