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Here are my thoughts on the Grand Slam Track first meeting, which was held in Kingston, Jamaica on April 4-6, 2025:
Grand Slam Track did an incredible build on their plans, and built a fine following on social media, with great content including incredible photographs and video, short interviews and exciting quotes. Grand Slam Track built this content over the past year, as Michael Johnson said, he has a tremendous content development team.
The two commentating crews, color commentating and event commentating recieved a mixed review. In fact, many liked it, as the behind the scenes information is what fans have wanted for many years, Perhaps, we could use the term, overly enthusiastic. They will fine tune their commentating.
Strong rivalries and exciting races. The first meeting was a shake down cruise. There were some pretty good races, and some fine finishes. It is early in the season, but, GST had built some fun rivalries, especially in the Men’s short distances, Women’s short hurdles and both Men’s and Women’s short sprints.
The weakest point of the meet was the lack of fans. Much of it was pretty normal for our sport. Meet teams focus to keep meets on time, manage athlete travel, training and meals and manage global and national TV broadcasting, plus social media. The lack of a crowd, after 30,000 were in the same stadium the week before just showed that GST may need some people with more life experience, and perhaps some management skills.
This writer watched all three broadcasts, read hours of GST social media and reached out to key players in the sport and fans. There were some focused attacks on Micheal Johnson, and there were some strong points made, but the point is this, Grand Slam Track is challenging the status quo of the sport, and the change is palpable. There is a middle Eastern proverb, that goes, ” A Man is judged by the quality of his enemies.” There are some people who want GST to fail. Anytime anyone challenges the status quo, there is loud protest. Some of the complaints make sense, some of them do not. We will have to watch GST over the four meets, and see how MJ’s plans develop. We wish him luck.
