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Where is the Track Capital of the World? Fayetteville, Arkansas
- Cory Mull
- 3h
- 9 min read
Massive success has shaped the Razorbacks’ identity over the last 40 years. But so, too, has hosting championships.
Written by Cory Mull
Ask yourself this: When does an idea truly take shape?
After a few wins?
How about five years’ worth?
Surely after a decade, right?
Ask yourself again: When are you defined by an idea?
Take the case of Fayetteville, a city of about 100,000 people in the Northwest corner of Arkansas, with its picturesque college town, its university on the hill, and a track and field program that doesn’t know how to lose.
You can probably point to the year 2000, right before the $8 million dollar Randal Tyson Track Center was set to open. It was back then, after a combined 34 NCAA Championships in men’s track and field and cross country for the University of Arkansas under legendary Coach John McDonnell, that something bold came to this city.
No one quite knows the exact origin story.
Maybe it was a couple of newspaper reporters and a throwaway line in a story. Maybe the city brainstormed a moniker. Maybe it was the athletic director.
But however the story went, the slogan arrived: Track Capital of the World.
“It used to rankle a lot of our peers,” said Lance Harter, the recently retired women’s track and field and cross country coach who led the Razorbacks for 36 years.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a little arrogant to call us the Track Capital of the World,” said Chris Bucknam, another recent track and field coaching retiree after 17 seasons leading the Razorback men, “but it probably is a little bit.”
At least this point isn’t debatable.
Arkansas now has the most NCAA Championships of any program in history, 51 and counting across men’s and women’s indoor and outdoor track and field as well as cross country (even after the program vacated its 2004 and 2005 men’s titles following sanctions by the NCAA). The university has hosted 16 national collegiate championships, countless SEC Championships, several NCAA outdoor regional meets, and the Tyson Invitational, the city’s signature indoor track and field event each year.
All of it adds up to a town built on track and field.
On Friday, the NCAA Indoor Championships return for the 14th time at the Randal Tyson Track Center. They’ll return in 2027, too.
“This nickname is so ingrained in our identity,” said Olympian Wallace Spearmon, a legendary former athlete at Arkansas and now USA Track and Field’s General Manager of International Teams.
Here’s why.
Behind the History
Back in 2000, the statement was warranted.
By the time the Randal Tyson Track Center was set to open, Arkansas had already racked up 15 indoor, nine outdoor and 10 cross country titles. The program’s legend was already sown.
The UTEP men were the only other team at that point with more than four indoor national titles to their name. The University of Southern California, meanwhile, had a boatload of national titles, but also called Los Angeles home — the Capital of Tinseltown.
The only other collegiate program with an argument for the namesake was LSU, which was the best women’s team at the time.
If the city of Fayetteville and the Arkansas the track program were a little too forward, they made up for it soon.
What happened next only solidified that idea.
Becoming the Track Capital of the World
Fayetteville became the center of the universe for indoor track and field over the next decade.
From 2000 to 2008, the NCAA Indoor Championships were held at the new Randal Tyson Track Center for nine consecutive years (and the men won four of those titles). The women's program won its first indoor title in 2015 and has proceeded to combine for four more (along with three outdoor titles) in the 10 years since.
The Chairman and CEO of Tyson Foods, Don Tyson, put up the $8 million to fund the new facility, Harter said, during a time when few other indoor tracks were being built in the United States.
“He said, ‘How much is it going to cost,’” Harter remembers of the conversation Tyson had with former Arkansas athletic director, Frank Broyles. “Frank said, ‘$7.5 million dollars.’ At the time, it seemed outrageous. But he (Tyson) cut the check that day and we broke ground soon after.”
It didn’t take long for magic to strike.
Championships were won.
World records were run.
Global superstars came and went.
It prompted the Arkansas track program to take things a step further.
They christened the oval, originally constructed in the 1990s for a World Indoor Championship in Canada, as “The Home of the Fastest Indoor Track in the World.”
Now that really rankled opposing coaches.
“What do you mean this is the fastest track,” Harter remembers hearing from his colleagues. “My track is fast, too.”
