Every major music act since "The Fab Four" has made it their mission to make the United States love them. 

Some, like Adele, selling tens of millions of records, have managed it. 

Others, such as Robbie Williams, a cultural icon in the United Kingdom, have remained unknown, with his best-selling release reaching number 53 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Williams admitted several years ago that he had come to terms with not being a massive star in the US and had given up trying.

But World Athletes President Sebastian Coe, a true child of swinging 1960s Britain when The Beatles opened the door for other British groups to make it big Stateside, it seems remains just as obsessed as cracking America as ever and will not give up until he has achieved his dream.

The double Olympic 1500 metres champion sees the World Athletics Championships in Oregon as the launching off point for his sport to spark interest in athletics, sweeping across the country as anticipation for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles grows. 

He dreams of a sport that is as much a part of the sporting landscape in the US as baseball, American football and basketball.

What most people see it as is a World Championships taking place in the only place in the US that really gets track and field (in the same way Americans call football soccer, they do not even use the name the rest of the world does).

Eugene is the self-styled TrackTown USA, a small city with a tiny airport, a sleepy, leafy university town, where former where Olympian and University of Oregon coach Bill Bowerman introduced jogging to America after a trip to New Zealand.

It was also here that Nike took wings, when Bowerman and middle-distance runner Phil Knight forged a partnership that ignited the beginnings of what would become the largest sports and fitness company in the world, whose sponsored athletes and biggest advocates have included Coe. 

To suggest that Eugene is indictive of how popular athletics is in the US is as much of a mistake of thinking that because you have spent a weekend in New York City that you know and understand America.

Even in athletics-obsessed Eugene, there are signs of what a hard sell the sport is in the US.

Crowds are described by organisers as "solid," rather than spectacular. Ticket attendances for the first three days of the Championships totalled 13,646 on day one, 19,543 on the second and 21,065 for the third. These figures are a marked improvement on the last World Championships in Doha - an event remembered for empty stands and devoid of atmosphere - but there are still noticeable gaps when watching on television.

Figures published by American information, data and market measurement firm Nielsen showed that for the first weekend there were 1.966 million viewers, very good by track and field standards in the US, but which hardly suggest that athletics-mania is gripping the country coast-to-coast.

That figure, tellingly, is a long way short of the TV ratings for the US Olympic Trials last year for Tokyo 2020, also held in Eugene, when the average number of viewers was 3.183 million - 38 per cent more than tuned in to the first few days of the World Championships.

Track and field faces an obvious uphill fight against the obsession in the US with professional team sports. Coe has pointed to a World Athletics study that claims there are 50 million recreational runners in America who just need to be persuaded into "believing they are part of that track and field landscape".

But someone who goes out running two or three times a week, taking part in the occasional 10 kilometres race, can no more identify with shot putter Ryan Crouser than they can with basketball superstar LeBron James.

Also, most American sports fans are insular with little interest in what is happening outside their own professional leagues. 

Athletics, along with football, is the only truly global sport where every country is represented and is capable of being successful in one of the 50 events that now make up the programme at major championships.

A glance at the current medals table from the World Championships in Eugene illustrates this. 

So far, 19 countries ranging from the US to Peru to Venezuela have won golds. 

That is great from a global perspective but not so attractive to an audience bought up to believe in the mantra of legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi that "winning is the only thing that matters in sport".

There are already plans after the World Championships to launch a Diamond League-style track and field circuit in the US next year with the aim of making athletics the country’s fifth-most-followed sport by the time of Los Angeles 2028.

News of that prompted insidethegames' South African reader Clark Gardner to send me an email.

"The new athletic series in the US supported by World Athletics had me upset," he wrote. 

"Eighty-five per cent of the world's top 50 marathon runners are from Africa, most of the middle-distance runners and even the origins of the sprinters mostly come from this continent which has so few resources, facilities and opportunities.

"However, Africa has never hosted a World Athletics Championship, never an Olympic Games and has no World Athletics supported series … Yet, Coe dedicates time and resources to a series in the US where there is plenty of investment, facilities, resources and opportunities for athletes. 

"Why is he not focusing on a series in Africa .... or better, just a World Athletics Championship to be hosted here."

On the eve of Eugene, it was announced that Tokyo had been awarded the 2025 World Athletics Championships, as much as compensation for having to host last year’s re-arranged Olympics in the middle of a global pandemic as because they were the best candidate.

"Tokyo will have the opportunity to fill its Olympic Stadium with athletics fans who were denied the opportunity to attend the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games due to pandemic restrictions," the World Athletics press release said.

I have no doubt that it will be fabulous. 

The best World Athletics Championships I have ever attended was the 1991 event in the Japanese capital. 

Even now, more than 30 years later, I only have to close my eyes to recall sitting in the press stands and watching Mike Powell and Carl Lewis produce the greatest long jump duel in history or how it felt like being slapped with a hot wet towel every few seconds as Liz McColgan literally ran her rivals to a standstill to win the 10,000 metres.

But it will be third time that Japan has hosted this event after Osaka also staged them in 2007, and I believe that awarding the 2025 World Championships in Nairobi would have provided Coe with a much greater legacy when he steps down at World Athletics President and offered more long-term opportunities for the sport.

Kenya’s capital has already staged two successful World Junior Championships and, three years ago, Coe appeared to back Nairobi’s bid. 

"We know it [athletics] is a national obsession," he told me. 

"Hosting championships in Africa is not a risk when it comes to crowds and passion because you get what is promised."

Now they have been spurned again, who knows when Africa, a continent which has provided athletics with so many great memories, will stage the sport’s flagship event.

It is just time for Coe to accept that athletics will never be as popular in the US as the major professional sports. That is okay. 

The sport is not in any danger of dying there and, because of its huge population it will always produce world-class athletes, even if they will only really prick the consciousness of their fellow citizens every four years at the Olympics.

It is time for World Athletics to put the "world" bit of its title back at the forefront of its thinking.