Inside Michael Johnson’s athletics revolution: Olympic legend reveals his superplan to problem tennis and golf… and the two-word mantra epitomising the American’s formidable imaginative and prescient

There is a particular quirk of athletics that has long puzzled Michael Johnson. Why, in a sport where milliseconds decide medals, must runners attach a piece of paper to their singlet with safety pins to display their name?

‘I have asked around to try to figure out why that is still the case and I have not got a good, solid answer,’ the American legend tells Mail Sport. ‘It’s pretty unbelievable.’

When it came to launching his own revolutionary track league, then, Johnson had a simple two-word starting point. ‘No bibs,’ says the 57-year-old. ‘You’re not going to see paper and safety pins, I can guarantee you that.

‘We’ve got the fastest people in the world. We think that it’s important that they look like the fastest people in the world, as opposed to the antithesis of fast. Some elements of the sport are stuck in the past.’

Grand Slam Track, Johnson believes, is the future. The man with the golden shoes at Atlanta 1996 has never been afraid to break convention to boost his and athletics’ profile. But he thinks he has now come up with a concept to take track to a whole new level – and put it on a par with sports such as tennis and golf.

Johnson’s league will see four three-day events take place between April and June next year, starting in the Jamaican capital, Kingston, before moving to the US cities of Miami, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Athletes must run both of the two distances in their ‘category’ at each meet, with 48 stars contracted as ‘racers’ to compete on all four weekends, and others to be signed as ‘challengers’ for one or two.

The 12 category winners at each event will bank £79,000 – more than the £55,000 on offer for gold medallists at the last World Championships.

‘I think it can be huge,’ insists the founder Johnson, a four-time Olympic champion and long-serving BBC pundit. ‘I think the potential of this sport is immense. It’s the greatest Olympic sport. Every four years, it’s the most watched sport – and probably the most watched thing – in the world.

‘It is a sport that everybody understands. It’s perfect for today’s audience. It’s really a series of highlights. Two thirds of our races take place in under a minute and you just keep getting more and more of them.

‘I don’t think track needs saving, but there’s a tremendous opportunity to grow and deliver to fans something that they’ve been complaining about for a very long time – a lack of head-to-head competition outside of the global championships.

‘Half of my team have come from WWE and that is huge. Look at what has happened with UFC and where they are now. Tennis has four Grand Slams every year. Golf has four majors every year. Look at what F1 has done. There is no reason that track can’t be on par with those sports.’

Among those to have signed up to Grand Slam Track as racers are Britain’s Olympic silver medallists Matthew Hudson-Smith and Josh Kerr. American stars Gabby Thomas and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone are two of six individual Paris 2024 gold medallists to have joined.

To Johnson’s frustration, however, there has been more talk about the big names who are currently missing, most notably Noah Lyles. The Olympic 100m champion has refused to sign until a TV deal is secured, saying: ‘If a tree falls in the middle of the woods and nobody is there to see it, did it really fall?’

In response, Johnson says: ‘We will announce our TV deal in January, but we’re going to go ahead and close out our group before then.

‘Noah’s timing doesn’t work for us and our timing doesn’t work for him. That’s fine. We’ll continue to talk to him about being a challenger and maybe he becomes a racer next year.

‘I know that there’s going to be this over-indexing on Noah and Noah’s great. But I think it does a disservice to all of the great athletes that we do have.

‘We have signed 48 racers and we got another 48 challenges that we’ve got to sign. So we’re going to continue to sign the fastest athletes in the world.’

They include Britain’s Olympic 800m champion, Keely Hodgkinson, who has indicated she intends to compete in one of the meets. Jakob Ingebrigtsen, the Olympic 5,000m gold medallist, is another Johnson expects to become a challenger.

‘We’re excited about the potential of having Keely and many others compete as a challenger,’ says Johnson. ‘Fans from all around the world want to see their favourite athletes compete against the best, and we’re certain Keely absolutely fits as part of that vision.

‘We don’t have Jakob yet but we’re going to get him. I think he’ll be a challenger this year in a couple of our races, and then maybe next year he becomes a racer.’

One complaint of Johnson’s concept is that it does not suit athletes who specialise in one event. To compete in her ‘short distance’ category, Hodgkinson will have to run the unfamiliar 1500m as well as her favoured 800m.

‘I would say there’s some people for whom the structure doesn’t work,’ admits Johnson. ‘But you can’t not build a league if it doesn’t work for three people but it works for everybody else.

‘We had a waiting list of athletes who wanted to join. The athletes have been overjoyed by what we’re offering them. It’s the first time ever they have had an opportunity to be contractually guaranteed a base compensation and a lane in the meets with the biggest prize money that the sport has ever seen.’

Further criticism has been around the omission of field events, which Johnson has said are not TV-friendly due to how long they take to complete. Questions have also been raised about why all four meets are taking place in North America, when the initial plan was to stage two elsewhere.

Johnson insists it was a strategic decision rather than venues turning them down, despite claims to the contrary by UK Athletics regarding the London Stadium.

‘We considered the UK at one point,’ he says. ‘We looked at a lot of different international cities that were interested. But we’ve decided year one doesn’t make sense for us for various reasons.

‘From a broadcast standpoint, we want to focus our energy where we feel like the opportunity to grow the biggest audience is, and the overwhelming majority of athletes we have signed are based here in the US as well.

‘I think we’ll end up in the UK at some point and London’s obviously the first choice. We have the opportunity in the future to rotate some cities and expand beyond just the four as well. But right now we’re really excited to be focused on this North American market.’

Johnson also dismisses the notion that Grand Slam Track is a breakaway league, akin to LIV Golf. Neither does he view it as a rival to World Athletics’ existing Diamond League, even though his Miami meet in May clashes with their Shanghai event.

‘What we’re doing is very different to the Diamond League,’ he adds. ‘It’s a much more exclusive group of athletes that we’re focused on.

‘We want to be great partners with World Athletics. We’re in constant contact with them. As I was setting out to develop this, I listened to (World Athletics president) Seb Coe’s comments over the years. He said repeatedly that we need more innovation in the sport, we need the athletes to be paid more and we need to grow the sport in the US.

‘I listened to that and thought, ‘Hey, I think I can help with that’. This is going to be hard, there’s no doubt about that. But I’m used to doing hard things.’