Does anyone else think that Michael Johnson’s Track league will flop?

I was thinking this as I watched. They showed the other races but they were obviously secondary to the Kentucky Derby race.

The whole time they were hyping the horses and their teams- every horse with emphasis on the 4 or 5 favorites.

All this for 2 minutes. And!!! The final time didn't matter at all. Yes, they timed it, they talked about the 1/4 mile split but the only thing that mattered was the winner not their time.

We put too much emphasis on:

1. One or two runners and then one of them scratches.

2. The final time- then, when they're not going to set any records the race is appeared to be a failure.

It's a race between 8-12 people to see who is fastest at that moment.

And talk about money!!!! Appearance fees, expenses paid, prize, bonus- talk about money. Americans love to hear about other people making money.

I was at a half marathon yesterday with very modest prize money- this old guy standing next to me had no idea ANYONE got paid to run. He said- you mean Boston, NYC, all those big events pay runners?!

Michael Johnson should sign up world champions to be pacers in his races and then have them drop out like Beamish at the Penn Relays this year. Track doesn't get any more exciting than that.

A few years ago, MJ estimated that his current 400 ability was well below the masters world record, and then never did anything to prove it. I concluded from that that he was just not a very serious person. So personally I will be surprised if this thing gets off the ground at all.

that said, best of luck to them, I hope the league works.

The Kentucky Derby was not a good presentation. It was a typical NBC sh!tshow where they felt they had to show the "celebrities" (Kelce, Fallon, et al), but the race is always very exciting and an amazing 2 minute event.

Yes I agree with you but- millions of people watched.

The Super Bowl is a horrible presentation- the pregame is way overdone, halftime sucks every year but millions watch.

US TV money men tried to have the goals made bigger for the 1994 Football World Cup cos Americans have the attention spans of goldfish.

Same principle behind amendments to meetings in Athletics. They want half the events got rid of, and the other half remade to fit advertising schedules. So already deathfattened American black kids can get sold chocolate and other poison in the breaks. Freedom!

Should be a criminal offence to use professional sport to sell junk food..... but USA USA USA! Muh freedom, muh liberty! I wonder if any of the athletes object? They'll cry about Black Lives Matter garbage but nothing to say about anything that matters. Cos it all about the money baby!

This is why God hates the USA, it serves Mammon!

I think we've all run a good race then you tell mom or a friend,

"I ran so fast! I ran XX:XX."

"Cool, what place did you get?"

"Uhhh, I think maybe 4th in my heat, and that was like, idk I'd have to check the results, 15th overall? But the place doesn't really matter. You see, it's a non-scoring track meet and..."

With DL meets ridiculously going to Flotrack, maybe it'll be possible to bring more eyes to Michael Johnson's track league?

Track and Field needs team scoring. That would build a greater fan base if people had a team and a city to root for rather than just a few individual athletes they may or may not know about.

Unlikely. He's already splintered the sport by eliminating events and by not declaring 50-50 revenue sharing with athletes.

I think most people would agree that the model for track and field to most realistically follow is what tennis did when moving to the majors. T&F needs to ween itself off of the Olympic cycle and develop non-olympic competitions that mean as much to athletes. The marathon has effectively done this and you can see it by how much bigger the coverage is for a major vs any other event outside the Olympics.

I think one of the problems is that everything I see in the conversation about what's "good for the sport" is about is so fan focused: How can we make this more accessible? How can we get people to like us? How can we change the sport for the fans? That is some of the dumbest thinking possible. We don't need fans to understand what pace Jakob is running if they were to "head to their local track" or give them a mile time. What no one involved with track and field seems to understand is that fans follow the athletes lead and will educate themselves, if they're interested. I didn't know a thing about English soccer prior to picking up my first FIFA game over 15 years ago but it was on me to educate myself and figure things out. What I could understand, even with no knowledge, was what was important to the players: Premier League game (even against relegation level clubs) are important and exciting, early round FA Cup tie against a Legaue 2 club isn't. Got it. Right now track has nothing really important outside of the Olympics and Worlds, and the trials leading to these.

I don't know if "more prize money" is the real answer but realistically you just need to get together a stacked field and have an emotionally charged race. That's it. Just get a bunch of good guys together and make the race mean something for them. Honestly you can even do this without the top talent, like take the best guys who don't make teams and run a B-level championship before the Olympics/Worlds (like how UEFA has Europa League/Conference League underneath the Champions League). Track and Field has a great roster and I actually think its niche status positions it uniquely as the major sports are becoming increasingly commercial and sanitized.

Professional Track and Field is fake. 99.5% of athletes are participating in the use of an illegal substance that is not on the list yet. I liken this sport to Friday Night Raw. Fake. View the Olympics as the same. Humans don't run that fast, jump that high, jump that long or throw that far on milk and chicken.

The problem is always trying to make things meaningful. Only top 12 in each event get to run diamond league and you qualify by running b races? Now those B races have value. You can build up stories about people trying to qualify.

People want races but it is important to know that uncertainty is a major part of making races exciting. People racing the same distance constantly tends to get old. let’s see Jacob and Kerr versus some 800m studs over 1100m.

But that requires athletes/sponsors to push those events instead of just focusing on the Olympics/WC.

+1 on this. If boring races like the Kentucky Derby and The Daytona 500 can be huge events in American culture, I don't see how under the right circumstances something interesting (like actual people running) wouldn't be able to find a niche.

the only way track can become popular is if all the following happen:

1) all hurdles events dropped, and steeple too.
2) all field events dropped except long jump, high jump, javelin.
3) running events are 100m, 400m, 800m, 1600m.

Meets involve multiple heats of each running event and are still over in 2 hours or less. Sprints do not stand at the blocks for minutes before starting.

Qualification for the event finals meet is strictly by form. Top 8 sprinters, top 12 800 and 1600, by time. Each meet will see people bump each other of the qualified list.

I do think there's utility in streamlining the events list, but we don't need to ax half the sport permanently. Say every meet has 100m, 400m, Mile, 5k, Discus, Long Jump, & pick one of the hurdle races. Score those events over a season like a league table and have the results mean something in terms of either prize money or connect it to Oly/WC qualifying. This way you have consistency in terms who shows up (which I think is track's biggest problem) and they actually race like it matters.

On the side, you could also have a rotating list of other events and maybe even make that related to the location. The short relay champs in the Bahamas were cool but that would be a miserable 10k. Say you add the 200m in Miami and the steeple in LA and the 800 in Seattle. Hell, you could even loop in the world majors to get a couple marathons in the rotation.

The idea of making it like a reality tv show sounds appealing until you realize how extremely boring most TF athletes are. Even the few with actually interesting personalities lead pretty monastic day-to-day lives because that's what it takes to be successful in the sport. No matter how funny Cooper Teare is, its going to be hard to make whole episodes out of "yeah I woke up, did a workout, ate, napped, lifted, shake out run, ate again, and went to bed at 9" for 6 months straight.

+1,000,000. I keep saying this. People talk about trying to grow the sport and argue that if you have more events, more parkruns, more races people can participate in, ... that it will all shake out and we'll have tons of fans. To me this is like the NFL saying, "What if we hosted a series of flag football tournaments to get people into the sport?" See how dumb that sounds? Participation and technical competency/understanding have very little to do with spectator numbers at the top level. The armchair quarterback yelling at his TV probably doesn't go and read about how to best periodize his upper body training to throw a football the furthest, no, they don't care about that.

They wanna watch something fun with some consequences and stakes.

What does it matter whether it succeeds or not? Even if it fails, it could lead others to develop a successful model. You have to start somewhere.