The Uncontested Rules of Rivalry

The story of Michael Johnson through words and artifacts

Written by Michael Silver
Photography by Jai Lennard

He rolled up to the club with a breezy smile on his face, excited to kick it with his NFL friends on a cool Colorado night in the mid-1990s. Alas, it was a false start: As Michael Johnson arrived at the VIP entrance, he encountered chilly, blank stares. Part of a crew that included his best friend from college, Denver Broncos cornerback Ray Crockett, and Crockett’s future Hall of Fame teammates Shannon Sharpe and Terrell Davis, Johnson was eyeballed by the doormen as though he were the group’s designated two-way-pager carrier, and it was unclear whether he’d be allowed entry.

Johnson’s friends on the Broncos were incredulous.

“Y’all don’t know who this is?” they asked as Tupac’s “All Bout U” blasted over the sound system.

Nope.

“How can you not f----- know who this is?”

Johnson, by the fall of 1995, was one of track’s brightest stars, having just made history by winning gold medals in both the 200 and 400 meters at the World Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden. In Europe, he was highly recognizable. In his own country, however, the former Baylor runner remained largely anonymous. That would change the following summer when, at the Atlanta Olympics, Johnson famously donned gold shoes and pulled off a legendary double that stamped him as one of the most transcendent champions in the history of the sport. Yet even as he enjoyed the subsequent spoils of success—and completed one of the most accomplished athletic careers of the 20th Century—Johnson continued to channel the frustration he felt while being sized up skeptically at those Denver clubs.

It was all so maddening. How could track, an Olympic centerpiece every four years that had enjoyed a wave of popularity in the ‘80s, fail to penetrate the American sporting public’s psyche the rest of the time? Why were there so few opportunities for the fastest men and women in the world to captivate audiences by competing head-to-head? Where were the annual, commercially viable showcases that featured the best of the best—track’s version of the Masters, Wimbledon or the Kentucky Derby?

After Johnson retired in 2000, things got worse. Much worse. “The sport, in terms of popularity, just dropped off a cliff,” Johnson recalls. “Every time I thought it couldn’t get worse, it hit a new bottom. Every four years, it’s extraordinarily relevant. But in between, it’s nothing. When Usain Bolt came on the scene (in 2008), there was this false belief that the sport was doing great. I said, ‘Once he’s gone, those people watching the sport are gonna bolt with Bolt.’”

He wasn’t wrong, and the predictable dip only hardened his resolve to try to effect change. For more than three decades Johnson—as a performer, an agent, a BBC broadcaster and an entrepreneur whose Michael Johnson Performance, which established a state-of-the-art training center in Dallas, counted track federations and athletes as clients—pondered the malaise and envisioned a better reality, for elite racers and for fans. The existing model, he concluded, couldn’t produce the type of cream-of-the-crop competitions that could elevate the sport’s profile. 

So Johnson decided to do the heavy lifting himself. In February Johnson, 56, announced that he had teamed with Winners Alliance—a group best known for being the for-profit arm of the Professional Tennis Players Association—to “build a professional truly fan-focused league that will unlock commercial value for the best track athletes in the world.” Two months later, Johnson revealed that he’d already secured $30 million in funding from investors and strategic partners.

In June, Johnson detailed his specific plans for the venture, known as Grand Slam Track, set for a 2025 launch. It will unveil four annual meets within the April-September window patterned after tennis’ Grand Slam tournaments and golf’s majors, three-day gatherings that feature marquee collections of contracted performers facing off in two events apiece. The current plans are to stage the meets in Los Angeles, an additional location in the United States, and two international sites.

“How can you not f----- know who this is?”

Long frustrated by the bureaucracy and outdated structure that have kept the top track athletes from reaping the benefits of professional competition in the way that their peers in so many other sports do, Johnson is determined to keep things simple. Grand Slam Track will be short on stunts, long on substance.

“This sport doesn’t need gimmicks,” Johnson says. “It needs a better presentation. This primarily has one objective, and that is to create a truly professional, commercially viable league for fans and the best athletes. Athletes are the product. But how we structure this league, and how we package the athletes, has to be based on entertaining the fans—like every professional sport, except for track and field (as it currently stands). If you watch a track meet today, the purpose of that track meet, if you really dig down… it’s for the athletes. We have events for ourselves.

“I’ve been involved in different startups, and we’re building this like a startup. You have to understand: Is there actually an audience for this, and what do they want? And the first thing you do when you deliver and release that first version is get customer feedback. The things that they say, ‘I don’t want,’ or ‘I didn’t use that,’ you scrap. It’s all about the user. And so, it’s all about the fan.”

In that vein, there will be no field events.

“We will have one thing going on at one time,” Johnson says. “Every athlete in every event deserves to have undivided attention on that.”

