Coming up Millroses
New Yorkers who came of age in the 1980s remember the Millrose Games fondly. Its Friday night races, hosted at Madison Square Garden (MSG), were a chance to get rowdy in the cheap seats and watch world-class indoor track in a facility that contemporary racers would deride. This was the era when the Games’ premier event, the Wannamaker Mile, was dominated by Irish middle-distance runners like Eamonn Coghlan, whose prowess on the ramshackle wooden track earned him the nickname “Chairman of the Boards.”
On a sunny afternoon this February, my friends and I—washed-up NCAA distance runners—called an Uber uptown to the Fort Washington Avenue Armory, where the Millrose Games have been held since 2012. The Armory, as it’s known in the track world, boasts an athletic legacy nearly as deep as its military associations. Neighborhood lore evokes the image of Depression-era high school kids running 880-yard races on a strip of gym floor, circling dormant tanks. Later, as the MSG iteration of the Millrose Games was proving there to be a commercial market for niche sports like track and field, the Armory building was converted into a poorly maintained homeless shelter. In the 1990s, as part of a larger movement to remodel old armories that had fallen out of use, a coalition of philanthropists and local politicians worked to “reclaim” the complex and return it to its roots in sport.
Today, the bricky regalia of the exterior is as mean as ever, if slightly cluttered by signage. The preserved stylings of the lobby, with its off-brand Guastavino vaults, are needlessly antagonized by the garish displays of the National Track & Field Hall of Fame, which occupies the ground floor. Much of the remaining floor area consists of event spaces, distinguished from one another with period décor. Then there’s the soaring facility on the top level, given over to the fastest (banked, “mondo” surfaced) track in the city. With its exposed steel girders and plate glass skylights, not to mention a lingering smell of BO and cigarettes, the facility feels less like a state-of-the-art racecourse than an airplane hangar, but neither the athletes nor the spectators seem to mind.
With a resurgence in running club culture coinciding with a burst of young American talent at the professional level, there are more eyes on the Millrose Games than in recent memory—as indicated by the sold-out hall. It turns out the ticket I’d bought was for a seat wedged behind the shotput cage, my view restricted by two layers of chain link fence, so my friends and I migrated over to the standing- room-only area, eye level with the upper lip of the banked track. For most of the shorter races—where all six lanes are used—we saw little but the bottoms of the racers’ shoes. The atmosphere was still electric. We sipped cans of “Armory Ale” and watched the action on the jumbotron, which is reported to be larger than its counterpart at MSG. After multiple professional heats and one indoor world record in the men’s 3,000 meters, the crowd awaited the main event, the (ninety-ninth) Wanamaker Mile, with mild anticipation. The favorite, Josh Kerr, had pulled out a few hours earlier, and two-time Wanamaker champ and 2024 Olympic medalist Yared Nuguse immediately emerged as the one to beat. He made up for this predictable outcome with a spectacular time of 3:46.6—another indoor world record.
Still buzzing from craft beer and the residual high of witnessing two world records, we filed down the Armory’s tight stairwells, overhearing whispers confirming what we’d all been thinking: In New York, track is back. Maybe it never even left.