Africana55 Radio 
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
The camera zooms towards a blurred face. Dramatic music kicks in. Michael Johnson appears from the haze. “Calling all rivals,” says his familiar voice, deep and crisp, God-like. “We’re about to change this game.”
That first advert teasing Grand Slam Track in the summer of 2024 sent a little tingle down the spine. Here was a doyen of the sport leading the way to a bright, ambitious future. But perhaps with hindsight it also pointed to one of GST’s fundamental flaws: Johnson, not an athlete, was the face of the event.
By the time GST launched in the spring of 2025, the most famous sprinter in the world, Noah Lyles, had already publicly doubted the business model. Lyles neatly articulated his argument for rejecting GST in an interview last year, explaining that the money Johnson had offered him didn’t meet his commercial value, and he wasn’t convinced the knock-on marketing benefits made up the difference.
“Have you heard of Grand Slam Track?” Lyles asked his interviewer, who admitted he had not. “That proves my point!”
There are myriad reasons why GST failed. It is a story of flawed financial planning; of a convoluted format; of over-promising and under-delivering; of the simple fact that it is hard to launch a successful new sports league in a crowded marketplace. See LIV Golf, which has oil wells of money at its disposal, but still can’t persuade grown adults to sit down and emotionally invest in teams called Majesticks or Range Goats.
GST did well to lure 28 Paris Olympic medallists with its $100,000 winners’ prize, but Lyles was one of many stars to say no. Femke Bol didn’t like the format, which required her to run two events and increased the chance of injury. Jakob Ingebrigtsen didn’t see how GST could fit into his season’s carefully calibrated plan, and Keely Hodgkinson was similarly cautious.
“Only the fastest,” Johnson boomed in his teaser video. Except it wasn’t.
Then there was his divsive snub of field events. “I am going to save what I think I can save,” Johnson said. “I think I can save track. I don’t think I can save track and field.”
Admittedly, it is not easy to sell discus as a viable entertainment product. But it might have been a misstep to eschew the throwers and jumpers when one of the world’s most marketable athletes is a handsome Swedish-American man who can fly. It was a sign of Mondo Duplantis’s pulling power that when he leapt to a pole vault world record at the Paris Olympics, every fan stayed in their seat past 10pm, long after the track events had finished, to witness history.
These were the athletes from whom Johnson needed early buy-in. The face coming into focus in that introductory video should have been Lyles nose to nose with a Jamaican rival. It needed Hodgkinson facing down Athing Mu and Josh Kerr staring into Ingebrigtsen’s soul. It needed Duplantis eye-balling a crossbar on the moon.
So perhaps it is no wonder that the first meet in Kingston, Jamaica was a flop. The action played out in front of half-empty stands and from that moment it was almost impossible to revive the show, despite better attendances in Miami and Philadelphia.
The Jamaican meet is thought to have been the catalyst for Eldridge Industries – co-owned by Chelsea CEO Todd Boehly – to withdraw its non-binding proposal to invest up to $40m in the league. GST claimed it had $30m in “financial commitments” but a New York Times investigation reported in reality it was closer to $13m without Eldridge.
Perhaps GST should have shelved the later meets after Jamaica. Instead it ploughed on in the hope of securing new funding. Debts spiralled but a new investor of Eldridge’s scale never materialised. It was all a little Fyre Festival: misdirection over investment, image not meeting reality, and participants left bearing the cost.
The story reached a new nadir this week when it was revealed Johnson is facing legal action for allegedly paying himself half a million dollars eight days before the project collapsed. A GST statement strongly rejected the claim as “unfounded and false”, and pointed out that Johnson poured more than $2m of his own money into the project.
The Independent spoke to one creditor, who is owed a six-figure sum, who said they believe Johnson always had “good intentions” but the situation spun out of his control. Sources close to Johnson say he is devastated by what has unfolded, but he is still determined to pay monies owed and ultimately – remarkably, given the story so far – to resurrect Grand Slam Track.
Before GST launched, I interviewed Johnson’s co-founder Steve Gera, who helped dream up the vision over lunch in Malibu two years earlier. Gera discussed the research they carried out which revealed what fans wanted to see: the sport’s star names competing head-to-head more often, for high stakes.
This broad idea was a good one, even if there were some more fanciful lines in that interview which revealed wishful thinking. “We are maniacally focused on having the youngest fanbase of any sports league in the world in the next five years,” Gera told me. “That’s our North Star.”
But launching a new competition is a notoriously difficult business. Great sport requires two key ingredients: absorbing human interest and genuine jeopardy. Often that jeopardy is history itself. The Masters, for example, matters because of Jack Nicklaus, because of Tiger Woods, because of Phil Mickelson from the pine straw. The green jacket is unequivocally the worst prize in elite sport, and yet part of the Masters’ genius is that all that history is somehow imbued in the lapels of a garish blazer.
It is hard to manufacture a compelling narrative from scratch. High stakes certainly help, and the principle of paying athletes serious prize money was sound – it remains absurd that a £6bn show like the Olympic Games does not pay its cast. But GST couldn’t keep its promise over those prizes.
Johnson’s fall is sad to watch, whatever his misdemeanours. For those of a certain age, his gold-shoed triumphs at Atlanta ‘96 were the first building blocks of a love of the Olympics, and of sport itself. His face later became an essential piece of the BBC’s coverage, looking flabbergasted next to Gabby Logan as another Usain Bolt record unfolded on the track behind him. He loved athletics, showed a genuine passion for women’s sport, and cared about the young stars following in his footsteps. His recovery from a stroke was inspiring.
Johnson’s reputation has been indelibly hit, not so much by the failure of GST – business ventures flunk – but by the manner of its collapse. Hundreds of people are still owed money, from a major creditor waiting on $3m to a young hurdler, Eric Edwards Jr, who says he is still owed $19,000, a significant loss for a struggling athlete.
Some athletes are still angry while others are more supportive, like triple world champion Melissa Jefferson-Wooden, who wrote a submission to the court hearing in support of GST’s future reboot. “The 2025 execution was flawed, but the underlying concept is sound,” she said.
The Independent contacted Johnson but he does not want to speak publicly on the matter, yet. Gera, his co-founder, was also offered the chance to tell his side of the story of GST’s downfall. “One day,” he replied. “One day!” They still believe they can revolutionise athletics. As the line goes in the Netflix documentary on Fyre Festival: “These guys are either completely full of s*** or they’re the smartest guys in the room.”