Grand Slam Track debuts with some solid moments and one big lingering question

New York Times

07-04-2025

How deep is your appetite for track competition? That's the question at the heart of Grand Slam Track, American Olympic legend Michael Johnson's new venture.
Johnson, who founded Grand Slam Track (GST), is among those who believe that there's a demand for more top-quality racing in a world that craves more sports. His idea — a four-event season with 48 of the best track athletes committed to appearing at all of them — is meant to create rivalries and storylines, even if records aren't being broken and not all of the best athletes are on hand.
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The Diamond League — track's top seasonal circuit — is spread out across the world, with most runners skipping several events. With GST, race fans will know that, barring injury, the same runners they watched duel this weekend in Kingston, Jamaica, also will be there in Miami next month and in Philadelphia at the end of May and in the finale in Los Angeles in June.
This weekend in Jamaica was the first test of his theory. It came with the natural hiccups most start-ups experience in their first time in the spotlight, a fair share of promising highlights and still a long way to go.
'We always play this game, fantasy track and field, when we go out for runs,' GST analyst and Olympic champion Matt Centrowitz said Saturday after the men's 1,500 meters. 'What if this guy moved up (to a longer distance)? What if this guy moved down? We got a chance to see what happened (here).'
That's the unique part of this format — forcing runners to step outside of their comfort zones — and the key to GST's long-term staying power. Each 'Slam,' as the weekend-long event is known, consists of 96 runners, 48 men and 48 women, divided into three general disciplines (sprints, distance and hurdles) with two races of different styles in each discipline. (Read more about how it all works here.)
So you get situations like American Gabby Thomas, the 200-meter Olympic champion, and the Dominican Republic's Marileidy Paulino, the 400-meter gold medalist in Paris, competing against each other across both races.
This helps create storylines throughout the weekend. The men's 1,500 meters on Saturday was billed as a showdown between star rivals Cole Hocker, Josh Kerr and Yared Nuguse — the trio that finished in that order on the Olympic podium. But Kenya's Emmanuel Wanyonyi, who hadn't competed in a 1,500 since 2022, beat them all in Kingston.
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It was one of the best moments of the weekend, but it also didn't end there because all four of them were coming back Sunday for the second race in the short distance category — the 800 meters, in which Wanyonyi is the defending Olympic champion. (Wanyonyi finished second in the 800 to win the weekend title.)
We all know Emmanuel Wanyonyi can close!
The 800m Olympic champion kicked past a historic field in the final stretch to take the 1500m win. #GSTKingston pic.twitter.com/WlW9Ma7eOY
— Grand Slam Track (@GrandSlamTrack) April 6, 2025
The format also adds some intrigue further down the field. A battle for fourth or fifth place, which might not get you excited in an all-or-nothing Olympic or world championship race, carries more meaning here. Those places gained or lost in a runner's less preferred discipline could make the difference between winning the weekend's title and the $100,000 prize that comes with it.
The format has some oddities, too. The 200 meters is counted as both the longer 'short' sprint and the shorter 'long' sprint, so runners who specialize in that are split up depending on whether they'd prefer to run the 100 or the 400 along with it. The second race for the hurdlers is just the non-hurdles version of the same distance (either 100 or 400 meters), but all the 100- and 400-meter flat specialists are racing in the sprint categories.
The weekend produced some strong times, especially for the time of year. American Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone set a record for April — a time when athletes are typically not yet in peak form — with her 52.76 seconds in the 400-meter hurdles on Friday. The men's 1,500 delivered on its star power.
There were also plenty of results that will test a fan's attention span. The men's 5,000 meters on Friday, won by American Grant Fisher, was a light jog (by elite distance runner standards, anyway) for 11.5 laps before a mad dash to the finish. Fisher's winning time of 14 minutes, 39 seconds was nearly two minutes off his personal best and 1:34 slower than the men's Olympic standard. The winning times in three of those second 'hurdle' races wouldn't have made it out of the qualifying heats at an Olympics or world championships meet.
Johnson has said that times don't matter. The emphasis is on beating your opponents, not breaking records. He's right in the context of the event he's created, but whether that concept will captivate viewers feels like the question that will define the success of Grand Slam Track.
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone is back like she never left with a decisive 400m hurdles win at Grand Slam Track. 💥
📺 Peacock pic.twitter.com/1CmtGYhoVP
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) April 5, 2025
