I am certainly not the first, much less the only, scribe to address this issue. Inside The Games’ Duncan Mackay had a very good article out today. But for the moment, forget about who didn’t show up at the inaugural USATF Los Angeles Grand Prix on May 26th. A lot was made of who wasn’t there – Athing Mu, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone – but in fact, headliners not showing up to track meets is an age-old athletics problem, a circumstance that reminds us how incompatible with a professional sport athletics truly is.  

You can’t tout your stars to sell tickets and viewership, then have them show up dancing in the stands rather than competing on the track!

I recently listened to a 2011 interview with Brit middle distance legends Steve Ovett and Steve Cram about why athletes in the 1980s, one of the glorious eras of middle distance running in history, didn’t race against each other very much, and often competed in complimentary events in the same meet like the 1500 and the mile, but not against one another.  

“Seb (Coe) was a wonderful speed-endurance athlete,” said Ovett. “Most of his training was indoors. He was an exceptional indoor runner. Broke many records indoors. In my case, I was doing far too much distance work…So I was coming off very slow endurance work, and Seb was coming off very fast speed work. I didn’t want to race Seb till I knew I was ready. And to be honest, it took me a lot of time to get ready after running 9 miles in the mud in cross country. So I wanted to make sure when I took the guy on, I was ready. Because if I didn’t, he would’ve beat me every damn time because he was too fast for me, quite literally. But if he beat me when I was in my best shape, no excuses.”

Simply put, the long-standing system in track and field creates an all-or-nothing binary that steers athletes away from competition, and to hell with the fans. Based on crowd totals in LA – an officially announced attendance of 7,249, later said to be closer to 4,500 – evidently, the people chose the netherworld.

The entire track schedule – and its payoffs – is focused on major championships, not the regular season meetings. Accordingly, even brand new, highly touted meets like the LA GP in a major US market, which will once again be an Olympic venue in five years, can’t fill their modest-sized stadium, can’t guarantee the big stars, even when their coaches are the meet directors, and the governing federation is a presenting co-producer.

Here’s the thing: if your system only pays people for winning but simultaneously penalizes them for losing – which is how the shoe company contracts work with their reduction clauses – guess what? Nobody shows up unless they are 100% ready, just like Ovett said. This system goes back decades! 

That may protect the athletes, but it kills the sport for the fans because it encourages avoidance rather than engagement. Systems, my friends, create realities. And how would we gauge athletics’ system working these days? Seems to be little more than an offshoot of the shoe industry.

To have any chance to advance the sport, the current system has to adapt. Because the more the system encourages runners, jumpers, and throwers not to compete, the more we alienate our core fan base and diminish the chances of ever expanding it. 

A proper system would pay people to risk losing, not penalize them for doing so! That way, the athletes show up and compete. But you have to encourage them to be brave, not threaten their financial well-being if they show up and lose. Anyone can tell you, you don’t race freely when you’re running scared. 

Sure, we got a great shot put world record in LA from the redoubtable Ryan Crouser (23.56m). The shot putters always show up. But the marquee matchups that advanced the meet never came off.

As long as the Olympics continue to be the athletes’ crown jewel – which the sport does not own – the professional opportunities staged by the sport will be seen by the athletes and the public as of secondary importance. The NBA with its load management is creeping into this area, too, for its regular season games.

That’s one reason FIFA, the world football organizing body, protects its World Cup property by only allowing age 23 and under players (with three exceptions) to play in the Olympic soccer tournament. Given the pandemic delay, FIFA pushed the age cutoff to 24 years for 2021.

Track is, or has always been heretofore, the centerpiece of the Olympic Games. Which is fine for the Olympics, until they find other newer, more fan-friendly sports to showcase, which they are constantly in search of. But the current system isn’t good for modern day athletics.

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Athletics is a precision sport presenting itself at an imprecise time. In a society rife with ADHD tendencies, athletics’ 19th century construct with its exacting, take-your-time-to-lineup, everything-just-right before we jump, throw or vault meticulousness is out of step with the times.

While other sports like baseball look for ways to speed up the action, athletics remains steadfast in its time-consuming articulation. It’s a true conundrum, because to speed things up is to remove some of the precision of the performance. And performance is what the sport is built around and based upon. Every jump, every throw, every race is a one-off.

As Motown’s girl-group The Supremes told us in 1966, You Can’t Hurry Love. So, too, can’t you hurry upper limit performance.

Thus are the spikes of excitement and athleticism that abound in athletics spaced too far apart, while a viewing public groomed to follow team-based sporting contests that feature episodic, every-30 seconds action via a new pitch, play, or shot, gets bored pretty quickly.

Not to mention, athletics doesn’t add up to anything. Diamond League standings notwithstanding, nobody actually wins the track meet. For aficionados, this formulation is, and has been, adequate enough. But to the casual fan, it is a deal breaker. What is the narrative thread I am supposed to follow? What am I rooting for?

There has to be a way to pit one event against the other. The sport needs to construct inter-event, rather than intra-event rivalries. You can’t just gauge the shot putters against one another. How did Mondo Duplantis’s 5.91m pole vault win in LA stack up against the other winners? World Athletics has a scoring table. Why not employ it in real time to bring increase fan interest?

Ryan Crouser’s 23.56 world record in the shot was valued at 1334 points on the WA scoring table. Marileidy Paulinho’s 48.98 400m victory (which was supposed to have been run against Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone till she withdrew the week of the meet) scored 1247. Jasmine Camacho-Quinn’s 12.31 100H was worth 1246, while Mondo’s 5.91m carried a value of 1242 points.

Same with entire track meets. Despite the fact that the big-name marquee stars either withdrew the week of the LA GP, or, like Sha’Carri Richardson, only ran the prelims but pulled out of the finals, the USATFF Los Angeles Grand Prix produced the highest competitive score of any athletics meeting so far in 2023. So the hype wasn’t just hype.

Bolstered by Ryan Crouser‘s shotput world record, the LA GP scored 92,749 competition points. The Diamond League meeting in Doha, Qatar on 5 May topped out at 92,720 points. If we’ve got the scoring tables, why not utilize them?

It’s hard enough being a “professional” in this sport, much less a fan. Makes one wonder how the overseers of the sport allowed the system to end up this way? Wondering, also, what they have in mind to address it?

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