Michael Johnson wants Grand Slam Track to transform his sport, to ‘pour fuel’ on track’s fire

Michael Johnson recalls the evening before this interview, when he was out for dinner in Los Angeles and bumped into Olympic champions Vernon Norwood and Rai Benjamin.

Norwood, 33, has won two Olympic golds for the U.S. in the 4 x 400m relay and Benjamin, 27, is a three-time Olympic champion who won 400m hurdles and relay gold last summer.

“Nobody knew who they were,” says Johnson, a four-time Olympic gold medallist and one of the greatest athletes in his sport’s history.

“That’s the issue with this sport. Rai Benjamin is the Olympic champion and one of the best track athletes in the world. But only once every four years can he compete on a grand stage that cuts through.”

This is what Johnson, now 57, wants to change. He is attempting to transform his sport with a global league, Grand Slam Track (GST).

The premise is simple: He wants to make track athletes relevant between the Olympics. Johnson believes they ought to be better paid, and the best way to achieve that is through a defined league structure where star names are contracted, helping fans and broadcasters discover recurring characters who can develop storylines and rivalries at a more appealing cadence.

“Going back to when I was competing,” he explains, “I always felt like people knew me as an Olympic champion. They knew me as ‘Oh, you’re the fastest in the world’, but they didn’t really know why other than because they saw me three years ago in the Olympics.

“But I was competing every year, working really hard, training, winning races, dominating, but nobody really knew that part about me. I found myself being the best in the world, but having to explain. I’d even get people going, ‘Oh, what are you doing now?’ when I was in the middle of my professional career.”

Next year will mark 30 years since the Atlanta Olympics, where Johnson, in his golden Nikes, became the first and still the only man to achieve the 200m and 400m Olympic double, breaking the 200m world record with a time which stood for 12 years until Usain Bolt obliterated it. Johnson believes he is lucky he made history during a home Games.

Johnson wearing his iconic gold spikes at the Atlanta Olympics. (Getty Images)

“If I did that in Barcelona (4 x 400m gold) or Sydney (400m gold), my other two Olympics, I don’t know that my profile and my ability to sustain and build a brand over this time would have been what it has been,” he says.

“It’s really hard,” he adds. “You’re not an L.A. Laker, where the Lakers have a huge social media following and a brand that is helping you build it out. On top of that, the NBA (as a league) is helping to build your brand because you are playing 80-plus games a year where you’re on TV and sports media outlets are re-showing clips, reporting on the league.

“Maybe a more appropriate comparison is Rory McIlroy, who just won the Masters. It’s been a while since he’s won a major, but he was still out there. Everybody knows who he is… When he plays a U.S. Open, or even the Waste Management Open over in Phoenix, that sport has a profile because it’s the PGA Tour and everybody knows that the best players play on the PGA Tour.”

Johnson celebrates winning the men’s 200m at the 1996 Olympics in world-record time. (Getty Images)

Since retirement, Johnson has distinguished himself as a pundit, most often on the BBC in the United Kingdom. The Texan, who studied for a business degree at Baylor University while training as a sprinter, has also become a public speaker and entrepreneur.

While he enjoyed the financial benefits of being an Olympic champion, he has witnessed the economic strain on those who fell short of the very highest level.

In Johnson’s mind, the league will provide a platform for world-class athletes to demonstrate their talents regularly, “just like NFL players do, just like Premier League players do, just like Formula One drivers do.”

Since 2010, the most notable global track and field series has been the invitational Diamond League, in which athletes try to accumulate the most points over 14 meetings to qualify for the end-of-season final and a chance to be crowned the Diamond League champion.

The Diamond League says this season around $18 million (£13.47 million) will be paid to athletes, which includes promotional fees for the biggest names. But Johnson argues earning a living on the circuit can be “extremely difficult” — especially if you are based in North America.

“Seventy-plus percent of the athletes who won medals in the Paris Olympics in the track events, just the running events, live and train here in North America. Regardless of what country they represent, they travel to Europe or China, or elsewhere for most of their meets,” Johnson says.

“If they’re competing in a Diamond League event, for example, and they’re not getting an appearance fee, they’ve got to (find the money) to travel over there.

“And then everything is based on every four years at the Olympics. If you win a medal there, then you’re in really good shape. You have a contract with Nike, Adidas, or whoever, that pay you based on that and pay you bonuses. If you fail, then you are in danger of actually losing your contract or reducing the value of that contract.”

Johnson says he has $30 million worth of investment behind him for GST. The league’s opening season, which consists of four meets, launched in Kingston, Jamaica, last month. The next is this weekend in Miami, before events at Philadelphia and Los Angeles in May and June respectively.

GST has signed up 48 of the best track athletes in the world — equally spread across men and women — and, fitness permitting, they are contracted to attend all four meets. The idea, therefore, is for people to tune in four times per year — think tennis Grand Slams (perhaps the clue is in the name) — rather than once every four years.

GST race groups for 2025

Event	Race 1	Race 2
Short sprints	100m	200m
Long sprints	200m	400m
Short hurdles	110/100m hurdles (men/women)	100m
Long hurdles	400m hurdles	400m
Short distance	800m	1500m
Long distance	3,000m	5,000m

Each participant will run two races each weekend and their combined score gives a total Slam placing, which in turn decides the prize: $100,000 (£74,893) for a first-place finish down to $10,000 (£7,489) for eighth place. Athletes also receive business class travel, athlete support services, base compensation for participating and access to the GST content team who can help build the athlete’s brand by being part of a league.

