Early Friday morning, unsponsored American sprinter Alaysha Johnson certified for the 100-meter hurdle finals on the 2024 Olympic Video games. She then took to X with a plea: “If anybody wants to buy me 8 tickets so my family can watch me run then I’d love yall … but know they going for $500 a piece,” she wrote. Inside an hour, her ask was answered: Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder and husband of Serena Williams, had come to the rescue.
Ohanian could seem doubtless an unlikely benefactor for girls’s monitor and subject—a “fairy godparent,” as Alison Wade from Quick Girls known as him—however however, because the principal proprietor of LA-based skilled girls’s soccer workforce Angel Metropolis FC and recipient of the Girls’s Sports activities Basis 2022 Champion For Equality Award, the enterprise capitalist is a long-time champion of girls’s sports activities. In April, he introduced that his Seven Seven Six agency would sponsor a brand new women-only monitor occasion known as Athlos on September 26, 2024.
“At 776, we believe in the power of sports to drive positive change and inspire future generations,” Ohanian stated in a press release. “By investing in women’s track, we aim to build a best-in-class event that elevates the profile of top women athletes and creates a more equitable sporting landscape.”
Ohanian’s companion on this enterprise is 200-meter Olympic gold medalist Gabby Thomas, who added, “We hope to not only provide athletes with the resources and visibility they need to have enduring careers but also to inspire fans worldwide with a reinvented format to experience the best of our sport.”
The primary-of-its-kind occasion will function top-tier feminine runners—together with Thomas, Olympic 5,000-meter silver medalist Religion Kipyegon, 400-meter U.S. nationwide indoor champion Alexis Holmes, Australian 100-meter document holder Torrie Lewis, and extra—racing distances from 100 to 1,500 meters. They’ll be vying for a share of $500,000, the most important purse ever provided at a girls’s monitor occasion; gold medalists will take dwelling $60,000 every (that’s double what the Diamond League finals solely award winners).
To up the ante even additional, Ohanian promised the 36 feminine Olympians operating his occasion that he’d personally pay them $60,000 in the event that they win a gold medal in Paris. Thomas was the primary to money in together with her Olympic win.
However Ohanian isn’t simply ponying up for the massive names. When discus thrower and first-time Olympian Veronica Fraley posted that she could not pay her hire, regardless of competing within the Olympics, Ohanian nearly instantly despatched her sufficient cash to cowl hire for the remainder of the 12 months. Fraley didn’t make it to the finals in Paris, however the consideration she received led to $23,000 in donations on GoFundMe, which she’ll use to maintain coaching for World Championships and the 2028 Summer time Olympics in Los Angeles.
To capitalize on what’s been an incredible Olympic monitor and subject competitors, with Staff USA incomes 29 medals as of publication, Ohanian has been on the bottom in Paris inviting actually everybody to Athlos: Staff USA gymnastics, rugby star Ilona Maher, Taste Flav (who’s the sponsor and largest hype man for Staff USA’s girls’s water polo workforce). To maintain the eye of recent followers, you want star energy and an attractive setting that requires reimagining the normal monitor meet. (Working example: The dramatic pre-race music and a light-weight present on the Stade de France in Paris.)
Athlos will function DJs and particular person entrance music for the athletes, and Megan Thee Stallion would be the inaugural headliner. “Only the best for the best,” Ohanian wrote on TikTok. ( who else has tapped Megan Thee Stallion’s star energy lately? Kamala Harris.) On the Enterprise of Girls’s Sports activities Summit in April, Thomas stated Ohanian was impressed by the spirit of Components 1 occasions, which have seen an unprecedented rise in reputation following the debut of Netflix’s Drive to Survive sequence in 2019.
Whereas monitor and subject may not be having its F1 second (but), that is the sort of mainstream reputation the game has hardly ever seen, and it’s not solely due to Ohanian. In February, Duæl Monitor—a head-to-head, bracket-style racing competitors made for TV—promised a $1 million prize pool at their September occasion.
At nearly the identical time as Ohanian’s announcement, legendary Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson launched Grand Slam Monitor, a brand new league debuting subsequent 12 months that may showcase huge names like Olympic 400-meter hurdles gold medalist and world document holder Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Olympic 1500-meter silver medalist Josh Kerr, and 36 different athletes.
In July, Netflix launched Dash, a documentary sequence that adopted elite monitor and subject athletes as they ready for the World Championships; the present attracted 2.4 million views in its first week of being launched and season two is already being filmed. In the meantime, Amazon Prime has a docuseries within the works in regards to the Ingebrigtsen brothers, together with world document holder for the indoor 1500 metres Jakob Ingebrigtsen, as they put together for the 2024 Olympic Video games, in line with the Norwegian newspaper VG.
Athletes are additionally driving curiosity on their very own by way of social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. They’re leaning into distinct personalities (see: Sha’carri Richardson, who simply gained the Olympic silver medal within the 100-meter dash, and 100-meter gold medalist Noah Lyles has 1.4 million followers) rivalries (see: Jakob Ingebrigtson versus Josh Kerr, or Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone versus Norwegian Femke Bol), and relationships (see: energy couple Tara Davis-Woodhall, who gained the Olympic gold medal within the lengthy soar, and her husband, Paralympian Hunter Woodhall) to assist them stand out on a world stage.
Nonetheless, it by no means hurts to have a fairy godparent, and a savvy entrepreneur like Ohanian is aware of how essential it’s to take care of this Olympic momentum so monitor and subject doesn’t lose that once-every-four-years highlight—and the income alternatives it brings for each particular person athletes and the game as a complete—after the Closing Ceremony.
“None of this came from a charitable POV. It’s not because I have daughters or because I’m married to a world-class athlete,” Ohanian wrote on LinkedIn about his funding in girls’s soccer—however the total sentiment applies to all girls’s sports activities, together with girls’s monitor and subject. “It’s because these women were objectively great, and they were being objectively undervalued. It’s just good business.”
