Attention, track and field nerds. This past weekend featured:
1/ the LA Grand Prix, on Friday and Saturday, at UCLA
2/ another Continental Tour Gold meet, in Tokyo, Sunday
3/ a Diamond League meet in Marrakesh, Sunday
4/ the Atlanta City Games, Saturday
5/ World Athletics Combined Events Tour (decathlon, heptathlon) in Götzis, Austria, Sunday
6/ and for the true specialists, World Athletics Race Walk Tour Gold meet in La Coruna, Spain, Saturday
The purist may say, look at the robust nature of the sport.
Anyone else says, this is scattergories bordering on idiocy.
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone winning the 200 in LA // Getty Images
Track and field has many problems, and understand this column is written from love because track and field is arguably the sport I most want to succeed. The lineup this past weekend, all over the world, underscores perhaps issue No. 1.
No meet matters.
Strike that.
As Joe Kovacs, the two-time Olympic silver medalist and two-time world champion in the shot put, said in the pre-meet news conference in LA, there are only two meets this year that matter for American athletes: the U.S. Trials and the Paris Games.
In a world championships year, like last year, there’s a compelling argument that the list of meets that matters is one — Budapest last summer was a big hit.
For 2024, why two?
Department of the obvious, part one:
At the Trials, top three go to Paris.
In Paris, it’s medals and history. Gold in Paris also means $50,000, thanks to World Athletics.
Department of the obvious, part two:
If the meet is not the Trials or the Games, we have a problem.
It’s the one World Athletics president Seb Coe recognized.
There is not enough money in track and field to get athletes to dependably show for meets.
To be clear: a track and field athlete is an independent contractor. He or she typically has no guaranteed income. Thus each meet is a math problem: what’s in it for me?
Now look at the LA meet from the position of Athlete X. Title sponsor for the meet? There was none. To quote The Clash: should I stay or should I go?
Credit here, big picture, nothing having to do with the LA meet, to Noah Lyles, who ran over the weekend in Atlanta. When Noah Lyles says he’s coming to your meet, he’s coming to your meet.
Anyway:
Because there isn’t sufficient financial incentive to show up for this or that meet, we have the sort of situation where — just to take one event — and unless something changes before they do meet in the Paris final, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Femke Bol will not have raced each other in the 400 hurdles for nearly 750 days.
Sure, injuries, and as Sydney said in an Instagram post after the LA meet, “Learning to fall back in love with the sport I’ve grown up in. It has its ups and downs with injuries, shortcomings, and everything in between.”
All the same, when the two best don’t race against each other: it’s straight-up buzzkill.
Track nerd might grumble a bit but track nerd more or less does not care because track nerd is willing to wait 750 days for the matchup.
Track nerd can tell his (or her) other track nerdy friends that Marita Koch of East Germany — East Germany! — ran 47.6 for the world record in the women’s 400 in Canberra, Australia, in 1985, in Lane 2 — Lane 2! — and that mark still stands, and whut, in March Bol set the indoor mark, 49.17, at the Glasgow world indoors.
Track and field already has track nerd.
Sorta. Maybe 5,000 or 6,000 people came to the LA meet.
At any rate, the issue confronting track and field is not, repeat not, meet attendance.
It’s television and, to some extent, social media.
The World Athletics Insta clip of Sydney running the 200 in LA has received more than 1 million views.
What does this underscore? Easy. The NFL and NBA are ingrained in American culture. When those games are on TV, any NFL game and, to a lesser extent, the NBA playoffs, it’s appointment viewing. Track and field is not that. But, track and field does cross communities, demographics, socioeconomic status. And when the international federation highlights one of the American stars, it’s a big deal.
Sydney is a big deal.
But she is never — OK, rarely — on TV.
And all sports are broadcast properties.
The issue is how to get people to watch track on TV and how to create that buzz on social media so that the key demographic, 18- to 34-year-olds, will tune in (Department of the obvious, part three) on TV.
That’s the idea behind the Netflix series — to focus on the sprints — out in a few weeks.
In the United States, we have a major problem. Time and again, this column has pointed out that staging the Trials in far-away Eugene, Oregon, is itself another buzzkill. Track nerd has, at times, been unkind in his/her criticism. Of me. Cool. But the indisputable fact is that NBC has — and we are not even two years beyond the 2022 world championships in remote Eugene — largely given up its coverage of track and field.
You want to watch? Stream your track and field on the internet.
That is not a recipe for mainstream success, and hardly something to build on, especially four years from an Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
There are any number of proposals now floating about — Michael Johnson this, Alexis Ohanian that.
I teach three classes each semester at USC. I deal with college kids day in and day out. They are the target audience. These are kids who saw Caleb Williams play a lot of football, and argued about his draft status, also a lot. By the way, the SC track, now named for Allyson Felix, directly across a pedestrian walkway from the journalism school building, is where some number of big-time American standouts are training for the Paris Games.
From Fred Kerley’s Instagram page: training at the USC track, now named for Allyson Felix
None of the young people in any of my classes knew that, for instance, Fred Kerley, Michael Norman or Rai Benjamin were training across the walkway from where they were practicing how to write better.
Did they care about, say, these three headliners? Not hardly.
They did know, and care, that Sha’Carri Richardson got busted for weed three years ago. They thought The System righteously hammered her for something they might do in their dorm room without consequence.
Here is the dilemma.
In 13 years at the university, and I ask this question every semester, not one kid in any class has individually paid for cable.
Since they aren’t paying for cable to watch the NFL, under what theory are they going to pay to watch track and field?
To reiterate, there are four years until LA28.
The only way to get them to watch is to give them a reason.
What’s that reason? Where’s any semblance of consistency?
Right now, there’s none.
With all the events — and the Ohanian thing, a proposed September meet for women only, would seem to be a solution in search of a problem that does not exist — talent is w-a-y too scattered.
If — if — track and field had a season, let’s stay starting in May, and there was a track meet on TV for two hours — only two — every Saturday (pick your day, whatever), and everyone knew — even college kids through the doldrums of summer, when nothing else is going on — to make it destination viewing because the world’s best were going to be on — now we have a conversation.
That’s going to take a lot of money. Way more than the sport has now.
Where that’s going to come from — that’s obvious, too. Some other sports have figured it out. Let’s see how long it takes track to get there.