Lamine Diack, the president of the I.A.A.F., was at the first meet in 1997.

“A men’s-only competition,” Diack said. “I was told at that time, ‘Next year we will have women, and we will change our country through sport.’ ”

Ato Boldon, a former sprinter who is now an analyst for NBC, said that Tuesday’s vote “puts athletics in an area that’s never hosted and cements Doha as a sports city."

Asked if the issues highlighted by Human Rights Watch and others should have been a factor in the I.A.A.F.’s decision, Boldon — like FIFA officials before him — said the championships could be a force for change.

“If this sheds lights on those human rights issues, it will be beneficial as well, in the same way those issues have been highlighted by the 2022 World Cup,” Boldon said in an email.

Doha failed to secure the 2017 world outdoor championships, which were awarded to London, but its team revised and improved its bid for 2019. Doha proposed a compact plan that would lodge athletes and officials in high-end, city-center accommodations, a level of luxury that Eugene — a small college town with limited high-end accommodations — could not match.

The question is whether the crowds in Doha will be able to match the size or fervor of those in Eugene, the heart of track and field in the United States, which would have needed to expand the University of Oregon’s iconic Hayward Field for the event. Empty seats have been an eyesore at recent world championships, and Qatar’s temperatures could be dissuasive to prospective visitors.

But because of the intense summer heat — another concern about the World Cup that may force that tournament to move to the winter months — the track and field championships are scheduled to be held from Sept. 28 to Oct. 6, with those dates still to be confirmed. That is outside the traditional August window, to which Eugene and Barcelona would have adhered, and it will make Doha 2019 by far the latest-starting world championships since the event began in 1983.