Cnn
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Michael Johnson wants to indicate a clear thing: the track does not need saving. But he thinks you have to improve.
For Johnson and many others, we remember the potential of sport once every four years when, for a brief window of two weeks, the athletes compete for the status and legacy at the summer Olympic Games.
At that time, athletics is suddenly the most popular spectacle on the planet, the short-term center of the sporting universe. This is what happens over the next four years that the commissioner who has become Sprinter has concerns.
“This is the void that existed in sport,” said Johnson to CNN Sports, Amanda Davies, “and we fill it with the Grand Slam track.”
Friday by the quadruple Olympic champion, the Grand Chelem is organizing its inaugural event in Kingston, Jamaica, the first of the four games taking place in the next three months.
The League has attracted some of the biggest names in sport, including American Olympic champions Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Gabby Thomas, Cole Hocker and Quincy Hall.
Athletes registering for a piece of Grand Colem have been promised regular and significant races against their fiercest rivals, as well as more prices than sport has never offered it before.
The 48 runners contracted by the League each receive an annual basic salary for having participated in the four games during the season, while $ 12.6 million at prices are also offered. This varies from $ 100,000 for winning a slam at $ 10,000 for having placed the last.
On the other hand, in the Diamond League – the established annual series of athletics meetings of sport – the athletes receive $ 10,000 for winning an event and $ 1,000 for having ranked eighth.
“Most athletes suffer greatly because they are unable to achieve a value,” said Johnson, best known for having won 200 meters and 400 meter gold medals at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.
“These athletes find themselves in situations where, many years later, and sometimes even in their careers, they wonder:” I should have made this choice? I love this sport, but I suffer financially, I mentally suffer from trying to make a living in this sport. I have to rely on friends and family to help. “” ”
The first season on the Grand Chelem track will see 48 contracted runners, who are among the best athletes in the world, and 48 challengers, selected on an event basis, in competition in six events: short and long sprints, short and long and short and long distance obstacles.
Each athlete is assigned to a group of events and will compete in two disciplines at each meeting. Short sprinters, for example, will run in 100 and 200 meters and long sprinters in 200 and 400 meters.
The points are won according to the arrival position of an athlete in a race, and whoever has the most points in the two races during a competition is crowned with a group of events.
“It creates important stories and dangers, which fans told us they wanted,” said Johnson. “They want to see athletes more. They also want to see a little danger and issues. ”
With the contracted runners guaranteed to appear at each event, Grand Slam Track hopes to present more regularly the best athletes in sport, beyond the Olympic Games and the World Biennial Athletics Championships. But there are significant absent from the list, notably Sha’Carri Richardson, Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Karsten Warholm and Femke Bol.
In particular, the two Olympic champions of the 100m in title – Noah Lyles and Julien Alfred – have not registered, and the League offers only track disciplines – and not of field -, which means that there is no place for the vaulter of Potte Superstar Mondo Duplantis.
However, those who joined are encouraged by the approach of the League, in particular with regard to the compensation of athletes.
“I have never had a base salary of a series of races before, which is entirely new,” the American distance runner, at CNN Sports, told CNN Sports. “For distance runners and sprinters, almost anyone on track, your main source of income comes from a shoe company – it would be your main sponsor.
“You could get appearance fees during a race here and there, but unless you are a superstar, you probably do not get money to present places. While with the Grand Colem, you have an incentive to introduce yourself, then you have a huge incitement to run well.
Fisher, a double Olympic bronze medalist who recently broke two indoor world records, will participate in the 3,000 and 5,000 meters – the group of remote events – as a runner contracted during the four games of this season.
He will not be against all his big rivals, like the double Olympic champion Ingebrigsen, but still believes that the Grand Slam track is the platform he needs to raise his career.
“I want to run the best guys as often as possible, and I want to be the best runner in the world,” explains Fisher. “To have this title, I have to beat the best guys in the world regularly.
“It’s a cool format, it’s new. It gives fans something to follow with continuity, and I am delighted to be part of it. When they approached me, probably no big negotiation tactics, but I was already sold to join it … They really didn’t have to win too much.”
The races of this season will be broadcast in 189 countries and territories, with Peacock and the CW as broadcasters in the United States, Eurosport in Europe and Asia, and TNT Sports in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Eurosport and TNT SPORTS are CNN sisters companies under the discovery warner Warner Bros.
In the Kingston National Stadium, the track has already been painted in the green, yellow and black flag of the Jamaica flag in anticipation of the league opening event. The next three meetings will be in the United States – Miami, Philadelphia and Los Angeles – which, according to Johnson, will serve a huge market for athletics, although with a few elite races to show.
The 57 -year -old man insists that the Grand Chelem piece does not try to usurp the tastes of World Athletics, the Global Governing of Sport and Diamond League, which organizes most of its events in Europe.
“We are a different product,” he said, adding that he has “a great relationship” with world athletics and its president, Sebastian Coe. In turn, Coe welcomed the Johnson League, comforts itself in the “chandelier” and “investment” injected into sport.
Grand Slam Track intends to develop and, according to Johnson, was contacted by cities interested in organizing future meetings. “It’s a trip to us, and we are there for the long term,” he says. “We are not going anywhere.”
For athletes like Fisher, which faces the demanding prospect of running two distance events in three days this week, the Grand Slam song will ostensibly feel the same thing as the other breeds in which it has contributed, and its objectives for the opening of the season in Kingston are simple.
“The only goal is to win,” he says. “If I can regularly win these slams, then it’s a very good sign for where I am in my career.”