“I haven’t felt this nervous since July 1996,” four-time Olympic champion Michael Johnson joked. “It’s the same nerves that I felt when I was competing, where you know that you're the best, but you have to go out there and prove it.”
The former sprinter was speaking to media ahead of the launch of his new passion project, Grand Slam Track, which gets underway in Kingston, Jamaica on Friday. A new track league of four meets involving head-to-heads between the world’s best athletes, Grand Slam Track promises fans and athletes Olympic-style competition - but much more frequently than every four years.
The premise, and thinking behind it, was simple.
“I think the word innovation has probably been used way too much in track,” Johnson said. “At the very beginning, I said to my team, let's focus on getting back to what makes track so amazing. It's just the racing. There's never been a time when you’ve got the best athletes racing together and there isn’t absolute fireworks.”
The male and female athletes are each subdivided into six categories of eight athletes, such as Short Sprints, with the eight in that group competing in the 100m and 200m each weekend. 48 of the 96 competitors are signed ‘Racers’, contracted to appear at each of the four meets. The remaining half are ‘Challengers’, who will swap in and out.
Throughout the conversation Johnson was keen to emphasise the most important element of the project: the athletes. Essentially Grand Slam Track’s product is the athletes, and the social-media-friendly rivalries and personalities – “high-stakes drama,” in Johnson’s words – that spectators can follow throughout the season.
“It's not about necessarily trying to be innovative and recreate the sport,” he said. “This sport is amazing as it is. It doesn't need a lot of gimmicks and bells and whistles. It does when you're missing head to head competition. We've seen over the last several years, in the absence of that, you try to figure out a gimmick to draw people in. We don't have to do that, because we have the athletes.”
While the new league has a starry field of signed Racers, including the likes of Olympic 200m champion Gabby Thomas and surprise 1500m gold medallist Cole Hocker, the field is also notable for its absences: Jakob Ingebrigtsen,
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