There are also 48 challengers in each slam who are vying to be considered as racers for the next GST season. Their travel and reasonable expenses are covered, plus a $2,000 (£1,497) appearance fee. The eighth-placed $10,000 cash prize means they leave the weekend with a minimum of $12,000 (£8,987).

Notably, there are no field events, which has drawn some criticism. “I think I can save track, I don’t think I can save track and field,” Johnson told the BBC.

Highlights of the Jamaica meet came in different ways: the American Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone blitzing the April record for the 400m hurdles, and Kenya’s Emmanuel Wanyonyi overcoming Josh Kerr, Cole Hocker and Yared Nuguse, all Olympic medallists in Paris, in the men’s 1500m.

For Johnson, the competition is the selling point, and he argues that other track events outside of the Olympics have historically blown their budgets on a small number of star names. This, he says, means it’s “not about rivalries.”

McLaughlin-Levrone won the women’s 400m at the GST in Jamaica. (Ricardo Makyn/AFP via Getty Images)

“It is not about servicing the fan,” he adds. “It turned the whole sport into a series of exhibitions to go watch one athlete run against, really, nobody that can compete against them. It created a situation where everybody thinks this sport revolves around a handful of athletes who don’t compete in the same event.”

The take-up by athletes has been striking, but it is not a clean sweep. Among the 48 racers, there are 28 medallists from the Paris Olympics, nine of them Olympic champions. There are, however, exceptions. Noah Lyles, the men’s 100m Olympic champion, has not signed, and neither has his runner-up, the Jamaican Kishane Thompson. The British 800m Olympic gold medallist Keely Hodgkinson is also absent, although she has previously expressed interest in competing as a challenger or in future seasons.

Is Johnson concerned? “We want all of the fastest people to come in,” he says. “But that’s on them.”

Johnson also describes GST as having “the best TV and broadcast partners of any time ever in the history of this sport” with agreements to show the events across 189 territories. This includes the CW Network in the U.S., as well as on NBC’s streaming platform Peacock, while Eurosport are taking up much of Europe and TNT Sports are broadcasting in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

“This is what these athletes want and need in order to actually put themselves out there and build their brands,” Johnson says.

Johnson is a strong salesman and pitches GST with the same assurance he conveys as an analyst. Yet there are some question marks. In Kingston, attendances appeared sparse. Patrick Magyar, the founder of the Diamond League, described GST as “Grand Flop Track” in a scathing post on LinkedIn.

GST say they sold 27,514 tickets in Kingston over the three days, averaging over 9,000 per day. GST President Steve Gera told The Athletic: “This was our first event for a professional sports league that basically nobody had heard of previously. We sold over 27,000 tickets in inaugural weekend, which more than doubled every new and emerging sports property in their debut weekend over the last 10 years. We are proud of that and it is a testament to the product.”

While Johnson says the Jamaica  event, overall, “exceeded a lot of my expectations” and created “amazing races” he does acknowledge some lessons had been learned.

“Jamaica is a very unique market. We knew we were taking big risk going there but we still feel that risk was worth it,” he adds. “One of the things we wanted to do with our first slam is make a big splash but also honour the history and culture of the sport.

“It’s a difficult market from a ticketing standpoint. We know that the Miami, Philadelphia and L.A. markets are much different. Our ticket sales trends for those are significantly different than what we were seeing in Jamaica.”

This weekend’s event at the Ansin Sports Complex in Miramar seats around 5,000. Over 50 percent of tickets have been sold, including VIP sections, GST said, and in a city considered a late buying market they are hoping demand increases as the weekend approaches. The meet in Philadelphia in late May will be at Franklin Field, which holds more than 50,000, and should prove a sterner test of GST’s appeal.

But Johnson says this will not be a one-off season. “We’re in this for the long haul,” he says. “We’re not trialling this. We are building this league to be sustainable. … We’re not going to get everything right, and we didn’t get everything right in Kingston. We’ll improve on those things in Miami. And when the season is over, we will review this season and look at what we improve for next season.”

He says that his three metrics for sustainability are ticketing, broadcast agreements and sponsorship. He also sees GST as a global event and says there is interest from other cities around the world.

Approaching 60, Johnson believes the time is right for disruption in his sport. He described it as an “opportunistic time for sports, because live sports is the only thing that people will actually still make an appointment to sit down and watch.”  He says track has some of the greatest collection of personalities in sports and “there is already a good fire going there that this league could pour fuel on.”

A brush with mortality has also focused Johnson’s priorities as he has recovered from a stroke suffered in 2018. He required a physiotherapist’s support, via a walking frame, to rebuild his strength.

“With everything since my stroke — every decision I make, what I want to do with my career, what I want spend my time on, who do I spend my time on — I now do have a different lens. When you suffer, you realize how lucky you are,” he says.

“The decision to do something that I’m really, really passionate about at this point, as opposed to taking some of the other opportunities to do things that are probably easier or more lucrative — I’m not going to spend time at this point on anything like that.

“I’m passionate about building businesses, but I’m passionate about this business itself.”

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; AFP-IOP/AFP, Anthony Wallace / AFP via Getty Images)

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