Champion distance runner Jon Anderson knows about sports injuries and recovery. He also understands how innovation can accelerate human performance.
A longtime Eugene resident, the first home he lived in was just a few blocks from Hayward Field. In high school, he improved his race times thanks to tips (and shoes) from legendary UO track coach and family friend Bill Bowerman—advice that helped him go on to compete in the Olympic Games and win the Boston Marathon.
Bowerman was an inventor, says Anderson, experimenting with waffle-irons and soles of course, but other things too. For instance, he once cooked up a batch of sand, tire rubber, and tar to create better track and runway surfaces.
“He tinkered with a lot of stuff,” says Anderson, who enjoyed being Bowerman’s test subject.
“It was fun to experiment,” he says. “And you got free shoes. Bowerman would give one group of athletes the old shoes and another group the new shoes. One group would get better results than the other one. And that’s how he did it.”
Anderson ran for Cornell University in the late 1960s. But a stress fracture ended his hopes for a strong finish to a promising college career.
“I was on the rise,” Anderson recalls. “It made me hungrier, I guess. It was senior year, and I wanted to keep running after college. I wasn’t finished.”
Anderson was definitely not finished.
At the 1972 Hayward Field Olympic trials, fans wildly cheered him on as he made his remarkable, final-lap comeback from fourth-place in the 10,000 meter race. Inspired by their support, Anderson made up eight seconds, took third place, and secured his ticket to Munich. He kept on going to win the 1973 Boston Marathon.
It makes sense that the Bowerman Sports Science Center at Hayward Field is one of the five innovation hubs in the Human Performance Alliance, Anderson says. Because Bowerman was an innovator and educator, as well as a great coach.
“Bowerman was a teacher. He coached of course, but he didn’t want to be called Coach. He believed strongly in academics and the importance of academics to his athletes.”
A generous gift from Terri and Jon Anderson will help build an endowment to support the university’s work with the alliance.
“We try to balance our gifts between athletics and academics,” Anderson says. “This was a great way to give to both. The University of Oregon runs with a top notch crowd. I’m blown away by the elite institutions that are part of this alliance.”
—By Ed Dorsch, BA ’94 (English, sociology), MA ’99 (journalism)