This thread was started about an emergency meeting being called by Michael Johnson with the contracted racers of Grand Slam Track today. Matt Lawton of the Times of London then reported on the emergency meeting being called here (story updated to reflect the LA meet has been cancelled)
And Front Office Sports was the first to report The Grand Slam Track LA meet has been cancelled. Story here.
I went to Philly and really enjoyed it as a spectator. It really is too bad the East Coast will go back to not having a top tier circuit meet.
The only way I could spin this as good news for the sport is that we'll go back to having one top tier circuit, so competition won't be very watered down.
We are still in need of more meets that matter
We had a DL in NYC for nearly a decade. No one went.
Icahn is a horrible place to hold a track meet if the goal is attendance. New York is too gridlocked of a place for a major sporting event to take place more than a quarter mile away from a mass transit stop.
I went to Philly and really enjoyed it as a spectator. It really is too bad the East Coast will go back to not having a top tier circuit meet.
The only way I could spin this as good news for the sport is that we'll go back to having one top tier circuit, so competition won't be very watered down.
We are still in need of more meets that matter
We had a DL in NYC for nearly a decade. No one went.
What, at Icahn? That dinky ass track is literally on an island in the middle of a huge parking lot. Not ideal for drawing huge crowds.
I think an underrated aspect of why Philly GST was a relative success (and why Penn Relays and most of the DL events are successful) is that all of the venues make sense. They're in good locations that are more or less central to their respective cities and you can walk or take public transit there. Not so for most American meets.
"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...
This is delusional. Who is going to commit to the league with this kind of uncertainty? Maybe if GST does, in fact, honor their contracts and pay a few of the headliners like McLaughlin and Kerr, they'll show up and collect a fat paycheck against lower-tier competitors, but they're certainly not going to fill lineups with only the fastest after they couldn't even get through four meets intact.
I went to Philly and really enjoyed it as a spectator. It really is too bad the East Coast will go back to not having a top tier circuit meet.
The only way I could spin this as good news for the sport is that we'll go back to having one top tier circuit, so competition won't be very watered down.
We are still in need of more meets that matter
We had a DL in NYC for nearly a decade. No one went.
You can't compare Franklin Field to Icahn Stadium/Randall's Island. Franklin Field is very accessible, plenty of other stuff to do in the immediate area, and has a ton of history.
This makes me a bit sad, and definitely more sad than I thought it would.
I watched the first one on replay, it was pretty messy (as expected) and bloated (as expected) and far from perfect (" "), but it was a long block of track I could watch. There was some good action and it was nice to see all the athletes - been a while!
By the third one, with the two days, I thought they'd really improved. I watched it with my Dad and we really enjoyed it.
I'm not a huge MJ fan, and there was plenty I disliked about GST. But it was better (much, much better) than not having anything. To see it end before it could even have 4 meets, with the last one cancelled being essentially the "Homecoming" meet - like I said when I started, this one is affecting me more than I ever expected it would.
Maybe it's the hope of what could have been. Maybe I secretly let my hopes get up. Who knows?
I'd argue that cash was one of the major problems with GST. They made it all about the prize money. Great, winners get an oversized check for $100k, good for them. But in what other sport is the prize money the primary focus? It should be about competition and winning, the cash doesn't matter to fans but the GST outriders acted like it should.
The other issue was cutting out some of the sport's biggest stars. American World and Olympic champions like Tara Davis Wood hall, Val Allman, Ryan Crouser, and Chase Jackson were left on the sidelines. As was Mondo, possibly the best known athlete in all of track and field right now, and a guy who always brings his A game to meets. Really, Mondo alone would have brought in more fans than all of the short hurdles guys combined.
Cash wasn't the major problem, it was THE problem.
1) There was too much of it for certain people that removed the desperation and incentive to really run their a$$es of - the thing that the public and average fan can relate to.
2) It was spoken about far too much in the presentation even though the value proposition of the league was supposed to be about winning and competition. There is only so long you can survive when your product actively contradicts your alleged purpose (the Kingston long distance debacle highlighted this perfectly).
3) It clearly created a false sense of entitlement within the day to day organization all as some of the rumors I had heard about the travel, accommodation, hospitality etc were of extreme extravagance.
In an extreme sense, this was figuratively like handing a briefcase of 100k to a homeless person and expecting them to invest it and use it to turn their life around. It's so much money they didn't know what to do with it and the spending was so exorbitant that by the time they realized it was close to being all gone, it was too late.
