The Grand Slam Track, the parallel athletics circuit launched by Michael Johnson in 2025, is already under threat

The Grand Slam Track (GST) was intended as a departure from the traditional athletics circuit. A competition aimed at "revolutionizing" and "bringing back to the forefront" this sport, whose audience tends to evaporate outside of the Summer Olympics, in the words of its founder, Michael Johnson. But less than a year after its launch, the GST is already in trouble.

In a statement released Friday, August 15, the former American sprint king announced that the "2026 season will not take place" until the financial problems facing this private league have "been resolved . " "The current situation and the inability to pay our athletes and partners is one of the most difficult challenges I have had to face," said the Texan, former world record holder in the track lap and triple individual Olympic champion (200m and 400m in Atlanta in 1996 and 400m in Sydney in 2000) in the text.

Comprised of four meetings per year, the Grand Slam Track pitted the world's top athletes – many of whom were under contract to create a repeat – against each other in two races at each event. Above all, it offered "the biggest prize money ever seen in this sport," Michael Johnson boasted in September 2024.

In fact, the emoluments of the entrants are colossal compared to the bonuses traditionally paid in the discipline: from 100,000 dollars (around 92,500 euros) for the winners to 10,000 dollars minimum for the last, per meeting – which excludes throwing and jumping competitions.

After an inaugural stop in Kingston, Jamaica, in early April, the GST stopped in Miami, Florida, and then Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in May. Each time, the venue was medium-sized stadiums with sparse stands. Its last event, scheduled for Los Angeles, California, from June 27 to 29, had to be canceled. "The economic environment has been disrupted over the past year, and this decision was made to ensure our continued existence as the world's leading athletics circuit," said Michael Johnson.

Since the premature end of the 2025 season, several athletes have announced that they are still waiting for their bonuses to be paid. "The cruelest paradox in all of this is that we promised [they] would be duly and promptly paid," the former rider acknowledged. The situation, he said, is linked to the loss of investors and "changes in circumstances beyond [the] control" of the organizers.

In its debut, the circuit brought together some track stars like multiple US Olympic champions Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Gabby Thomas, but it was shunned by sprinting greats like Noah Lyles, Julien Alfred and Sha'Carri Richardson.