Cathal Dennehy: Grand Slam Track future uncertain after first season fails to cross finishing line
The Grand Slam Track event in Philadelphia was a success with 30,000 people attending over the two days but the overall season failed to catch fire. Pic: Emilee Chinn/Getty Images
Fans of athletics – the kind whose idea of a good Friday night is sitting at home, watching from afar as the world’s best athletes run, jump and throw in some fabled stadium – are not stupid.
They know which events matter, and those that don’t. They know the difference between races they should care about, and those they’re being told to care about. They love the sport, and know it can be better, so they’re generally open-minded to ideas that might improve it. But they also have a razor-sharp radar for PR speak that doesn’t reflect the reality they see.
So when Michael Johnson, the commissioner of Grand Slam Track, said this week that his team “couldn’t be happier” with its inaugural season, not many were really buying it. After all, Grand Slam Track had just cancelled its fourth and final event of the season in Los Angeles, without giving a specific explanation.
As its press release stated: “Grand Slam Track™, the global home of professional track competition, founded to bring new energy and opportunity to the sport, today announced the conclusion of its transformational 2025 pilot season.” That term, pilot season, wasn’t used in previous communications, and seemed an attempt to move the goalposts on its inaugural season.
The closest thing to an explanation for the cancellation was Johnson saying “the global economic landscape has shifted dramatically in the past year, and this business decision has been made to ensure our long-term stability as the world’s premier track league.” On social media, Grand Slam Track said they “have been and will be a league dedicated to transparency”, but a valid question was raised in reply by US Olympian Colleen Quigley: “How is this transparent though? It is not clear at all why the last slam is being cancelled if everything was going so great.” Talk of transparency seemed misplaced when its press release concluded by stating Grand Slam Track would have “no further comment at this time,” even though a flurry of questions were left unanswered.
Front Office Sports cited a source stating “a poor lease agreement” with the host venue at UCLA was a factor, though it’s hard to understand how that could only be an issue now when the venues were decided last year. The statements from Grand Slam Track danced around what multiple well-placed people in the sport understand as the reason: it was losing too much money.
Johnson said he’d raised more than $30 million from private investors to launch Grand Slam Track, which promised to pay out $12.6 million in prize money this season, with a top prize of $100,000 at each meeting, dwarfing that of the Diamond League. So far, so promising, but countless people I spoke to on the international scene had the same question: how can they sustain that? It’s a question I asked Johnson last August.
“Look, I’ve been an investor and entrepreneur since I finished my career as an athlete and I’ve been very fortunate to have a few successful ventures,” he said. “None of those have ever been successful or profitable in year one. Investors don’t invest to make a 10% profit in year one or two. We invest to get a 4-X, 5-X, 10-X return in 10, 15 years.
“UFC took 20 years to become what it is. For the first 15 years they were losing money so you’d have to ask yourself: How does an organisation that’s losing money continue to operate and lose money for 15 years? It’s because investors continue to put money into that organisation. Why does the investor put money into a company that’s losing money? Because that company or organisation is growing their customer base.
“For us, the most important thing is not to make money in the first few years. We’re going to continue to pour money into this sport. The most important thing we have to do is grow the fanbase and as long as we do that, we’re on track to be successful.”
Cancelling the Los Angeles event will save about $3 million in prize money, along with other costs, and Grand Slam Track assured fans it will return in 2026. But the damage could be lasting. Over two months after its first event, I understand many athletes have not received their full prize money from Kingston, though they’ve been assured they will get it. As Grand Slam Track looks to 2026, potential investors might be wary of hopping on board a ship that couldn’t complete its maiden voyage.
“We feel that we’ve proven everything that we needed to this year in the first three slams and so we’ll go ahead now and conclude our season and focus on the 2026 season,” said Johnson. “But 2025 was amazing.” There was, no doubt, lots to like about Grand Slam Track. Granted, its first meeting in Jamaica fell flat, but things improved in Miami and were better again in Philadelphia, where about 30,000 fans showed up across two days. But TV viewing figures were poor, with around 250,000 people in the US watching each day of coverage from its opening two meetings, despite it being widely available in a country of 340 million.
To call it a failure is unfair given they demonstrated proof of concept, and undoubted potential, in Philadelphia, but to label season one a success is also inaccurate.
The chief issue is that to get star names that will really make people watch – the likes of Noah Lyles, Sha’Carri Richardson and Jakob Ingebrigtsen, who all opted out this year – it needs a hefty budget. But sparse viewership and half-empty stands mean it’s going to be very hard to recoup that, and investors won’t be willing to shoulder losses indefinitely.
Another issue? It’s hard to overstate how wide a chasm exists between how popular athletics is as a participation sport in the US and how unpopular it is to watch. Over 1.1 million US high schoolers did track and field last year, making it the most popular sport at that level, above American football (1.07 million) and basketball (903,000).
Yet despite the US having the best team in the world, by far, very few watch the sport there – either on TV or in person. Grand Slam Track set out to change that, and it showed flickers of hope that it can. But having to pull the plug from Los Angeles, the city that will host the 2028 Olympics, shows how difficult a landscape it faces. If Grand Slam Track is to survive, and thrive, it needs meetings in Europe, the sport’s beating heart, where far more people watch athletics on TV and in person. Otherwise, it could face a swift demise.
This time last year, when the league was launched, I posted a poll on X asking followers – who are mostly athletics fans – where they thought Grand Slam Track would be in five years’ time. Just 21% predicted it would become the sport’s top league, with 25% believing it would still exist but play second fiddle to the Diamond League. The most popular option, however, was the third one: 54% thought it would be ‘dead and buried’. There are a lot of smart, passionate people behind Grand Slam Track, who care deeply about the sport, and they’ll hope that’s not the case. But the fear is that it will be.
