Why Olympic 400m Champion Quincy Hall Backed Out of Grand Slam Track & Why Grant Holloway Didn’t Do It In The First Place

Last week, Grand Slam Track announced the full fields for its second meet of 2025, to be held in Miramar, Fla., this weekend. The most notable aspect was that American Olympic 400m champion Quincy Hall, who signed with the league in October, has been replaced as a Racer by the Bahamas’ Steven Gardiner.

Grand Slam Track pivoted well, because in terms of star power, Gardiner for Hall is not a huge change. Their personal bests, 43.40 for Hall and 43.48 for Gardiner, are nearly identical. In fact Gardiner, 29, is the more decorated athlete, winning the 400m world title in 2019 and Olympic gold in 2021, but injuries have prevented him from making the last three global finals. The 26-year-old Hall, meanwhile, is in his prime after winning gold in Paris eight months ago.

On Thursday, Hall posted on Instagram thanking Grand Slam Track for the opportunity and thanking Gardiner for stepping up. Notably, however, he did not specify the reason for his withdrawal.

“I will not be able to compete in Grandslam this season due to some circumstances but I see where the league is going and it’s turning out to be something special,” Hall wrote.

Hall missed the end of the 2024 season due to injury, and he also missed the first Grand Slam meet in Kingston from April 4-6 due to what his agent John Regis told LetsRun.com was “a slight niggle.”

But injury is not the reason why Hall is withdrawing from GST. He is set to open his season on Saturday at the Keqiao Diamond League in China and has also been announced for the Rome DL on June 6.

Hall’s withdrawal — from the very event group, 200m/400m, in which GST founder Michael Johnson made his name — highlights one of the challenges Grand Slam Track has faced in getting the world’s best to sign onto its league: the format. As a Racer, Hall would have been required to race the 200 and 400 at four different meets. Hall has not raced a 200 since 2016, his senior year at Rayton South High School in Missouri.

“Unfortunately, he’s not able to be part of this event, purely and simply, because of an issue he had with sprinting and it made more sense for him to focus on the 400m event, which is what he’s renowned for,” Regis told LetsRun.com. “At this particular point, all he’s focused on is being the world champion in the 400m later on in Tokyo. 

“I think he wasn’t able to be in the position to be as competitive as he really wanted to be [in the 200]. His training has gone well but not enough to the point where he could show the real Quincy Hall. And I think for him, it makes more sense at this particular juncture to focus on the 400 and allow another athlete to have a chance in the Grand Slam.”

Regis did not rule out Hall, who was the 2019 NCAA champion in the 400m hurdles for South Carolina, participating in Grand Slam Track next year.

“It’s a great event that we think adds more eyes for our sport and I think it’s something Quincy will look at down the road,” Regis said.

Gardiner is an interesting replacement. While he races the 200m far more frequently than Hall (he owns an impressive 19.75 pb from 2018), he has historically been quite selective with his racing schedule. Since the start of 2019, he has raced a total of just five Diamond Leagues.

Grand Slam Track has signed some big names as Racers, notably Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Gabby Thomas on the women’s side and Fred Kerley, Cole Hocker and Yared Nuguse in the men’s events. But there are plenty of other stars who have chosen to sit out the series so far, including Noah Lyles, Sha’Carri Richardson, Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Julien Alfred, and Letsile Tebogo.

There are a number of reasons for that. The travel is inconvenient for athletes based outside of North America. Some athletes (or their coaches) want to maintain flexibility in their schedule rather than committing to four weekends of racing months in advance. Some athletes’ agents remain loyal to the Diamond League (for the record, Regis also represents Marco Arop and Daniel Roberts, who are both GST Racers).

All of that is why GST is paying salaries to its Racers and offering monster prize money. But for the very best of the best (most of whom are on big contracts), even that money is not always enough to convince them to do something they do not want to do. And Quincy Hall does not want to double four times in 2025.

Neither does another of Regis’s star clients, reigning world and Olympic 110m hurdles champion Grant Holloway. Holloway races all the time, far more than most athetes of his caliber, and raced at the Diamond League opener in Xiamen last week. He is also extremely well-suited to the GST format: Holloway was the NCAA champion in the flat 60m in 2019 and would be heavily favored to win all four Slams in the 100/110 hurdle group. But the hurdles is a rhythm event, and Holloway does not want to break his rhythm by being forced to run a flat event.

“He’s a renowned 110m hurdler and that’s what he wants to focus on,” Regis said. “When he’s ready to branch out and do other events, he’ll notify us. But at this particular juncture, that’s where his vision is.”

Holloway’s close friend, Olympic 400m hurdles champion Rai Benjamin, has also cited the doubling format as one of the reasons he is not running GST. Benjamin has frequently had to manage in-season injuries throughout his career and was concerned about getting hurt.

“If you want me to come out and run 44-low and then come back the next day and run 45-47 [in the hurdles], bro, what am I gonna do for the rest of the week?” Benjamin said on the March 6 episode of the Beyond the Records podcast. “You never know what might happen. I might run 44 today and be sore tomorrow. And now I’ve gotta go hurdle and now I’m at risk of getting hurt in April?”

It will be interesting what Grand Slam Track does moving forward. Johnson and his team will certainly evaluate the league at the end of year one, but having athletes double is Grand Slam Track’s signature tweak. It allows fans to see the biggest athletes twice in a weekend rather than once and creates cross-event matchups that would not otherwise materialize, such as 800m Olympic champion Emmanuel Wanyonyi facing 1500m Olympic champion Cole Hocker in Kingston. It also sets GST apart from other track meets — take away doubling and GST meets wouldn’t be much different from your typical Diamond League.

Eliminating the doubling requirement could remove one roadblock to enticing stars. But even then, there’s still no guarantee the likes of Lyles, Holloway, or Hall would sign on.