Johnson strives to highlight the essence of the sport he loves, something he believes has been lost amid unnecessary noise.  Because of that, Johnson believes, media who cover the events tend to focus on times and records, even those of the arcane variety.

“The whole sport has overcomplicated things,” Johnson says. “Because the avid fan is so disenchanted with the sport—because there’s no competition to speak of, very often—it’s, ‘well, give us something,’ and we can get into all these facts and figures. There’s no room for the casual fan to come in, because ‘they’re not even talking about anything that I know.’”

By contrast, this is Johnson’s three-word summation of the Grand Slam series: Only the fastest.

First to the finish line wins. The end.

And don’t even get Johnson started on the labeling of those participating in Grand Slam events as “athletes.”

Says Johnson: “A word that is almost never used in track anymore, that we will always use, is ‘racing.’ We have racers; we don’t have athletes. And we race. That’s what we do. When you get on the track, you’re racing the other racers. You’re not ‘executing your strategy,’ or all the other stuff we say in the sport now. It’s almost like we deliberately try to avoid saying that they’re racing. You’re missing the whole point of this, which is: Who f----- won?”

Not surprisingly, Johnson will encourage Grand Slam Track’s race winners to celebrate—something he believes does not come naturally, because of the sport’s amateur roots and an accompanying “ideology around track that everybody should be treated the same, everybody is deserving, everybody’s equal—even though they’re not.” 

First to the finish line wins. The end.

During the height of his career Johnson experienced a stark contrast when he was part of an entrepreneurial group, headed by Ross Perot Jr., that owned the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks from 1996-2000. Each year, at the league’s competition committee meetings, Johnson recalls, “the committee (would be) looking at, ‘How do we improve the game? What’s happening? How do we make sure that we don’t lose fan base? Who’s our target market? What demographics?’ Demographics don’t even matter anymore; now it’s down to habits and behaviors. In track we never even studied demographics: ‘Who do we want to be targeting and how does our product fit that?’”

Grand Slam Track, by design, will be all about giving fans the product they desire. Under the current model, the best racers derive most of their income from contracts with shoe companies heavily tied to performances at the Olympics and World Championships, which inadvertently disincentivizes focusing on other events. Johnson’s league plans to counter this by signing the sport’s biggest stars, including U.S. collegiate champions whose eligibility has expired, to professional contracts. As contracted runners, they’ll be motivated to treat the Grand Slam meets as priorities. Also, Grand Slam Track prize money will be significantly higher than existing events: $100,000 for a first-place finish, and a minimum of $10,000 per competitor in each race.

The format will foster rivalries and develop storylines. Market research has shown that there’s a potentially large audience made up of viewers who enjoy watching track at the Olympics and Worlds and are hungry for more events featuring the top racers. Johnson insists his series can coexist with the Diamond League meets, much as golf’s major championships and tennis’ Grand Slams do with other tournaments

Nothing is guaranteed, but Johnson believes his venture can burst out of the blocks and pick up the pace. He views the NFL, NBA, Formula 1 and UFC as models for what he believes Grand Slam Track can become. He fantasized about such a scenario while running his small agency, which began as a means of helping Jeremy Wariner, another Baylor star, who captured gold in the 400 meters in the 2004 Athens games. That was also the first Olympics at which Johnson served as a BBC commentator, an ongoing role that has kept him connected to the sport and made him a highly recognizable figure in the U.K.

“I get (recognized) in London because I’m on TV all the time,” Johnson says. Then he laughs, marveling at how things have changed since the ‘90s, when he continually got the side-eye from those doormen at Denver clubs. “Back then,” he recalls, “an American football player would not be known in London. But now, as things have become more global and superstars are superstars everywhere, they would be. (In the ‘90s)  a track athlete at least would have been known in Europe; now, for the most part, they’re not recognized anywhere.

“Most sports have become even more global since that time and have expanded their presence. Track has gone the opposite direction.”

Johnson, a racer to his core, is now leading the charge toward what he envisions as a bountiful future for the sport. Track has had its share of dark moments, but the Grand Slam founder is convinced that legions of potential customers remain drawn to the sport’s essence.

His vision: Get the fastest humans on earth together in one place, line them up and let them race.

“I’ve been thinking about this and experiencing this since 1990,” he says. “That’s 35 years of seeing these things from all my different vantage points—as an athlete, an agent, a television commentator, and in my role as an entrepreneur. Being an investor myself, being the owner of an NBA team, I’ve just seen the stark difference between track and these other ventures. So yeah, this has been bugging me for a long time, and there are so many things I’ve seen that have left me shaking my head. And we can create a better model for the sport and its fans.”

Now, once again, Johnson is in front of the pack, and determined to stay there—no matter how far away the finish line might be.