Any fan is familiar with the rush and confusion of getting into a new sport: You slowly get sucked into a world you knew nothing about. Before you know it, you’re signing up for obscure streaming services to watch faraway events at odd times and following inscrutable social media accounts. Often, you start wondering: Does the way this sport does things make any sense?
Alexis Ohanian, the wealthy Reddit cofounder, serial sports investor, and Serena Williams’s husband, went through the experience recently with track and field. In an interview with Front Office Sports, Ohanian said he spent the past few years going deep into track’s almost quaint culture of posting wars and social media accounts. “There’s such an energetic fan base that’s so engaged online,” he said. “This is the heat that I’m drawn toward. You can’t fake that. If you have this vibrant community online that has its memes and its culture and its in-jokes … you can build a ton.”
Unlike most of his fellow posters and lurkers, though, Ohanian had the money and influence to act on his frustrations.
In April, Ohanian announced the 776 Invitational, named after his venture capital firm. Details were scant, but two items stood out: It would be a women-only track meet, with an enormous prize purse.
The event announced more details Thursday, including a unique revenue-sharing scheme. There will only be six races—the 100, 200, 400, 800, and 1,500 meters, plus the 100-meter hurdles—with six women each. All participants will take home prize money, with $60,000 for the winner, $25,000 for the runner-up, $10,000 for third, $8,000 for fourth, $5,000 for fifth, and $2,500 for sixth.
Those may sound like small sums for professional sports, but they’re positively eye-popping amounts of money in track and field. The Diamond League, track’s premier circuit, pays just $10,000 to race winners, and $30,000 at its final meet of the season. Ohanian said it was “wild to see the announcement from World Athletics,” in which track and field’s governing body said it would be making its first-ever cash payments to Olympic gold medalists this summer in Paris.
At the 776 Invitational, 10% of all event revenues will be pooled and split evenly among all the athletes, an arrangement he compared to giving start-up employees equity in a company. That way, “even the most junior employee has skin in the game,” he said. (He added it was incumbent on him and the meet organizers to create an event compelling enough that the athletes were genuinely enthusiastic to discuss it on social media.)
The location, precise date, and full slate of competing athletes have not been announced yet. Austin-based sprinter Gabby Thomas, who won bronze at the Tokyo Olympics in the 200 meters, will be competing; she helped Ohanian come up with the idea for the meet.
At the Business of Women’s Sports Summit in April, Thomas recalled Ohanian asking her, “Can the track be laid out like an F-1 circuit, so it’s not like an oval every time?” She told him that was a “terrible idea,” and Ohanian dropped it, but that’s the spirit he’s bringing to the event.
A year ago, he says, he began asking the top U.S. women in track what he calls “dumb questions” about how their sport works. “And what I found was just, embarrassingly cheap prize money,” he said. “It felt like women’s soccer in 2019, when I saw Megan Rapinoe’s team sell for three-and-a-half million dollars. I was like, ‘Someone is very bad at their jobs’ if that’s all they’ve been able to monetize this with.” (The soccer team in question, the NWSL’s Seattle Reign FC, sold for nearly $60 million earlier this year.)
Thomas has publicly complained about meets being behind expensive paywalls, and Ohanian said that their event will be “accessible,” with an emphasis on “world-class entertainment.”
Money is rushing into track and field right now as a sport that often struggles to be relevant outside of the Olympics. Investors are hoping to capitalize on both an Olympic year and a sustained post-pandemic running boom in the United States. Earlier this year, legendary sprinter Michael Johnson raised $30 million in seed money for a new track league to start in 2025.
Ohanian compared track’s current moment to where women’s soccer was ahead of the 2019 World Cup: a sport that gets “tons of attention every four years,” and one that is primed to break through otherwise. He joked that people are currently trying to invent other sports—“make fetch happen,” as he put it—while track is sitting right there, underfunded and ready for a cash infusion to make it soar.
Ohanian made clear he’s not getting into the running business out of the goodness of his heart. Yet he’s also not cutting corners on this meet, promising a heavy investment in production in addition to prize money, and he does not anticipate making money on the first edition of the invitational.
“In tech, in start-ups … I’ve always been very comfortable with the idea that if you focus on making something that people love, and you can draw the attention, you can draw the engagement, you can draw the interest in the short term, creating a profitable, successful business in the long term is very, very doable,” he said. “The most important thing is doing right by the athletes … when you do right by athletes, everything else tends to fall in line.”
