The SEC and Big Ten Are Driving College Football
Before they set out to secure commitments from some of the world’s fastest runners earlier this year, organizers of a new track meet understood they had some convincing to do.
The meet, Athlos NYC, would be held in New York City six weeks after the end of the Paris Olympics, the peak of many athletes’ seasons, and two weeks after the finale of the Diamond League, track and field’s biggest global circuit.
And yet organizers felt confident the top runners would find it worth it to delay their offseason plans, because the meet was offering them the rarest commodities in the sport: big prize money and a big broadcast.
When Athlos NYC begins Thursday, 36 women in six events—the 100 meters, 100-meter hurdles, 200, 400, 800 and 1,500—will compete for a total purse of $663,000, including $60,000 for event winners. By comparison, the $110,500 of prize money per event at Athlos dwarfs the range of $30,000 to $50,000 the Diamond League will offer per event at its 14 regular-season meets next season, when the overall purse will reach $500,000 per meet.
In addition, organizers say 10% of all revenue will be redistributed to the athletes. Just as valuable is the exposure: The meet will be carried live by ESPN+, YouTube, DAZN, and on X/Twitter, an ease that makes it an outlier in the U.S., where becoming a professional track athlete can feel only slightly harder than finding broadcasts of professional track and field.
And yet the meet is not targeted at track diehards solely interested in Paris gold medalists like Faith Kipyegon and Gabby Thomas, two of the four Olympic champions who will be racing in New York. DJ D-Nice will play walk-out songs picked by each athlete for their introduction, and once the meet finishes, the Icahn Stadium infield will become a stage for a Megan Thee Stallion concert.
The twist? The women-only meet is not being staged by USA Track & Field, or a well-known meet operator within the industry, but an outsider—the venture-capital firm Seven Seven Six, led by Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian.
“I just think it’s kind of unfortunate that someone outside of the track space had to really realize that and understand the growth that our sport is capable of,” Masai Russell, the 110-meter hurdles gold medalist at the Paris Olympics who will compete at Athlos, told Front Office Sports.
Athletes like Russell and others have made clear it was an easy decision to extend their seasons for Athlos. Paul Doyle, a prominent agent representing multiple competitors at Athlos, said his clients had been “treated like queens” with perks, including first-class travel to New York and luxury accommodations.
Or as sprinter Shamier Little explained her reasons for running: “I love women, and I love making money,” she told LetsRun.
Yet within track and field, the biggest question of athletes, agents, and officials is whether Seven Seven Six will see enough evidence from its first, expensive foray into the sport to believe it is worth continuing to invest in the coming years.
“I think [the Athlos] event itself is going to be successful,” Doyle said. “The question is, will they internally analyze it as a success afterwards if it is operating at a big loss? And I hope they do. I hope they look at it and say, ‘You know what, even though we lost some money on this, it was a great event, and there’s value to this down the road.”
Seven Seven Six CMO Kayla Green told FOS she had heard concerns Athlos would be “one-and-done.” Though industry sources described internal discussions among organizers that suggested a desire to host multiple Athlos-style meets in coming seasons, perhaps up to four per season, Green told FOS that future plans won’t be decided until Athlos’s “market fit” is proved.
“We’ve got to really blow the doors off of Thursday night,” Green said. “And then we get to have those discussions about what happens next.”
Athlos is one of several new meets that has drawn outside investment into a sport desperately seeking it, joining Grand Slam Track, the four-meet circuit led by former Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson that begins in 2025 and will pay event winners $100,000 and Duael, a bracket-style sprinting competition. Athletes, coaches, agents, and organizers have welcomed the new investments while also acknowledging the new meets stand to benefit a small group of already successful, sponsored athletes who compete solely on the track, and not in any field events. Still, they expressed guarded optimism that if the new ventures are successful and draw new audiences, the effect could benefit a larger swath of athletes.
“The fact that Alexis decided to put this much money into the sport, we’re talking millions of dollars, shows that our sport has value,” Doyle said—to the point, he added, that it had even raised his own investment and revenue projections for American Track League, the meet circuit he has staged for the past decade.
“Put it this way, our sights are aimed a lot higher now.”
Ohanian, who is married to tennis star Serena Williams, told FOS in June that injecting cash into women’s sports isn’t about good PR, but good business. His founding of the NWSL’s Angel City FC paid off with a sale at a reported $250 million valuation this summer. To Ohanian, track looked like the next market inefficiency.
“What I found [in track] was just, embarrassingly cheap prize money,” Ohanian told FOS in June. “It felt like women’s soccer in 2019, when I saw Megan Rapinoe’s team sell for three-and-a-half million dollars.” (The NWSL’s Seattle Reign FC sold for nearly $60 million earlier this year.)
Still, the experience building Angel City wasn’t a perfect playbook for staging what Green called a “track meet-meets-Coachella.” Unlike soccer, interest in track wanes between Olympic years, and sustaining that interest in the U.S. is the riddle track officials have been unable to solve for decades.
Ohanian is the latest to try, with money, music, and connections. (An ESPN spokesperson said the network’s relationship with Ohanian factored into its decision to broadcast the meet despite its lack of exclusivity.) The entertainment-meets-track format has been tried before—twice by meets in Los Angeles alone in 2023—with little fanfare. Then again, they didn’t have Megan Thee Stallion.
“Track and field needs them to pull it off,” said one agent, who asked not to be identified to preserve relationships with the organizers. “If they can boast about how much exposure and money they’ve made, we’ll be in a different place in four years.”
Green wouldn’t comment on whether the platforms were paying rights fees to broadcast the meet, but said top priorities entering media negotiations were to ensure the meet would be easy to watch and to “get the highest ratings possible for the event,” she said.
“We can then go to speak with any of those partners and say, ‘Here’s a proof of concept; let’s actually now talk about the valuation off of this proof of concept,’” she said.
Networks could be interested in that concept following strong summer ratings. June’s U.S. Olympic track and field trials produced NBC’s largest audience for the meet since 2012, and the Paris Olympics saw jumps in viewership as well.
That potential exposure has in turn drawn in sponsors. Arielle Knutson, the CEO of Oiselle, a women-owned running apparel company based in Seattle, told FOS that the way Athlos had reached broadcast agreements with multiple partners to cast a wide net and capture casual fans was “hugely impactful.” And Bandit, a Brooklyn-based running company, began talking with Athlos organizers just as it was trying to figure out how to create more overlap between its core audience of amateur road runners with fans of professional track.
“If you can connect those dots a little bit more, all of a sudden the audience size is just so enormous,” said Tim Rossi, the head of experiences and brand at Bandit.
How enormous? Seven Seven Six will find out Thursday.
