The track and field start-up Athlos “has not been a profitable endeavor yet,” founder Alexis Ohanian said at a press conference in New York City on Thursday.
Asked by Front Office Sports about Athlos’s revenue and ownership structure, Ohanian declined to say how much revenue it was pulling in, only disclosing that the event would make “millions” of dollars this year, increasing last year’s revenue by “3X, 4X.” He also said that he and his fund, Seven Seven Six, own “100%” of Athlos outside of the three athletes—sprinters Gabby Thomas and Sha’Carri Richardson and jumper Tara Davis-Woodhall—who already are “advisor-owners” in Athlos. Ohanian declined to say what share of the venture they owned.
Thomas and Richardson are not competing at Athlos, which began with a long jump competition in Times Square on Thursday night and continues with a track meet on Randalls Island on Friday. The event, in its second year, added the long jump this year after Davis-Woodhall, the Olympic champion, criticized Ohanian on social media for not including field events.
The pair said Thursday that they had collaborated on several ideas for presenting a long jump, including Ohanian’s suggestion that competitors get just a single jump. (The horizontal jumps typically give athletes three first-round jumps and three more in a final.)
The event is moving to a team-based league format next year; Ohanian said that “we take a lot of inspiration from our friends over at Unrivaled” and that like the women’s basketball league, he plans to give competitors equity next year.
Amid an ongoing running boom that has pushed the global running market to a $90 billion industry and the quadrennial surge in track’s popularity around the Olympics, start-up money flooded into professional track in 2024 and 2025.
Much of it ran into the reality that has plagued the sport for years: It’s challenging to turn the masses of casual runners into track and field fans. Grand Slam Track, a rival Ohanian has repeatedly tweaked, launched with what they said was $30 million and funding; it failed to complete its initial season or pay athletes more than half of what they’re owed so far. Its future is in doubt as it seeks more emergency funding. Athlos will pay out more $750,000 on Friday night, a fraction of the millions that Grand Slam promised, but with a guarantee to pay the athletes immediately.
Ohanian, who also owns 10% of Chelsea’s women’s team and is invested in Angel City FC and Tiger Woods’s TG, told FOS this summer that the shambolic state of track had shocked him. “Nothing could prepare me for the broke-ness that exists in the infrastructure around this sport,” he said in July.
“The goal here obviously is to build a highly profitable league,” he said Friday. “And then the question here is how soon. LA28 is a great goal for us,” he said, referring to the Los Angeles Olympics in three years. “The most important thing here is that we build something that is sustainable and durable.”
