Seattle Plots a Sports Carnival for the World
With the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition set to open, promoters arrange A.A.U. games, a Lake Washington regatta, balloon races, and a marathon meant to draw champions from across the country.
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SEATTLE, Feb. 11. — One of the greatest, if not the greatest, amateur athletic carnivals this country has ever seen is to be held here during the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, which opens in June. The annual games of the Amateur Athletic Union will be held here, and, in addition, there will be a regatta on Lake Washington in which all the coast universities will enter crews. The Eastern colleges have been invited to participate, and it is probable that crews will be here from Cornell, Harvard, Yale and Pennsylvania. Arrangements have been completed for the track meet of all the Pacific coast colleges and high schools, and the schedule is to be arranged this month when representatives from the different athletic associations meet in Seattle. It is also practically arranged that the annual army and navy baseball championships will be held at the Exposition grounds. The Pacific coast fleet will be stationed in Seattle harbor during the entire period of the fair, and this will be a strong inducement to hold the championship games in the exposition city. A big feature of the sporting program will be the international balloon races. Representatives of the aero clubs are now in Seattle arranging the details for contests between airships, balloons and aeroplanes. The classic Marathon will be the big thing of the field athletics. Dorando, Hayes, winner of the next Olympic Marathon, and Tom Longboat, the Canadian phenom, have accepted offers to enter the long-distance run. Wadda, the well-known Japanese runner of Alaska, is also likely to pit himself against these world-renowned runners, and there are those who say he may prove a big surprise to the athletic world. There will be international yacht races, motor boat races, a roller skating tournament open to the whole world, clog dancing championships, and practically every form of athletic contest known to the calendar of sports. Capt. Wm. Inglis, manager of the Seattle Athletic Club, who went to New York and secured the A.A.U. games for the exposition, has been elected one of the vice presidents of the Amateur Athletic Union, and is in charge of arrangements for the carnival. An immense stadium is now being erected on the exposition grounds at a cost of $25,000, in which all the field athletics will be held.
“One of the greatest, if not the greatest, amateur athletic carnival this country has ever seen is to be held here during the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition.”
The 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition remade Seattle's civic identity, much as a world's fair or major stadium bid now becomes a city's proof of arrival. The carnival's mix of international sport, military pageantry and aeronautical novelty shows how boosters sold a young city to the world.
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