In recent years, collegiate programs have built indoor facilities at alarming speeds -- ovals sprouting up at Missouri, Michigan, Texas Tech, Pennsylvania, Liberty, and Texas A&M (again!).
Meanwhile, the NCAA Indoor Championships have crisscrossed across the United States over the last 17 years, with events in Texas, Oregon, New Mexico, Alabama, Massachusetts, and Idaho.
But to this day, the Randal Tyson Track Center remains an iconic destination. In February, thousands packed the house for the Tyson Invitational. Hundreds of children and teenagers bombarded Olympic gold medalist Noah Lyles after he won the 200-meter championship in 20.56 seconds.
“You couldn’t stand in it,” current Arkansas men’s coach Doug Case said.
It’s a facility, Harter says, that other tracks are even based on -- the track at Clemson, the new track at Texas A&M and JDL in North Carolina, he says. “You can go anywhere in the world and if you bring up the term ‘Arkansas Track and Field,’ they associate it with the Tyson Indoor Track,” Harter said.
Athletes who call this place home -- currently two professional track and field groups, along with one of the nation’s top collegiate track programs -- consider Fayetteville the Mecca of track and field success.
“No offense, but you don’t hear anybody calling Iowa the ‘Track Capital of the World,’” said Olympian Taliyah Brooks, a one-time individual NCAA champion and multiple-time team champion with the Razorbacks during her time there from 2014 to 2018.
The University of Arkansas Forms an Identity
You could say it all started with McDonnell.
The legendary Arkansas coach, who died in 2021 at the age of 82, led the Razorbacks for 36 years, his run beginning with cross country in 1972 and then as head of track and field in 1978.
In 1984, things heated up when the Arkansas men won their first cross country national title, their first indoor title and their first outdoor championship -- otherwise known as the triple crown.
“If you’re in track and field, you know what Arkansas means collegiately to track and field and all of track and field,” Case said. “It’s a world-known name. That started with Coach McDonnell.”
McDonnell went on to lead the Razorbacks to four more triple crowns over the next 15 years, cementing himself as one of the most successful track and field coaches in history even before the flip of the new millennium. Before his retirement in 2014, he finished with 40 wins overall, not to mention the countless other conference championships over that stretch.
Spearmon remembers the late coach as someone who refused to accept mediocrity.
“My freshman year as a walk-on, Tyson Gay, myself, and Alistair Craig are in a meeting with him,” Spearmon said. “I remember him telling me, ‘I expect you to get first or second. If you are as competitive as I think, we don’t have to worry about second.’
“Then we go to the meet. We tie for second place and lose at our own facility. John McDonnell takes the second-place trophy and throws it in the trash. He says, ‘We don’t get second, especially at home.’”
Naturally, Fayetteville became a place where athletes go to win.
Legendary figures such as Edrick Floréal (now the University of Texas track and field coach), Reuben Reina and Joe Falcon were among the first successful batch of athletes in the 1980s, while millennium-era stars such as Spearmon, Veronica Campbell-Brown and Tyson Gay all came later.
In the coaching pecking order, Harter arrived in 1990 and left with seven titles. Bucknam was introduced in 2008, earning two more. Case, a long-time assistant with Bucknam (he was even recruited by Bucknam to run at Northern Iowa back in the 1980s), took on full-time coaching duties in 2025, while Chris Johnson, the program’s long-time sprint guru, followed Harter’s retirement. Johnson also leads a professional women’s group in Fayetteville.
Since 2010, athletes on the hill have only become more established. And they have descended on campus from across the globe, from the United States to Europe to the Caribbean Islands.
It would be impossible to name every great former track star, but standouts like Omar McLeod, Jaydon Hibbert, Taliyah Brooks, Britton Wilson, Amber Anning, Jarrion Lawson and Jordan Anthony certainly come to mind.
“The girls on the team, they made it known,” Brooks said of her arrival in 2014. “We’re here to work. We’re here to win. If you don’t want to do that, you can leave.”
All of them pushed Arkansas into a new era.
