Eugene Keeps the 2028 Olympic Trials, and USATF Cuts the Meet to Six Days

USA Track & Field will select its 2028 Olympic team over six days at Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore., in a meet that will no longer include the 10,000m, the decathlon or the heptathlon. USATF and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee announced the dates, June 17-22, 2028, on Monday.

It will be the sixth Trials in a row held in Eugene, a run that began in 2008 and spans the original stadium and the rebuild that replaced it after 2018. Organizing duties go again to TrackTown USA, the Eugene nonprofit named in the announcement. Hayward Field’s hold on the American calendar runs past these Trials, with the national championships due back there in 2027. The 2026 edition went to New York, the summer Eugene staged the World Athletics U20 Championships.

USATF’s announcement puts the meet at six days, down from eight in previous editions: the 2024 Trials ran June 21-30 with June 25 and 26 off. USATF gives athlete preference as the reason, saying athletes asked for a faster route through selection, with so little time between the meet and the Games.

LetsRun.com, which reported the competition details, confirmed with USATF that the 5,000m and every field event will be contested as straight finals. Straight finals also shrink the entry lists. The 2024 standards allowed 24 athletes into a field event and 30 into the 5,000m, caps written for a meet that ran qualifying rounds. LetsRun expects the field events to settle near 16, the size used at the 2025 national championships.

There is little slack on either side of the June window. The NCAA Division I outdoor championships are booked into Hayward Field for June 7-10, 2028, leaving seven days between two national meets in the same stadium. At the other end, Olympic athletics begins July 15 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, in the first week of the Games rather than the second, because SoFi Stadium hosts the opening ceremony and the swimming and needs time to convert between them.

Pulling the distance and combined events out of a championship is not new for USATF. In 2022, ahead of the World Championships in Eugene, it held the 10,000m selection race at Hayward on May 27 and the combined events in Fayetteville, Ark., on May 6 and 7, for the same stated reason.

The gap between selection and competition now varies sharply by event. Athletes chosen on the track June 22 will have 23 days before the Olympic session opens. The equivalent wait was 33 days before Tokyo and 33 again before Paris. The marathon team will be picked in St. Louis on March 25, 2028, 127 days before the Olympic men’s marathon, under standards USATF tightened earlier this cycle.

Several cities put in bids, USATF confirmed to LetsRun, and the host of the Olympics was not one of them. Adapting the Coliseum for athletics means building a temporary floor about 11 feet above the existing one, at a cost near $100 million, as the Los Angeles Times reported in 2024. No American will race on that surface at a Trials first, though The Sports Examiner reports an LA28 test event there in late May 2028.

Dates and host sites for the 10,000m, decathlon and heptathlon have not been set, and round counts for the rest of the program remain with the USATF men’s and women’s track and field committees. Qualifying standards and windows are due in 2027. Paralympic qualifying has not been fixed.