Mt. San Antonio College, the site of world record-setting track and field performances for more than 60 years, has been asked by USA Track & Field to host the 2028 U.S. Olympic Trials for the men’s and women’s 10,000-meter runs and the decathlon and heptathlon, the Southern California News Group has learned.
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The Olympic Trials events will be held at Hilmer Lodge Stadium on the Walnut campus on May 20-21, 2028.
While there is no contract between the college and track’s national governing body, an agreement is expected to be reached in the coming weeks if not days.
“They’ve requested we host four events and we’re determining if it’s practical for us,” said Jill Dolan, Mt. SAC director of public affairs.
“We are still working out the details but are looking forward to sharing more information soon about this important event on the journey to LA 2028,” USATF spokesman Jay Holder said in an email.
SCNG has also learned that LA28 will hold a meet at the Coliseum sometime in the early summer of 2028 as a test event for the 2028 Olympic Games.
Eugene was awarded the 2028 U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials on August 17. But the June 17-22 Eugene meet, with a reduced six-day competition format, is just three weeks before the Olympic Games track competition, 10 fewer days than the window between the 2024 Trials in Eugene and the opening day of track and field at the Paris Olympic Games.
Because of concerns with the reduced window between the Eugene Trials and the Olympics, USA Track & Field officials opted to move the 10,000s and multi-event competitions to an earlier date “to allow additional recovery time before the Games.”
The men’s 10,000 should feature a pair of Olympic medal contenders, former Newbury Park High School phenom Nico Young, and Grant Fisher, a bronze medalist in both the 10,000 and 5,000 at the 2024 Paris Games. The heptathlon is expected to be headlined by Anna Hall, who last September became the first American to win the World Championships heptathlon in 32 years, and should also feature Worlds bronze medalist Taliyah Brooks. Former University of Georgia standout Kyle Garland, the 2025 Worlds bronze medalist, leads the list of decathlon Trials contenders.
The decision to hold the Trials events at Hilmer Lodge Stadium comes eight years after USATF stunned Mt. SAC officials and American track and field in May 2018 by pulling the 2020 Olympic Trials from the school just nine months after awarding U.S. track’s premier event to Mt. SAC.
USATF selected Mt. SAC to host the 2020 Trials in June 2017 over Eugene and Sacramento against the backdrop of concerns over the funding of the renovation of Eugene’s Hayward Field needed to hold the 2021 World Championships. A month earlier, billionaire Phil Knight, the Nike co-founder and former Oregon miler, had pulled out of the Hayward renovation project. At the time, Mt. SAC was in the midst of an $87 million renovation of Hilmer Lodge Stadium.
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“The board, and especially our active athletes, were clear in their desire to take the Olympic Trials back to Los Angeles,” said Steve Miller, USATF board chairman, in announcing Mt. SAC’s selection. “Mt. SAC has long been one of the top meets in the country, from an athlete performance perspective as well as from an organizational perspective.”
In April 2018, Knight recommitted to an updated plan to rebuild Hayward Field overseen by the former sports agent Howard Slusher, a longtime Knight confidant.
A month later, the USATF pulled the Trials from Mt. SAC and reopened the bidding process, contending that two lawsuits regarding the stadium renovation filed by citizen groups against the college had created “delays on planning for a successful 2020 U.S. Olympic Team Trials.”
The 2020 Trials were awarded to Eugene three months later. The Hilmer Lodge Stadium renovation was completed in March 2020, three months ahead of the completion of the $270 million Hayward project, which was funded primarily by Knight.
The USATF move to pull the 2020 Trials from Mt. SAC came weeks after Walnut’s city attorney signed a stipulation on lifting a preliminary injunction that was preventing grading on a renovation project and a Los Angeles Superior Court judge denied a citizen group’s bid for a preliminary injunction that would have prevented the college from using taxpayer funds on a stadium renovation project. In issuing her temporary ruling denying the United Walnut Taxpayers request for the injunction, Judge Holly E. Kendig said that group was “not likely to prevail” at trial.
Hilmer Lodge Stadium’s place in American track history is perhaps behind only the Coliseum and Hayward Field. The venue and the Mt. SAC Relays, the world’s largest track meet, are the last pillar remaining from a golden era when Los Angeles and California were the center of the track and field universe and meets such as the Coliseum Relays and Compton Invitational were every bit as influential and record-shattering as Zurich’s Weltklasse or Brussels’ Memorial Van Damme are today.
Twenty-one world records have been set at Mt. SAC, including in the decathlon. Taiwan’s C.K. Yang, the UCLA standout, became the first man to break the 8,000-point barrier in the decathlon, finishing with 8,010 at Mt. SAC on April 28, 1963. Yang’s score is also the first mark to crack the 9,000-point standard under the current scoring system.
Seven world records were broken or tied at Hilmer Lodge on a single night in August 1960. In a pre-Olympic meet for the U.S. team on its way to Rome, five world records were broken, two more equaled. The highlight that night was Ralph Boston, a 21-year-old Tennessee State student competing with stitches in his leg after a spike wound, long jumping 26-11¼ to break Jesse Owens’ 25-year-old world record of 26-8¼.
“This is the fastest runway I have ever competed on,” said Boston, who went on to win the Olympic gold medal in Rome.
Boston isn’t the only athlete to experience a Hilmer Lodge Olympic springboard effect. Athletes competing in the 1984 Mt. SAC Relays went on to win 35 medals at the Olympic Games later that summer in Los Angeles.
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