Update: Grand Slam Track LA Cancelled

Crappy business model and no doping control. I had no faith in this from the beginning.

I'm sad for the some of the folks that are a little too gleeful about the demise of GST.

Its failure is not just a condemnation of MJ or Merber (who so many of you have spent years wrongfully clowning on) but it's a condemnation that track will never succeed as a serious sport in the US. This model was so close to something real and meaningful outside of Eugene that got butts in seats. It was holding a Tuesday afternoon time trail at some high school. It was the real deal.

This model won't be tried again. We won't see major track and field on the East Coast again anytime soon outside of Penn. We'll all be stuck schlepping to Eugene for the 18th time in 5 years to see anything worth a damn. Sad state of affairs. A less less serious sport by the day.

Franklin Field is awesome. Unfortunately, it will never see NCAAs, USAs, or Diamond League given the track itself, which truly sucks.

MJ won't disappear for us; he'll likely be on a BBC sofa come Tokyo.

An 8 minute event and a 13 min on two separate days.

The reality is that distance running is just not a good spectator sport. If it were, it would’ve taken off a long time ago.

Nice job crying about slow, tactical races. Letrun degenerates are why we can't have nice things.

Props to Michael Johnson for giving this a try. Grand Slam Track was so much more fun than Lord Coe's Diamon League.

This has nothing to do with ICE. Media sensationalizes everything. Most of LA is business as usual. Most of the protests are peaceful. Depending on which news outlet you watch, you're going to see the worst of it when, in reality, protesting is a big part of this country's history & nothing going on right now would affect a track meet so far out. GST appears to be running out of money. Hopefully they can regroup for next year. They have obvious flaws but it's fun to watch stars race, race often, & race off distances. It's good to see athletes take home some real prize money. It's good for the Diamond League to have some competition. Increased prize money was announced for the World Champs, which maybe can't be wholly attributed to GST but they have to be a factor in moving the needle there.

Hey, at least he went for it. When this started, I remember thinking, "I hope he didn't quit his job at Am-Ex."

Dude is a big track fan and smart but he has two young kids to feed. At least he won't have regrets about not going for it when he's old.

That's the saddest part - his dream of a big track league is basically gone. As I walked out of Philly, his glee was contagious. "I think we have something here," is what he said and then he was talking about how he thought they could sell out in a few years.

I was still skeptical as they often have 10-50k in the seats in Europe but it's not some wildly profitable league with big tv money. One fo the highest attended meets of the year is ISTAF Berlin and it's not even on the DL circuit.

A few weeks later, the thing appears to be history. To the guy who says people constantly clown on Merber, I totally disagree. He seems liked by everyone.

Literally nobody wants to see C tier fields double 3k and 5k on back to back days with no rabbits in a meet with no stakes or consequences. It is beyond stupid.

Another factor that may negatively affect athlete participation in GST going forward (assuming it survives into '26) is unreliability of scheduling. Presumably athletes structure their training months out based on expected racing schedules, and if I'm an athlete considering signing up as a racer for next season's edition, I'm going to worry about whether all the meets actually take place, given LA's sudden removal. Unless GST secretly warned the current racers in advance that LA was a no-go?

You should listen to our podcast this week with DL commentator Hannah England. That's basically what i told her - there is too much action in the DL for tv. They should not approach all races the same. They need a studio show for at least 15 minutes beforehand. Hype up a few races way more than others. Don't just turn the tv cameras on the 5000 guys lining up on the track at 3:13 pm for a 3:14 pm world record attempt attempt. Hype the shit out of that the beginning of the show.

Last 20 minutes of our podcast was with Hannah here:

https://podcast.letsrun.com/episode/2d2e39ab/donavan-brazier-is-baaack-jane-hedengren-superstar-hannah-england-guest-nico-young-in-oslo-lutkenhaus-800-record-track-talk

The DL needs some minor tweaks like how MLB did the pitchclock. Don't interrupt the flow of the tv broadcast with some worthless field event update. Give that it's own stream. Talk about it in the 15-minute post-meet studio show.

LA was supposed to finally feature SML, Paulino, and Eid Naser in the same grouping. That would've been rad af to see

In a stunning turn of events, GST will now request that all "Slam" money winners return their winnings immediately. Since only three events occurred, no events can technically be called "slams," and therefore there are no winners. This was in the small print of all contracts. Also, Grand Slam Track will rebrand to "Slam Track" effective immediately.

We had a DL in NYC for nearly a decade. No one went.

The fact that you believe a message board for fans could bring down a professional sports venture is very telling about said venture.

How many NBA / NFL / MLB message boards full of negativity are in existence, yet those ventures aren't in fear of a glorified text message.

Yeah none of this lands at the feet of Merber and I hope that he had some guarantees in his contract like I'm sure some of these clowns on the "executive team" like Steve Gera did.

I can imagine at some points this was incredibly painful for him. He's a running guy and knows the sport, some of the decisions/directives I bet he was just like "oh my god, what", but when you have a megalomaniac like Johnson running his show and at some point you just have to shut up, keep your job and preserve your own interests.

If anything I would like him to do a "tell all" in a years time when his standard employment non-disclosure runs out about what it was like working in a track league with nobody that knew how to run a track league.

Why can't stupid garbage like F1, where you know the winner of he race before it starts, fail miserably? This sucks bro, we're never going to have serious meets in the US.

citiusmag.com

Grand Slam Track Cancels Los Angeles Slam, Still Planning For 2026 Season - CITIUS Mag

Grand Slam Track has canceled its upcoming meet in Los Angeles, which was set to take place June 28-29 as the final competition of the inaugural season.

Open link

"The league is still planning to return in 2026 for a second season. Several athletes who have signed onto the league are on multi-year deals, according to sources close to the league."

No, its not dead, not yet. Not according to Citius anyway.

While this is a really, really bad look, I think this thread is pretty overblown. With the amount of money that was invested into this venture you have to imagine that some very smart people were doing their due diligence before they threw money at Michael Johnson. I think if GST returns in 2026 as they say they will, it will probably look very different and prize money will likely have to be reduced, but they're going to do what they need to in order to make it work.

I haven't really understood all the negativity around this league to begin with. For a website of track fans, a lot you don't really seem to actually like track all that much...

Of course this was a failure. As soon as Grant Fisher went for the money instead of the win in that 5k a few weeks back, I knew this league would not last. They called this "competition" a response to the Diamond Leagues, and that was a false "bill of goods", to begin with. No one outside of the most diehard fans want to see professionals running 8 min 3k's and 14 min 5ks, running times where they top African women could win and even a high schooler like Jane Hedengren could be competitive.

Now that they season is over the most hilarious thing I saw besides Grant Fisher winning the 5k in 14:39, LMAO was the 1500m podium get destroyed by Emmanuel WANYONYI who was literally mocking them in the last 5 meters.

Now that this pathetic experiment is over time to watch the Diamond leagues and more exciting races with the likes of Beatrice Chebet who would have beaten Grant Fisher by 33 seconds and
Nadia Battocletti and Faith Kipyegon and all the great talent that runs in these meets :)

I think one thing is clear and that Michael Johnson will have a new perspective on male distance runners after this first year and if there is a 2nd, major changes will be made.