Register-Guard begins its big push towards the Olympic Trials...

I received an e-mail from Ron Bellamy, the sports editor of the Eugene Register-Guard, and president of the Track & Field Writers of America, an organization which I am a member of, in which he touts his paper's coverage of the 2008 Olympic Track & Field Team Trials.

In his opening column in the paper, Bellamy writes:

"The ’72 Trials were, in Eugene, a big-time event, and the coverage dominated The Register-Guard’s sports section under the leadership of sports editor Blaine Newnham, who attended the 1960 Trials at Stanford, and covered the 1968 Trials at Echo Summit near Lake Tahoe, and who had been inspired by coverage of the sport in Track & Field News.

In what was a unique approach in that era, the newspaper provided stories on every event, and devoted the sports front page entirely to the Trials. Such coverage embraced the importance of the Trials, nationally and in the track-sophisticated Eugene community, and became part of the newspaper’s enduring identity and philosophy; you can see vestiges of it today in our coverage of, for example, an Oregon football game.

It’s with a deep respect for that legacy that today we formally launch our advance coverage of the 2008 Trials."

Bellamy continues, "Beginning today, on Page D10, and for the next 10 Thursdays, we will present the Road to Eugene ’08, a color page devoted to covering the athletes who will compete in the Olympic Trials, and reflecting on special moments from past Trials in Eugene. That coverage will be accompanied by a Trials-related cover story on news, personalities and issues."

The Road to Eugene '08 can be read at registerguard.com/trials, along with archived articles from the Register-Guard pertaining to the event.