Athletes not being paid yet to me is a MASSIVE red flag.
Also, of course they are going to say now that they're committed to 2026 and that some athletes have multi-year deals. That means nothing and unless they find some miracle cure asap, next year will be even less "profitable" (i.e. it'll lose even more money) than this year.
We had a DL in NYC for nearly a decade. No one went.
People went to that meet, it's just too small a stadium and highly inconvenient to get to. When they tried to add temporary stands, yes those didn't get sold out. But the inferior meet in NYCGP sold 95% of the tickets if not all, but again it's small. You did get 5-6000 fans.
The Armory which is far more convenient though still far from convenient easily sells out what ~5,000 tickets at 3-5x the price?
I don't think attendance is the issue, rather it's conveniently-located stadiums with the right amount of capacity ~10,000.
I just texted a TOP agent and asked hiim if he had any GST racers and if they'd been paid at all this year.
His reply.
"I have a bunch and none of them have been paid anything yet. Some agents yesterday received 40% of their Kingston invoice with no explanation."
Wow.
If I was one of the lucky to receive the 40%, I'd be speeding to the bank, parking illegally and trying to deposit it before close of business today.
Oof. If the finances are bad enough that they're not moving forward with the LA meet, I wouldn't count on runners ever receiving those prize winnings.
That's a shame, I respected MJ and Grand Slam for taking a big swing and getting people paid, even if the model wasn't sustainable. If the non-contract racers get stiffed... that's indefensible. $100k payouts are huge for guys like Trevor Bassett and Jamal Britt, MJ deserves to be shamed out of the sport if he leaves them hanging.
Talking all that smack about paying out 10x Diamond League prize money, and then paying out nothing because you went bankrupt? Come on
This post was edited 3 minutes after it was posted.
My favorite thing about GST is that it "forced" 1500 guys to run the 800, and vice versa.
But overall, terrible.
Slow, dark, musty coverage. No field events (which exist for their own sake, but also kill downtime). The "400 but for 400 hurdle runners" type races were confusing and awkward. Plenty of weak commentary. Boring long distance events. The WORST results page I've ever seen, which was fixated too much on "overall winner" as opposed to the races actually taking place. Stretched out too long over multiple days.
Pretty much worse than Diamond League in every way possible.
One day meet at better locations. NY, LA, Austin, and you can keep Philly. Keep the same groupings except get rid of the hurdles. Alternate races at each meet. Short sprinters do 100m at Meet #1 and 200m at Meet #2 etc. Add one “Wildcard” event that changes each meet. This is where you can add the hurdles, steeplechase, or field events. Depending on who you can get to commit to the meet. Points scored at each individual meet carry over for an overall win/bonus for each group at the end of each season (except the wildcard events). And keep the pay *relatively* high to get athletes to commit. That’s just my thoughts on how they can fix this moving forward.
There was a lot I liked about GST so sad to see this, although like many others in this thread it felt inevitable to me. The problem I always had with GST is that the things I liked best about it, namely getting people like Sydney McLaughlin and Josh Kerr to actually race a lot, including in events we don't usually see them in, was only made possible by paying them tons of money, and it didn't seem like there was any way for that to last.
We like to complain on this message board about athletes not racing often, and I think what GST shows is that they are willing to race a lot, but only if there's an incentive for them to do it. Without GST they know that how much they get paid by their sponsor is really only based on how they do at the Olympics/World Champs, so their only incentive is to run their best there.
In hindsight GST location planning was lacking. They got athletes by offering big money but that wasn't enough. It's like alot of super wealthy people decided they could figure it out because they're smarter than everyone else - kinda like Elon and DOGE but the skills didn't transfer. Just because you're successful in one area, have alot of money, and love track and field doesn't mean you can organize a league from scratch and make it work. My answer is still for the investors to pool their money and wrestle Diamond League sponsorship away from Wanda, and then they can help modernize and improve what is already working.
I have seen a bunch of Michael Johnson interviews over the years and the guy is about as exciting to listen to as a ham sandwich (I challenge any of you to share a link to an entertaining Michael Johnson interview)
Working for him is probably a pain
Not surprised Grand Slam Track is dead in the water (who the hell uses a tennis term for a track event)
As a track fan, I will be sad that there will be one less track meet to watch this summer