Can Grand Slam Track craft a new narrative after botched rookie season that led to bankruptcy?

Back in June I made a guest appearance on CBC Sports’ online series “Trackside,” to discuss the implications of Grand Slam Track cancelling their season finale. The task: don my sports business reporter hat, and help the hosts and audience unravel GST’s corporate spin regarding the premature end to the league’s rookie season.

Lease deal this, travel costs that…

Sounded to me like they had simply run out of money, and I said so. If year two was coming, any athlete signing up needed a briefcase full of cash just to know GST meant what they said about delivering quit-your-day-job money.

Six months later, I’m here to apologize.

I said GST ran out of money, but I was wrong.

A steady stream of news leaks, public statements and a mid-December bankruptcy filing have made clear that they never had it. 

At least not enough to cover six-figure winners’ cheques that aimed to change professional track’s pay scale.

Not enough to cover the content and marketing deal it had struck with Citius Mag, the U.S.-based, track-centric media company.

And nowhere near enough to pay for the professional-quality broadcasts that streamed on CBCSports.ca in Canada, and aired on the CW Network south of the border.

According to an August report in The Athletic, the circuit’s primary funder, the asset-management firm Eldridge, saw the anemic crowds for the kickoff event in Kingston, Jamaica, and decided against following through on the investment it had pledged in a non-binding term sheet.

So GST, it’s now clear, had some of the sport’s top athletes turning in world-leading performances for significantly less than the promise of a big payday. I’d call it an IOU, but if the term sheet was non-binding, Eldridge didn’t owe GST anything, technically.

With Season One done and Season Two buffering, we could second-guess decisions that GST leadership, fronted by Olympic legend Micheal Johnson, undertook – but that’s too easy. If the question is, “what should they have done differently?” the answer is “almost everything.”

Looking at it that way doesn’t help us understand the situation, how we landed here, and what might change if Grand Slam Track manages a second season.

Instead, we can evaluate GST outside the specific context of elite track and field, and alongside other notable North American sports startups, and search for through-lines.