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Sitting on a bleacher on a weekday morning, Gary John, a 77-year-old hammer thrower, pulled on a pair of fluorescent yellow training shoes and strapped a glove onto his right hand. Then he dragged a heavy metal ball by a wire to a dusty concrete ring at Moffett Field.
“It’s what keeps me going,” John said, before spinning in a circle, bringing his arms above his head and releasing an 8-kilo hammer in the air. It flew across a dirt field, landing just shy of an orange cone that marked 40 meters from the ring.
The hammer-throwing site has drawn hundreds of athletes to Moffett Field over the past three decades, according to Tore Gustafsson, a three-time Olympian and coach. Located on a barren strip of land adjacent to U.S. Highway 101 in Mountain View, the range is one of the few training areas accessible to the public, he said.
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But it now looks like the range is headed for closure. Last month, a NASA official notified the hammer throwers that they would need to remove all their equipment from a storage shed and lock box by Friday, Aug. 14. Anything left behind would be confiscated, according to a July 14 email sent by Gerald DePerio, a NASA realty specialist.
A NASA spokesperson told the Voice last week that the area “has been identified for future development activities associated with the NASA Research Park” and the structures on the site had to be removed.
“Individuals currently storing personal property are not tenants of the NASA Research Park and do not have an agreement with NASA to utilize the property,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
NASA did not respond to a Voice inquiry about the planned use of the site, including whether it was slated for a future housing project. It is also unclear when the site will be redeveloped.
The practice range sits within the Middlefield-Ellis-Whisman Superfund site, an area that is known to have groundwater contamination from industrial pollutants left over from semiconductor facilities.
According to the spokesperson, NASA is performing the “required work” to clean up the contaminants, which includes cancer-causing TCE and is being overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Threats of eviction
This is not the first time the hammer throwers – a group that includes professional athletes, coaches and high school students – have received an eviction notice. About every 10 years, NASA says it is going to build on the site and then the project falls by the wayside, according to Gustafsson.
In 2018, NASA planned to work with a private developer to build nearly 2,000 homes along the southeastern side of Moffett Field, an area that included the hammer-throwing range. The status of the project is not publicly known.
More recently, UC Berkeley, in partnership with NASA Ames and SKS Partners, has proposed to build a $2 billion space center on a 39-acre portion of Moffett Field. The project site is near the hammer range but appears not to include it.
Each time the hammer throwers are told they have to leave, they pack up their equipment from the shed but keep using the site, Gustafsson said. He added that they typically put equipment back into the shed about six months later when it’s clear that the site is not being razed.
“It’s not like we’re causing any problems,” Gustafsson said. “We’ve always been very good about keeping it clean and minimizing the people coming out there. It’s been very responsibly used.”
The hammer throwers first started coming to Moffett Field in the 1990s as part of a track and field program with the U.S. Army, according to Gustafsson, who was one of its coaches at the time. Before then, athletes were training at a site that was eventually paved over to build U.S. Highway 85, he said. When the army program ended, the hammer throwers kept using the Moffett site.
“Moffett has been pretty much the only place ever since,” Gustafsson said. “It’s lasted for 30 years so it’s been a good run.”
One of its biggest attractions is its accessibility. The practice range is easy to get to from U.S. Highway 101 and athletes can train anytime of the day, according to Gustafsson. Currently, there is no alternative training location for the hammer throwers. Land is expensive and it’s difficult to find suitable sites to lease, Gustafsson said.
The timing of the slated closure is not ideal either, as it hits just as athletes are gearing up for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. It is likely that visitors will also want to use the range to train and acclimate to the area ahead of the event, Gustafsson said.
NASA did not respond to a Voice inquiry about whether the hammer-throwing range would be relocated to a different part of Moffett Field.
For the moment, however, the threat of an imminent closure is not deterring John from showing up to Moffett Field several times a week to train.
“I will come and throw until they bulldoze,” he said.