Hibbert, Lawson and Anthony, in fact, earned the coveted award known as The Bowerman -- the sport’s highest individual honor. Arkansas is currently the program with the most winners of The Bowerman overall.
“I think people understand what it means to be a Razorback,” said Anning, who transferred to the school in 2023 after a previous stop at LSU. “It’s pride.”
Truth be told, Fayetteville has always been an iconic landing spot for future stars.
An Olympic Star's Arkansas Story
To understand this story’s heartbeat, perhaps we must take it to Spearmon. The 41-year-old may have been born in Chicago, but he was surely raised on the Arkansas track.
He is, in many respects, the native son of Fayetteville. He’s also the son of a two-time All-American on the track (Wallace Spearmon Sr.).
“I grew up around a lot of the greats,” Spearmon said. “Reuben Reina. Joe Falcon. Our legendary jumpers. Coach McDonnell and his family.”
Spearmon used to dream about playing professional football -- he even ran a 4.17 40-yard dash for Jerry Jones in Cowboys Stadium at one point (true story!).
But fate always had its way of bringing him back to the oval.
He eventually walked-on to the program in 2004 and before long was a demon on the track, clocking an indoor national record of 20.10 over 200 meters in 2005 and then a time of 19.91 later that same year on the outdoor oval. He turned pro soon after.
Spearmon, however, wasn’t immune to the stakes of expectation. If he didn’t win an individual race, McDonnell pushed him to be better. It often drove Spearmon to exceed his own limits, he said.
“This is the greatness that was demanded by this man,” Spearmon said of McDonnell. “You are going to sink or swim (at Arkansas).”
A Global Name
The greatest credit to a program’s success is the identity it establishes across a greater community.
On campus, a flagpole rises from the ground. There’s a giant red flag that bears the number of national titles the program has won.
That idea came to Bucknam, he says, one Sunday night while he was watching a Green Bay Packers game. The NFL team had a series of flags at Lambeau Field that represented their divisional wins.
At Arkansas, Bucknam decided to make use of a flagpole with no American flag. What followed has become a tradition. “It becomes a ceremony,” Bucknam says. “We put the new number up anytime we win another national title.”
There’s also the matter of community. If Arkansas is truly the Track Capital of the World, wouldn’t other people know it?
Well, Arkansas coaches and athletes have often seen this idea first-hand.
There’s the time Harter met President Bill Clinton in his office in 1990. “I’m excited you’ve come to Arkansas,” Clinton said to Harter, who arrived from Cal Poly.
Or, during another stretch in 2008 while “in Beijing, for the Olympics,” Harter said, “I was out on a jog near the Beijing Zoo and somebody yelled out, ‘Woo Pig Sooie.’”
How about this moment from Case?
“When Coach Bucknam and I first got here (in 2008), strangely enough, we went into a McDonald’s and the people recognized us and told us ‘Hey, you better win.’ I thought to myself, ‘Woah, OK.’”
Brooks experienced a similar encounter 2025 after returning from the World Championships in Tokyo, where she earned bronze in the heptathlon.
“I didn’t think anybody would know a thing, and then you hear people yelling like, ‘Hey, great job! We watched you!’” Brooks said. “How many other places can you walk into a Chick-Fil-A and somebody will know who you are?”
Best yet is the experience of Spearmon.
As a native of Fayetteville, he spent his formative years in the city and came of age on the track with Arkansas. During the early 2000s, he remembers local shops selling “Track Capital of the World” memorabilia. Things like key chains and stickers.
He was coached by a legend, competed at the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, won a World Championship. He was a three-time United States champion and a Diamond League finals winner. In other words: His career is Hall-of-Fame worthy.
Off the track, though, he’s full of stories.
There was the time he ran with Snoop Dog in 2024.
There was that 40-yard-dash in front of Jerry Jones in 2005.
Or maybe it was a day he spent with John Daly, the former professional golfer from Arkansas, many years back.
Turns out, Daly is a track fan.
Out on the links, Daly told him: “I really appreciate what you did for Arkansas. You know, you put us on the map.”
By then, Spearmon already knew.
Fayetteville really is the Track Capital of the World.
