Grand Slam Track misses July 31 deadline to pay Kingston prize money

I had never done the math on this. $262,500, per event, per gender. That's so ridiculous. Like, in Philly, they had SML run the short hurdles but they still held the women's long hurdles/400 double. So they're paying Anna Cockrell & friends $262,500 to run hurdles and 400s, plus first-class flights and 4 nights hotel in Philly for eight non-star athletes to run two events that even serious track nerds (see my LRC handle) couldn't care any less about. That's gotta be 5-10 times the going rate for what it would actually cost to get those athletes to show up to a meet.

Even if you could get past this sinkhole of a current financial situation, that's so obviously not a sustainable business model, and just an extravagant waste of money. I mean, we all knew this, but the suspension of disbelief at this stage is just impossible.

This thing has taken a life of its own and maybe, GST can claim a victory by being a sinking ship but still paying their athletes in a shorter time span than continental meets, Ironman and T100. GST got the spotlight due to their audacious claims but athletes not being paid for months seems to be a thing.

Why do people believe the lies and deception steroid boy MJ continues to throw out to stall and buy time/take the heat off momentarily? He's a liar and a fraud. Definitely pocketed millions of the investor funds for himself too. You can guarantee administration guys got their pay on time, athletes did not. Typical exploitative and selfish business pigs. Accountability must be demanded and excuses/lies ignored.

No one ever said legendary sprinters were necessarily good businessman.

Even if some money shows up in the next weeks or months, who the hell is going to run these events in the future? Humiliation and shame for a great champion. He'll be in litigation for years.

Who is going to run a Grand Slam Track even in 2026? No one would be that stupid.

Really not much different than the Fyre Festival.

Way to rub their noses in it, Big Mike. I wonder what the "investors" think of this. What the athletes think, I already know. Hide the Bentley, I saw the Repo Man around the corner...

the problem with speculative investment like this is you have to have trust and faith and for this you need respect and credibility. this is why lif went for the shark (no matter what many think of him) and gst had mj.

but this podcats proves that mj is a lying piece of dirt, and anyone can accuse him of this in public because they have the best defence - the truth. he knew, a day before the deadline, that it was unlikely the athletes would be padi by the deadline. and yet he hid this and said; they will be paid. if he knew this was going to be after the deadline he needed to say this. it would have been simple; 'the athletes will be paid. due to cash flow, i cant guarantee we will meet tomorrow's deadline, we are doing everything we can to meet that deadline, but if we dont , dont worry, you will be paid as soon after as possible.

simple. honest.

but he didnt, he lied. no respect, no credibility, no investment?

new house and bentley? class.

oh, and no, MJ cant just say; i will personally guarantee the funds, which i am sure he could, because that would simply pierce the corporate veil in the eyes of his lawyers and open him up personally to unlimited losses.

Perhaps GST should have fielded fewer events:

-100m and 200m

-1500m and 3000m

for men and women. Four groups total, eight races. Ditching all the hurdles.

I think the should have made a success of a one off event and continue that way

Anyway format was all wrong

you realise what your first sentence says?

Surely all they needed to do was vaguely follow the Diamond League structure of payments and bonuses on the American continent/Jamaica and make it only 4 meets? Seeing athletes run twice and out of their normal events is just a gimmick and all right for a one off, but repeating it just diluted the novelty.

"Everyone just relax. There's a Powerball drawing tonight at 11:00pm..." - Michael Johnson

it would be highly unusual for GST to be set up as a partnership structure with a GP/LPs and capital calls. that’s how private equity funds are set up, not private companies. Typically, when a company raises money, they require investors to fund their commitments on day of closing. Maybe one or two of the seed or institutional investors structured their commitments to include performance hurdles/benchmarks to hit before they funded (this is still very unusual). My guess is GST received a number of verbal, non-binding commitments or had a lot of “investor interest” and marketed that as the money they had raised. If I were an GST athlete or vendor, I would consider that fraud. If I were a potential investor, I wouldn’t touch GST with a 10-foot pole.

That's EXACTLY what happened. Johnson lied and said he had the money when he was well aware that he didn't have the money and that the investors weren't legally required to give him the money.

Johnson was hoping that the first meet would go so well that the investors would decide to actually give him the money that he had lied about having.

But obviously the first meet didn't do that well and so Johnson never got the money that he had lied about having.

The athletes signed contracts with Grand Slam Track based on Johnson lying about having the money. Johnson is in big legal trouble.

The gimmick produced some of the best races of the year though. Specifically at Kingston with Wanyonyi in the 1500 and Gabby Thomas in the 400.

But the alleged prize pool was about 5 times what it needed to be to attract athletes (the Diamond League pays $10k for a win). And of course it remains merely alleged.

This is where venues, athletes & their agents are going to go if he’s pursued for fraud charges. With how chaotic and disorganized the entire GST operation was thrown together, I would be shocked if they did their due diligence to invest in attorneys who put together verbiage in the contracts to clearly explain the financial situation in legally-permissible terms. I don’t think they even understood their own financial situation, much less how to legally convey it to the athletes and vendors. It would be very surprising if they outlined the assumption of risk for nonpayment to the athletes based on financial backing from what we now know to have been essentially speculative investors, and to have been specific enough in the contracts to acknowledge this in exculpatory terms.

If MJ made any sort of statement to the venues and athletes that would lead them to believe GST had the money in hand, or even worse that the money was in escrow, it’s going to be very easy for prosecutors to nail him.

There is a slim chance this was disclosed and non-participant stars like Noah Lyles were keen enough to see the writing on the wall and look past the extravagant dollar signs. Maybe some athletes overlooked the red flags after being blinded by such huge payout potentials and they genuinely believed along the same lines as MJ that this was going to be the next big thing. But I just can’t see the likes of Harvard-educated Gabby Thomas, or other high-caliber olympic medalists with deep pockets for excellent agents, callously signing off on something so reckless if the risk was appropriately outlined. The overwhelmingly likely scenario is that they were misled.

Over the past year, who do you think paid themselves more between MJ and Max Segal?

Does anyone think that Johnson doesn’t really believe there will be a second season, but he needs to say it publicly in order to get investors for fill the league’s debts? I imagine his “ideal” scenario at this point is that he gets enough money to pay the athletes and then has a season where the league only loses a minimal amount of money and they shut it down.