Alexis Ohanian Tweaks Track Rivals With Promise of Instant Payments

Alexis Ohanian’s track startup, Athlos, promises to pay athletes just minutes after crossing the finish line at its New York City event this weekend.

Athlos is returning to the Big Apple after a strong debut last year, where it offered $663,000 in prize money and notched what it says were millions of viewers across several platforms.

This weekend, the all-women’s track spectacle will hold the long jump in Times Square on Thursday night and the rest of the meet at Randalls Island on Friday night. The event is known for being a party on top of a track meet: last year’s musical guest was rapper Megan Thee Stallion, and this year’s will be Ciara.

Ohanian told Front Office Sports in July that payments for the 2024 event hit athletes’ accounts “a few business days” after the event.

This year, the wait time is even shorter.

“That wasn’t good enough,” Ohanian said on an episode of Front Office Sports Today. “They’re getting paid within minutes of getting their time secured this year,” he said, thanks to a sponsorship deal he landed with a payment company.

Swift payments are far from standard in track. Oftentimes event organizers wait weeks or months to distribute prize money, citing drug testing that can take that long. But there are other reasons track events have been slow to pay runners. As Grand Slam Track wobbled this summer, it became clear that it had burned through the money it raised without paying athletes the salaries and record prize purses it had promised. Months after the payments were due, Grand Slam paid athletes $5.5 million last Friday, FOS reported. That’s only half the money it owes, and it required emergency financing just to pay that much.

Athlos will still drug test its athletes, but the startup won’t wait on those results to send the payments. A spokesperson for Athlos tells Front Office Sports that the U.S. Anti-Doping will conduct random tests at the meet, and all athletes and agents have agreed to return any prize money if their tests come back positive. (Recovering and redistributing prize money paid to dopers has also been an issue in the sport.)

Last year, Athlos paid $60,000 to the winners and down to $2,500 to sixth place in each of its seven events, and offered $250,000 to anyone who breaks a world record. An Athlos spokesperson confirmed to FOS that the payment structure is the same as last year, meaning that athletes will be paid $773,500 across seven events; the world record bonus and 10% revenue sharing are also back this year. The long jump is a new addition, because the 2024 event didn’t include any field events.

Ohanian last year criticized Grand Slam and directly called out billionaire Bill Ackman, who chairs his rival’s lead investor, Winners Alliance. The Reddit cofounder took issue with part of Grand Slam’s contracts with athletes that seemed to limit athletes from joining other major sports leagues without permission, which Grand Slam said was “[creating] controversy through distortions.”

Athlos plans to launch a team-style league—starring Sha’Carri Richardson—next year, which Ohanian compared to Formula 1. “I love watching dudes race around in cars, that’s dope,” Ohanian said, “but again, watching humans do it on their own two feet?”

“If I was describing it to an alien, I think the alien would say, ‘Well yeah, obviously your species cares more about the humans doing it on their own two feet, right? That’s surely the more impressive one.’”