Michael Johnson’s Grand Slam Track begins tonight: What is it and how does it work?

Athletics has changed considerably over the past decade.

Advancements in shoe technology have seen road-running records smashed while the combination of ‘super spikes’ and improvements to synthetic tracks are having similar results for middle-distance racing.

In Paris last summer, athletics became the first Olympic sport to offer prize money ($50,000/£38,000) to gold medallists.

There is a unanimous consensus within the sport that, in spite of this evolution, for most people, athletics is still a quadrennial affair. Michael Johnson’s Grand Slam Track League (GST) is trying to change that.

The concept is simple: change the sport from something that people care about once every four years to one that drives interest four times every year.

The first leg starts tonight in Kingston, Jamaica, the unofficial home of sprinting and the official home of ‘Champs’, the country’s high school national championships — which is widely credited as the launchpad for Jamaican sprinters.

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So how will it work?

Forty-eight “racers” have been contracted for four meets this season, which gives them a base salary. Winners at each meet will earn $100,000, scaling down to $10,000 for eighth place. The racers, so the GST website says, “include the fastest and best in each event group, with a focus on fierce rivalries and competitive racing”.

Legendary U.S. sprinter Johnson is trying to recreate the win-at-all-costs and racing format of major championships, where times are immaterial and athletes have to negotiate rounds. GST athletes are put into event groups. Everyone doubles across the weekend.

There are 12 unique groups, one men’s and one women’s for six different combinations: short and long sprints, short and long hurdles (who race once over hurdles and once flat), and short and long distance — their races are shown below.

For each ‘slam’, 48 challengers are recruited to fill out the races to give a combined field of 96 (eight per event). The hope — and expectation — is that they disrupt the “racers” and, particularly in the distance events where athletes all merge into one lane, will make for intriguing tactical affairs.

Athletes score points based on their finish position: the more points, the higher you place, and the athlete with the best overall score in the event group wins the slam. Across the season, whoever has the most points from the four slams takes the overall crown.

It means that one-event specialists (such as Marco Arop over 800m, Matthew Hudson-Smith in the 400m, or Mary Moraa for the 1,500m) have no special advantage over an all-rounder in the two disciplines. The event winner might not be the one with the biggest strength but the smallest weakness.

Arop and Hudson-Smith were Olympic silver medallists in those events in Paris, and a big success of Johnson’s is how many top-level athletes he has recruited.

Fine, there are some US sprinting big-hitters missing (like Noah Lyles and Sha’Carri Richardson) and the short hurdles group has no Grant Holloway, perhaps the greatest-ever in the event. The only improvement to either ‘distance’ group would be the inclusion of Olympic 5,000m Champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen.

Still, 28 of the 48 racers were medallists at the last Olympics (34 medals combined), with nine winning gold in an individual event and/or a relay.

GST has the men’s 1,500m podium (Cole Hocker, Josh Kerr, Yared Nuguse, in that order), the three men’s 400m medallists (Quincy Hall, Hudson-Smith, Muzala Samukonga) and two of the women’s (Marileidy Paulino and Salwa Eid Naser), plus the top three women’s 100m hurdlers (Masai Russell, Cyrena Samba-Mayela, Jasmine Camacho-Quinn).

Kerr and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, the latter being the 400m hurdles Olympic Champion and current world-record holder, are particular standouts. Neither have been frequent circuit racers previously, to the extent that McLaughlin-Levrone was ineligible for the Diamond League 400m hurdles final last September because she had not competed in it all season.

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What is the schedule?

Three US meets will follow Kingston: Miami (May 2 to May 4); Philadelphia (May 30 to June 1) and Los Angeles (June 27 to June 29). A European leg, specifically in London, England, never materialised because UK Athletics did not have the funding to host it — a reflection of the disproportionate lack of funding that governing bodies have compared to shoe companies and sponsors.

Johnson, the GST’s CEO and commissioner, is trying to redefine circuit racing. Currently, the Diamond League is the pinnacle in the track and field world, with 15 meets worldwide from the end of April to August. The issue, though, is that not every event is held at every meet. Athletes compete to score points to reach the final, typically held in Zurich, with the winner there crowned the overall season champion in that discipline.

This season, presumably partly in response to Grand Slam Track, the Diamond League have upped the prize money, giving out a total of over $9million, with top prizes of $50,000 for winning events throughout the season and $100,000 in the final.

These numbers might sound big but they are not by elite sporting standards, particularly considering how globalised the circuit is (with early-season meets in China and Qatar, a leg in Eugene, Oregon, and others scattered across Europe throughout the summer). Athletes have to travel and compete against time zones as much as each other.

It means that the quality and depth of fields vary, and they focus primarily — for track events — on making races fast. Pacemakers are included and wavelights are put around the track infield to show how quickly athletes are moving. These meets tend to be as much about athletes meeting standards (for making major Championships later in the year) and improving their world ranking than beating others.

The contrast to GST is huge — it won’t have pacers. All four meets are in the western hemisphere and it particularly suits US-based athletes. There are critics that Johnson has completely neglected field events — “I think I can save track. I don’t think I can save track and field,” he told BBC Sport in November. “Putting the two together works at the Olympics and World Championships, but I’m not sure it works when you’re trying to create a professional sport outside of those global competitions.”

Johnson was a 200m and 400m double-specialist in the 1990s, who took 12 golds from 12 finals across three Olympic Games and five World Championships. In this sense, he is sticking to what he knows and the positive is to see someone of his sporting success trying to be part of a solution rather than continuing to diagnose a well-known problem.

His theory is that new fans to the sport care more about rivalries than times, and growing the fanbase is essential to keeping athletics alive and making it more than just a four-yearly event. Doubling makes it less likely but, by creating stacked fields, fast times should occur naturally.

Sometimes, innovation does not mean something is new. Johnson’s focus, born out of his own career, is building on the foundations of what makes athletics so watchable every summer Olympics. It feels unrealistic to expect GST — or any singular competition — to “save” track, though bigger and better competitions can only help push the sport forward.

(Top photo: Ernesto Benavides/AFP via Getty Images)