4 weeks ago
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In a season which promised much, Grand Slam Track (GST) came to a screeching halt as the final meet in Los Angeles was cancelled abruptly. GST founder Michael Johnson has since explained that the cancellation was due to financial shortfalls in the league’s inaugural run.
In a recent interview with Front Office Sports, Johnson explained GST ran into financial difficulties after one of their investors backed out of their full commitment.
The loss of funds left GST in a multimillion-dollar hole, now owing an excess of $10 million to both athletes and vendors.
Though Johnson declined to name the investor or the amount of money they failed to collect, he explained it played a major role in the league’s misfortunes.
“We want to be really clear. We had a very difficult situation this year financially,” Johnson said.
“We had an investor that wasn’t able to honour their complete commitment to the league, so we started off with the capital that needed to get through the season as we planned it with the four Slams and made sure we could take care of everyone.”
Continuing, he said:”That was a huge blow to us and caused some major, major cash flow issues for us and put us in a difficult position, put our athletes in a difficult position.”
The league held its launch in Kingston at the National Stadium, before moving to Miami, and held its third event in Philadelphia.
Four meets were planned, with the final ‘Slam’ set to be hosted in Los Angeles. However, the meet was cancelled, at a time when ICE agents descended on the city and residents responded with a series of demonstrations, many of which were violent.
Despite their financial issues, Johnson believes this will not be the end of the GST series, and he is committed to hosting the league next year, with greater focus on ensuring the league can remain sustainable.
“We’re very proud with what we were able to accomplish over our first three meets. But it has been a very difficult season this year, and for that reason we felt like we needed to cancel LA and try to get things right with the league so we can make it sustainable.
“This is a start-up and (with) start-ups, in the first couple of years, you’re going to experience some wins, you’re going to experience some losses, you’re going to experience some headwinds and we’re not different,” he said.
PRIMARY GOAL
Johnson sought to highlight the positives from GST’s inaugural season and believes it had achieved the primary goal of proving the potential to improve track and field. He said the three meets showed that the sport has the ability to garner public attention outside of the Olympic cycle, and pointed to their broadcasting metrics and fan engagement across social media as evidence.
“We’ve had some amazing performances and some amazing metrics that really proved what we set out to prove, which was that you can coalesce an audience around this sport outside the Olympics,” he said.
“This season has been amazing by any measure in terms of what we were able to do with the sport; how we were able to partner with our athletes and go out there to achieve the sort of television numbers that we were able to achieve,” Johnson added.
“We’re very proud of what we were able to achieve this year, especially under really, really difficult situations and circumstances. But it gives us confidence and its attracted the attention of numerous investors and sponsors that are on board with us for next year.”
PAYING DEBTS
Though this season reached an abrupt end, with monies owed to athletes and vendors alike, Johnson is confident the league will be able to clear its debts and confirmed they are in talks with new investors in the hopes of meeting these payments in time.
“But we have to get this right. We’ve got to get our athletes and vendors taken care of,” he insisted.
“As a start-up, you’re always raising money. We’ve been in those conversations and we continue to be in those conversations with new investors that are attracted to what we were able to build, but also our existing investors as well.
“We’ve been working very hard over the last couple of months to make sure that we can get everyone taken care of and making sure that we can get to the next season.”
English (US) ·