By Kyle Merber
January 3, 2024
With the turning of the calendar comes the opportunity to reinvent ourselves, to become the people that we hope to be. (Or we can at least talk about doing that!) Either way, in that spirit, what if we took this article published in The Athletic called “Professional tennis is broken. Here’s how to fix it” hit control + F, and every time tennis is mentioned, we replaced it with track and field? Mission accomplished. We did it! The solution for both sports seems so obvious to fans, the issue remains that there are too many stakeholders with slightly different goals.
Tennis and track are both similar in that they are mass-participant sports and that complicates what it means to grow the sport. Would you rather the number of people signing up to run a marathon in the world double or is your preference that TV viewership (and salaries of professionals) multiply instead? It depends who you are. Road race directors and shoe companies would prefer the first, but newsletter writers, athletes, and most fans would probably prefer the latter.
The proposal for tennis is not significantly different from what has already been discussed or written about in what has become an annual cycle here in The Lap Count. The schedule should be focused on the Majors and the largest competitions on the calendar with the notion that the top athletes would be predictably present at each of them. In many ways, track and field is closer to this vision than tennis.
We have the Diamond League – a moderately cohesive collection of meetings on the calendar that sort of provide a semblance of a season for fans to follow. Although they each are managed by independent organizations, the collective bargaining works in favor of negotiating sponsorships, TV deals, and what events are happening when.
The underlying problem is that of fairness and development. In tennis the proposal is that the top 100 players are on the tour each season – that’s the major league. To break-in to that stratosphere, less-established athletes would have to thrive and separate themselves from the pack in the minors.
So let’s apply that to track, as a thought experiment. Each year the least successful athletes from the preceding season’s Diamond League are relegated and the most successful outsiders are promoted. This works great in theory until a kid that no one had ever heard of starts running solo 1500m races in 3:28 at meets vs. nobody. Unlike tennis, track has a barometer by which to measure performance beyond head-to-head matchups. And no matter how much we try to make head-to-head competition the focus, time will always be a factor.
From a storytelling and marketing perspective, a consistent roster of athletes facing off each week would be the most ideal scenario… IF they were also consistently the top performers. This is easy to control in the likes of Formula 1 because no one outside of those 20 drivers are sitting in those cars and racing on those tracks. Since it is unrealistic for the top circuit of track and field to become exclusive, there needs to be more incentives in place so that the best athletes in the world need to keep racing at the best meets in the world.
The answer: don’t let the top athletes get comfortable.
The first step is to remove the standard. Take a page out of tennis’s book that requires even the best players to continue playing throughout the season – you can’t rest on your laurels. The standard is the ultimate crutch because once an athlete achieves it then all they have to do is show up for the championships.
The next step is to shorten the window. An athlete can run 3:33.50 on July 1st, 2023 and be qualified to compete on August 2nd, 2024 for the first round of the 1500m in the Olympics. Those might be two different athletes – a lot can happen in 13 months! January 1st of the same year seems like a more honest starting point, although I’d really say that the season should start at the first Diamond League meet on April 20th in Xiamen. Do you know who would be at opening day, if it actually mattered? Everyone.
The challenge is determining the fairest way to determine how to fill out the fields in the Diamond Leagues since they will become even more competitive to get into. In addition to tweaking the ranking algorithm, getting rid of the home field advantage and “my agent is in charge of this meet” clauses are two obvious ones. Perhaps having a play-in race at a minor race a week before creates more opportunity and intrigue.
It’s important to develop the talent of tomorrow, but for the sport to succeed then there needs to be stars. And like stars in the night sky, you always know where your favorites will be (shout out Betelgeuse)! Even if that’s occasionally slightly less fair to the up-and-comers or those who haven’t run fast in over a year.
Kyle Merber
After hanging up his spikes – but never his running shoes – Kyle pivoted to the media side of things, where he shares his enthusiasm, insights, and experiences with subscribers of The Lap Count newsletter, as well as viewers of CITIUS MAG live shows.
