A crowd of more than 12,000 people attended the opening ceremony of the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials at Tad Gormley Stadium on Thursday, June 18, 1992. The event featured Mardi Gras floats and musical entertainment by local bands and musicians. (Staff photo by Kathy Anderson, The Times-Picayune)
A crowd of more than 12,000 people attended the opening ceremony of the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials at Tad Gormley Stadium on Thursday, June 18, 1992. The event featured Mardi Gras floats and musical entertainment by local bands and musicians. (Staff photo by Kathy Anderson, The Times-Picayune)
Imagine the Prytania Theater hosting the Cannes Film Festival.
That’s essentially what the U.S. Olympic Track and Field trials felt like at Tad Gormley Stadium in the summer of 1992.
If you weren’t there, it’s difficult to describe how impossibly magical the experience was for New Orleans.
The world’s greatest athletes — among them, Carl Lewis, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Michael Johnson, Gail Devers — were competing in the middle of City Park, in a stadium surrounded by oak trees and about 4,000 parking spaces.
Even now, three decades later, the men behind New Orleans’ successful hosting of the event are amazed they managed to pull it off.
It wasn’t just that New Orleans upset traditional track and field hot spots Eugene, Oregon; Knoxville, Tennessee; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; Sacramento, California; and Seattle to stage the sport’s marquee event.
Or that they staged the event in a facility that previously lacked an Olympic track, a working scoreboard or a suitable press box.
Or that the meet was awarded to the city, knowing it would happen in June — typically a dead zone in the New Orleans sports calendar because of the insufferable summer heat, a time when many locals abandon the city for vacations in more temperate locales like the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina or the white sandy beaches of the Florida panhandle.
It’s that they did it with relatively little funding and almost no experience or expertise in hosting a major track and field meet.
“We had no idea what we were doing,” said Mike Millay, who spearheaded the New Orleans bid as the director of the nascent Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation. “We were going hand to mouth at the time. We didn’t know what we didn’t know.”
At the time, New Orleans hadn’t hosted a major track meet in nearly four decades.
What’s more, it didn’t have a ready-made venue. Tad Gormley Stadium was built during the Depression-era Works Progress Administration and had been neglected for years.
A stony, Romanesque structure in City Park, the 26,000-seat stadium was originally designed to host community events like March of Dimes parades, summer concerts by the New Orleans Opera and the Eighth National Eucharistie Congress, an enormous gathering of Catholic clerics and laity. It later hosted everything from New Orleans Pelicans baseball games to Beatles and Bob Hope concerts.
But by the late 1980s, it had fallen into disrepair and was badly in need of a face-lift.
“(Tad Gormley) was a 55-year-old, WPA-era, rat-infested stadium with a cinder track,” said Doug Thornton, who led the team’s fundraising efforts on the project. “We were the only one of those five cities that did not have a track, that did not have the infrastructure. Those five cities all had pedigrees. They had all hosted NCAA (track and field) championships. They had all hosted Trials.”
For these reasons, New Orleans was considered a major underdog to land the event when bidding started in the winter of 1989.
“People laughed at us when we first started bidding,” said Sam Semmes, the former LSU track coach who served as the technical director for the New Orleans group. “We sold a dream.”
Yet New Orleans won the bid, thanks to some good, old-fashioned Louisiana politics, a dose of New Orleans hospitality and an impassioned sales pitch that included a series of beautiful artists' renderings of a renovated Tad Gormley.
Millay famously greased the skids with selection committee members three years earlier by hosting a party at the annual meeting of the U.S. track and field governing body, then known as The Athletic Congress, now U.S. Track and Field. The party at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Washington D.C. featured unlimited supplies of Gulf shrimp and Pat O’Brien’s hurricanes, along with an extra helping New Orleans hubris.
Local organizers sold TAC officials on their plan to make the Trials a Super Bowl-like event, replete with luxury suites in the stadium and a festival-like atmosphere before, during and after the competition.
“The pitch was, ‘Come here, and we’re going to make it larger than life,’ ” said Jay Cicero, the president of GNOSF, who oversaw ticket sales for as a special events coordinator.
The sale pitch worked. New Orleans shocked the sports world by landing the event in an overwhelming 7-2 vote by the nine-person Olympic Trials selection committee.
“No one thought we could pull it off,” Thornton said. “We saw it as an opportunity to create something special for the community and renovate Tad Gormley at the same time.”
The positive vote came with the understanding that Tad Gormley would get a new track and face-lift for the trials.
Pat Rico, the head of the selection committee, said at the time: “We picked New Orleans because we felt their site would truly be a state-of-the-art facility.”
The renovation required massive replacement of the stadium’s subsurface drainage system and field underlay, installation of a new artificial playing surface and replacing of the old cinder track with a modern polyurethane track, a new press box, new lighting, new concession areas, new restrooms and a new electronic scoreboard, along with the construction of a 400-meter practice track adjacent to the stadium.
Originally, local officials projected a $3 million budget for the renovation. But those early estimates fell woefully short once the actual work began. The renovation’s final price tag of $8 million was funded by various public and private sources.
Even then, local organizers frantically flew by the seat of their pants to complete last-minute preparations for the event that summer.
Thornton recalled working until late on the weekend before the event to slap fresh coats of paint on the restrooms at Tad Gormley.
Jay Romig, one of the 2,500 volunteer workers at the event, remembered the scoreboard short-circuiting during a test run a couple of days before the event. The explosion scattered lens covers for the light bulbs in the board across the track below.
The (Portland) Oregonian reported that “dozens of workers still were painting, hanging doors and putting the finishing touches on the polyurethane track” on the day before the opening ceremonies were scheduled to be held.