Some events were notably absent from the major stars that define them. Olympic champion Noah Lyles, who resisted overtures to join GST, and Jamaican silver medalist Kishane Thompson were not in the men's 100-meter field. American star Sha'Carri Richardson also didn't sign up for GST, and only one of the eight Olympic women's 100-meter finalists was in the field (American Melissa Jefferson-Wooden, the bronze medalist in Paris, who won the race Saturday). Still, all but one event from the Olympic program that was also featured in Jamaica had at least one Paris medalist in the field.
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'There is nothing that you can dislike about Grand Slam Track and what Michael Johnson has done here,' ESPN alum John Anderson, who helmed GST's studio-style coverage from an on-field set, declared early during Saturday's broadcast.
It was said with a dash of Anderson's typical tongue-in-cheek tone, but it was one of many instances of over-cheerleading for the new league, which is not surprising from broadcasters getting paid by that league.
Anderson also occasionally used that same tone to critique the action. When highlights of the underwhelming men's 5,000 came on during Friday's postgame show, only showing the last-lap sprint and not the early-race slog, Anderson quipped, 'Oh good, we're picking it up late.'
But overall, the tone tried hard to convince you that this is the best thing to happen to track.
Olympic champions Sanya Richards-Ross and Centrowitz served as on-set analysts. Two of their best moments came on Friday. Richards-Ross explained why it was impressive that Dalilah Muhammad finished second in Lane 2 in the women's 400-meter hurdles (the sharper turns of the inner lanes can be tougher to handle while maintaining speed), and Centrowitz explained how capping the field for the long-distance races at eight runners, when it's much more than that, can change that race.
Both were insightful points, at least for the more casual fans of the sport, but they came near the end of the broadcast, more than 20 minutes after the final race had ended. That sort of commentary might've been better — and more visible — right before or after the races.
The BBC's Steve Cram called the races in typically excellent fashion. Race analyst Anson Henry had some good moments, including immediately noting on Saturday how American Jenna Prandini, who was a late addition to the field, put herself in position for an unlikely $100,000 by finishing second in the 100 meters ahead of her specialty race on Sunday, the 200 meters. (Jefferson-Wooden went on to win the 200 and the title.)
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The wait time between races was typical of track meets — about 10-12 minutes, on average — but with no field events unfolding simultaneously, the burden was on the broadcast to bridge those gaps. On the Peacock stream, that time was largely filled with dead air and ads for Jamaica. In all three days, there were fewer than 30 minutes of live action in a nearly three-hour broadcast window.
There were several uneven production moments, and the time in between races could be filled better, but the races were smooth and the features interviewing the athletes showed their personalities in more depth than you typically see in an Olympic broadcast.
The Kingston National Stadium was largely empty as action began Friday. It filled in some as the night went on, and the weekend appeared to bring better crowds, but the entire backstretch of the stadium was sparsely populated throughout.
Filling a 35,000-seat stadium for an experimental track event may not have been realistic, but the optics were not good, and the turnout in the world capital of track was disappointing even to Johnson.
'We would love to see more spectators here, you know?' Johnson said, according to the BBC. 'We think we'll get that; we think that'll happen. But the crowd was engaged, and that's what's important.'
The next event is from May 2-4 at the Ansin Sports Complex in Miramar, Fla., which seats only around 5,000. But the Philadelphia event at the end of May is at Franklin Field, which seats more than 50,000 at full capacity. GST will certainly hope these rivalries take shape and all these American stars in the field bring a bigger audience in the States.
Johnson and his team have us talking about track in April, three years before the next Summer Olympics. That was part of the point of all this, and it's an intriguing step toward bringing track more into the casual fan's radar, at least in the Americas.
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GST can't replicate the stakes of the Olympics or the world championships. But it has created a world with its stakes and has proved an appealing option for several of the sport's stars. It's succeeding in getting racers in front of fans at a time of year when they usually aren't.
For example, McLaughlin-Levrone, one of the biggest stars in track, and fellow American Kenny Bednarek hadn't raced since September. GST creates four new opportunities to see them and others, including three for U.S. fans on home soil.
Will it stick? Will you want to come back each month to watch McLaughlin-Levrone rout a field that can't compete with her? There were times this weekend — when Wanyonyi taunted Naguse as he won the 1,500; when Thomas collapsed across the finish line after finishing second in the 400 to clinch the title — where the concept shined and you could see it working.
There's also a lot of room to improve, and the lingering question at the heart of it all: Will the competition be compelling enough if the times aren't lightning-fast?
(Top photo of Emmanuel Wanyonyi: Ricardo Makyn / AFP via Getty Images)