After Day 1 of Grand Slam Track, It is pretty clear that this league will not succeed.

Didn’t LA Grand Prix become GST LA?

It is of course a bust and it’s a shame that Letsrun will not stop promoting it because they clearly have been given a cut or more accurately a bribe. They make me so sick I want to throw up.

I was there…I am here. A great night, home stands full of passionate Jamaican track fans…can’t wait for the next 2 days….

Had the same thought, any race over 800 would benefit from this.

Give it time and they'll work out the kinks. I'd like to see great athletes running in between events against rivals they don't tend to race. Like Hoppel and Hoey versus Hocker and Naguse in a 1000m or 1200m. Or Gabby Thomas verses Sydney in a 300m.

Ha Ha. The stands weren't full of anything.

This is about as low a crowd as I could have imagined.

The few fans there were loud however. Enjoy the weekend. Hopefully more people turn out.

Let’s wait and see what happens at the other sites. I’m hoping Franklin field will fill up like it does for Penn Relays. Philly actually has a lot of T&F fans. And having Penn, Villanova, St. Joe’s, LaSalle and Temple nearby should help too.

Hagos running 12.36 on the DL circuit but getting outkicked by Dylan Jacobs and Cooper Teare in 14+ race shows how seriously the athletes are taking this.

As a football (soccer) fan I am getting Saudi league vibes from this. It's just a payday.

I’m getting XFL vibes. MJ is a tool.

I posted on another thread like this earlier in the week about triathlon doing this with the T100. It's a little different because triathlon has just one event but it's similar because they're taking the best 20 athletes & having them race head to head in a season long series. They had to work out early wrinkles but it's survived & a little competition has been good for the sport. I wouldn't be quick to write off grand slam track after one day. I think they do have to figure some things out. 3x3 days/3 hours of coverage is a lot. I like people racing 2 events, & some off events, but maybe 2 days/90min would be better. They also need to hit social media harder. T100 pumps out a ton of race week coverage that really builds up to the event. The daily videos get between 10k & 40k views. Then they knock out some documentary type stuff that has hundreds of thousands of views (500k+ on some).

I wouldn't be too concerned about in-person attendance. Sports are different now. You definitely want to see packed stands but their success is going to be driven by their tv numbers. Plenty of sporting events do well on tv, even with lackluster crowds. 3 day events are going to be tough to sell. You'll probably see the best crowd on Saturday's no matter how big they get.

The 5k guys could not have done any more to harm distance running short of drowning kittens during the race. We want distance events to be popular and included in premier events, and then these guys go and make a mockery of the entire meet with a performance like that. They have no clue the damage they just did.

"Nitro delivers on opening night"

"The elimination mile was just as riveting, with the back athlete being
eliminated from the race after each lap. Essentially, each lap in the
race became a 300m pedestrian stroll followed by a 100m sprint. A race
certainly not for the faint-hearted, the change of pace was brutal."

runnerstribe.com

Nitro delivers on opening night

@runnerstribe

Worldwide running and athletics media.

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I know it’s time on the schedule but the combined 40 mins of tv time isn’t worth the 5k doubles for the LD group. Especially when there’s no pacer. The DL was looking to jettison the 5,000, but then wavelight and a philosophical change for athletes without Farah made it exciting. Now, you see why it’s a boring race without those elements. The 3K cuts to the chase and is short enough to reward being aggressive like Ngetich was. Hopefully they see the light on this one.

I thought it was entertaining. I'm guessing the stands will be fuller today and tomorrow bc it's the weekend. I have teenagers, one who runs and one who does a completely different sport and my non-runner found it easy to follow. I thought it lot of it was trying to appeal to their generation and that's fine by me.

Sure they might tweak it as it goes along but that's part of reimagining a sporting event. I don't really get the negativity either, track is a sport with huge participation in high school and very little viewership beyond that. I think there's the market for it to work and I'm glad someone is trying. I hope it succeeds.

Can you go a day in your life without fanboying Jakob on this site? What’s your motive for disparaging GST? Is it because you know Jakob would get beat if he ever dared to show up and race in the middle distance group without pacers and pace lights like a man?

If you don’t care about seeing Hocker, Kerr, Nuguse, Wanyonyi, Arop, Hoppel, Fisher, Bekele, Hagos, Kwemoi, Hull, Welteji, Moraa, Tanaka, Ngetich, Taye, and all the rest, then you are not a fan of the sport. You’re just a fan of Jakob.

Very entertaining Day One and now we get to see Hocker, Kerr, Nuguse and the 800 meter guys.

I thought I was the only one that felt this way. I understand that the money will get the athletes in the meet, but it means nothing to me how much they are getting.

This idea is always thrown about and it's fun but it's gimmicky. It won't last because eventually it becomes corny, like when they have people race animals. It's funny on occasion and it's a spectacle, but that's not what anyone wants to see.

Rich Gonzalez: "Two hundred sixteen runners under 9:00, the most ever!!"