During the Metro Conference track and field meet a few weeks before the Trials, the javelin, shot put, discus and hammer throw had to take place on the practice field across the street because the new artificial turf playing surface in Tad Gormley had not been fully tested for competition in the throwing events.
During the week before the Trials, a multi-layer sub-surface of plywood and porous insulation fiberboard was installed to cover and protect the new turf field in the stadium. The top layer was older artificial turf imported from Northern Iowa University and the Tacoma Dome.
Even then, officials weren’t 100 percent sure javelins would stick in the specialized field or not be damaged by it.
“When they had the warmups for the javelin before the Trials, everybody went out to watch,” Thornton said. “We were scared to death: Is this gonna work?!”
Thankfully, the javelins stuck. But midway through the meet, another problem developed: The plywood boards under the turf infield started to buckle in the relentless heat and humidity.
“We had a group of (Orleans Parish) Sheriff (Charles) Foti’s prisoners out there every morning, replacing the warped boards,” Millay said.
Officials also were forced to erect a series of makeshift barriers to catch the 16-pound, iron-and-steel sphere weights in the hammer throw competition.
“Normally, a hammer lands and just indents (in the field), but (at Tad Gormley) it would do a big bounce, like 20 or 30 feet in the air, then it would roll with speed across the turf,” Seemes said. “It all worked out. But part of it was, we were pretty lucky.”
Delivering on their promise to make the New Orleans event unlike any other in Trials history, local organizers staged an opening ceremony that featured a parade of Mardi Gras floats and entertainment from singer Rita Coolidge and local marching bands.
The trials themselves featured a Who’s Who of the sport, a star-studded field that featured 30 future National Track and Field Hall of Famers, including Lewis, Joyner-Kersee, Johnson, Devers, Leroy Burrell, Gwen Torrence, Mike Powell, Evelyn Ashford, Mike Conley, Mary Slaney, Lance Deal, Marion Jones, Hollis Conway, Roger Kingdom and Dan O’Brien.
But the event will be remembered less for its winners than its losers.
Lewis, considered the fastest man in the world, failed to qualify in the 100-meter dash and missed the making the U.S. team in the 200 by one one-hundredth of a second.
Slaney and Greg Foster also finished fourth by footsteps in women’s 1,500 meters and men’s 110 hurdles, respectively. Kingdom crashed into a hurdle. Butch Reynolds, the silver medalist in the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games, failed to qualify in the 400 after winning a lengthy, highly publicized court battle over what he deemed an unjust drug suspension by the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF), track and field’s world governing organization.
But everything paled in comparison to the Dan O’Brien saga. O'Brien entered the Trials as one of track’s biggest names and marquee attractions. The 26-year-old Portland, Oregon, native was the reigning U.S. and world champion and universally regarded as the best decathlete on the planet. He and fellow decathlete Dave Johnson were the focus of a glitzy, summer-long $25 million marketing campaign by Reebok.
Then, on the second day of the competition, with hundreds of fans watching from the stands in red “Dan” and blue “Dave” T-shirts, O’Brien shockingly “no-heighted” in the decathlon pole vault and finished an unthinkable 11th.
To this day, O’Brien’s ill-fated performance is listed among sports’ all-time busts by historians.
“It was the biggest story in sports, the shot heard ’round the world,” Semmes said. “He just had a bad day at the office. I hated it for him.”
All in all, the meet was a rousing success. There were no major incidents from the heat. The official attendance of 137,262 was the second-largest in Trials history. More than 2,500 volunteers assisted in the effort.
Frank Greenberg, USA Track's former president, rated the city's performance a 12 on a 1-to-10-scale.
“It was just bigger than life, everything that happened during that event. The renovation. The athletes. The crowds. The event itself and how hot it was. And then, all of the storylines that came along with it,” Cicero said. “It was pretty amazing.”
Alas, the Trials were a one-and-done proposition for New Orleans. The city was one of three finalists for the 2000 trials but lost out to Sacramento. Tad Gormley played host to the NCAA Track and Field Championship meet in 1993, USA Track and Field’s championship meet in 1994, but that was it. Since then, the stadium has mainly served as a venue for high school sports events.
The New Orleans trials were seen as a trend-setter of sorts. The five-star hotel rooms provided for athletes and portable luxury boxes constructed to host sponsors and VIPs became standard operating procedure for future Trials.
The event’s success also helped New Orleans land the 1993 Final Four and the 1995 U.S. Gymnastics Championships.
Moreover, it helped launch the careers of Millay, Thornton and Cicero. Millay left New Orleans in 1994 to become executive director of sports events at Walt Disney World. Thornton replaced Millay as executive director of the sports foundation and served in that capacity until 1997, when he left to become general manager of the Superdome. Today, Thornton is an executive vice president at ASM Global, the company that manages the Superdome and the Smoothie King Center. Cicero replaced Thornton and has been in the lead role ever since.
“To this day, that was one of the top five things I’ve ever done in the world of sports,” Millay said. “That event really changed the Sports Foundation. It changed its brand, it changed its visibility and launched us into the next level of credibility in the community."
The Trials weren’t as high-profile as the Super Bowls, Final Fours and Sugar Bowls the city was accustomed to hosting over the years. But in many ways, they were more important. They were the first major sporting event lured to the city by the sports foundation. Their success cemented the city’s reputation as a world-class sporting venue and paved the way for future events to come here.
“It was one of the best events we ever hosted in New Orleans,” Thornton said.
It certainly was one of the most improbable ones.
“No one thought we could pull it off,” Thornton said. “But for 10 days, we were the epicenter of the sports world.”
Email Jeff Duncan at JDuncan@theadvocate.com or follow him on Twitter at @JeffDuncan_
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