Columnist: GST flopped in part because cutting the field events is like cutting the feathers off of chicken

I dint "miss" the field events though I like jumps and pole vault. Throws mean nothing to me.

MJ picked terrible locations with Jamaica and Miami.

He also picked bad investors

I’d rather watch wnba than field events. They’re truly terrible

If they come in between races it's better. If they are in the middle of the race, I'm not so happy. One problem with the field events is they're just so slow. So much waiting in between each jump or throw. Maybe having two apparatuses would improve this? Like two pole vault pits or two shotput circles?

One of the great things about having field events is that it cuts down on the dead time in between running events and gives you something else to watch. It's like a three-ring circus where something is always going on.

But I admit that applies more to watching events in-person than on TV. And making money in pro sports today is all about the TV product, not the in-person product.

This Jonathan Lew guy is really up his own butt. It seems like he doesn't know or follow the sport. It seems like this article is for people who don't know or follow the sport.

Right... each event had 90% of the seats empty because there was no field.

For a second I forgot those Jamaicans loved their field so much more than track.

You are 100% correct. He has posted similar clickbait articles about every other sport popular in the UK

It is hard to miss something that is used to interrupt the race you actually want to watch so you can’t see significant parts. It is like thinking marathons need more wheelchair coverage.

in terms of the concept, i think you have it backwards but right. there are too few races. there is too much dead air.

at which point you do miss the field events.

but i think it failed for financial hubris. they didn't fund a full season of sponsors, they didn't fully fund the money the prizes. they seemed to have relied on it being an overnight success that could pay for itself. my general impression most new sports leagues are like startups. they lose money. they just try to stay alive enough for lending and to see if they can catch on. he didn't even fund the league enough just to get it to the next stop and year 2.

maybe he had the idea that 3 days of meet would be more tickets but it's a tad goofy when we can barely attend 1 meet well to think americans were going to fill the stands 3 nights.

On a "world feed" without ads, field events can be presented well in a way that doesn't involve disruptive cutaways. It's better at the championships than DL events typically (outside of the final 3). But I don't think it had really any effect on the GST TV product with ads. There was just too much dead time on the broadcast before they cut it to 2 days, and as you said the investors and Jamaica as a disastrous location were the problem. By Philly, the amount of action on the broadcast was fine.

For in-person, yes I'm sure the lack of field events was a negative. But they could fill that void with how any number of stadium events do — performers, amateur races, Jumbotron stuff etc.

You got it absolutely right with the "dead air": that's when cutting to a field event makes perfect sense. But it failed before and beyond the financial aspect. As somebody said, Jamaica and Miami did not make any sense. Diamond League would fail there. And GST would have thrived in Brussels, Oslo, London or Zurich, with knowledgeable crowds (Jamaicans are crazy about sprints, but in general don't seem to care about any other part of T&F, even though they have excellent jumpers and throwers)

I think where T&F (and especially distance and field events) have a tough problem is in having the casual fan appreciate how incredibly difficult what these guys do is. Everybody can relate to a slam dunk in a basketball court. But non-runners don't have an immediate sense of what it means to run a 3:45 mile or to throw a 16 pound metal ball 22 meters. Find a way to show that an elite long jumper can jump the length of 2 compact cars, or that a high jumper can easily go over the height of a door, and field events suddenly are extremely impressive. Football players going over another player are impressive, yet hurdlers do that 10 times, much faster, and for the lenght of an entire field. Mondo jumps over a 2-story building. T&F has a perception problem in an era when people want to see awesome feats of athleticism but non-practitioners cannot relate. Something like the treadmill running at the marathon world record speed helps with the perspective. We need more of that.

London turned down GST last year as UKA has enough cashflow problems of its own and didn't think it could sell a three day meet.

This is silly. They didn't fail because they didn't have field events. They failed because they never had the money and they never had a business model. /thread

Oh spare me. GST not flourishing had absolutely nothing to do with the lack of field events. To be honest, I was thankful they weren't there. Let's stop acting like watching a discuss be thrown or watching someone jump over a bar is exhilarating. It has everything to do with weak investors, a terrible CEO with no track record of knowing how to run a profitable business, and just a bust in every which direction.

Agreed. The Philly meet only had about 8 or 9 minutes in between events. That's really not so bad. Here's how I'd structure an 8-minute gap in between races at a professional track meet:

• First Minute: Winner celebration/catching breath/receiving flowers
• Second Minute: video replays of the race with commentary
• Third Minute: Winner interview
• Fourth Minute: Hype video promoting the next race
• Fifth-Eighth Minutes: Exciting athlete intros and the athletes getting into their blocks or lined up at the start

I think that would keep spectators engaged, whether at home or in person.

I think GST had similar problems to LIV Golf. You can get a bunch of world class track athletes or golfers together and have a tournament or track meet, but that doesn't mean that people will care about it. And messing with the format doesn't guarantee you anything.

And unlike LIV, GST had financial backing issues from the beginning, which is instant doom for a new professional sports venture. It can take years to get a new pro sports venture to catch on. X Games were a flop when they first started in Bear Lake. But they had the funding to keep going until ESPN picked up coverage. GST couldn't even pay their athletes mid season of their first year.

I’m pretty sure planning for a check with $X0,000,000 that never came is why GST failed.

My brother didn't know the first thing about the sport. Of course he was dragged to my meets a few times. He said something like, "I like the anarchy of it all. Those guys are racing. That girl's jumping. He's throwing a weight never seen before!"

Lol. He couldn't pay track athletes $100,00.

There's no way any idiot is going to offer to pay that kind of cash to throwers and jumpers. Other than Mondo I can't imagine any fielder (that isn't someone who earned actual money from running) that's ever made a living.

The fraud would have been revealed right there and then.