Interview with Steve Gera, President and CEO, Grand Slam Track
Michael Johnson’s visionary right-hand-man talks storytelling, singularity of focus and the Slam formula that’s set to revolutionize the sport.
Steve Gera has been building Grand Slam Track with Michael Johnson since the idea was in the starting blocks. It has been a fast and furious 18-month race to bring the new global home of track competition to fruition; a fitting start for a venture that will bring only the fastest athletes and biggest rivalries on the planet together.
As the league’s Official Track Partner, we caught up with Steve to get the inside track on the journey so far and the next chapter that is coming for the sport.
What is the ambition of Grand Slam track?
Our goal is to create a storytelling platform for some of the most exciting athletes on the planet.
Your casual fan only really gets to see these athletes race once every four years. Between Olympic cycles they are relatively unknown. We want to take this amazing sport of track and turn it into combat racing where you create and tell the very best athlete stories and give fans a way to follow and connect with their heroes year-round.
Why do you think the sport hasn't been able to achieve that popularity between Olympics?
The sport is sneakily popular in between the Olympic Games. It actually does really well on television. There are hundreds of millions of fans who follow the sport on TV and social media. But there isn’t a unified global competition platform like the NFL, NBA, NWSL have created in the U.S. or like you have in Europe with the Premier League and La Liga.
There isn’t one entity pulling it all together. It’s extra hard to achieve this within track because it is so wide and deep. It needs a singularity of focus, and no one has attempted that until now.
What makes Grand Slam Track different?
The gladiatorial combat racing at the heart of the proposition is what makes Grand Slam Track unique. We are all about the rivalries, the competition between these extraordinary human beings and telling those stories.
People get really obsessed with World Records in track and when you're only obsessed about a WR, you end up being disappointed a lot of the time because they are very, very rare.
But what's not rare is the competition.
Most of the time, sports fans can't tell you who holds a record for points scored in a game or who won a championship in any given year. But what people do remember is the competition. They remember this athlete versus that athlete. They remember this team versus that team. Those are the stories that really cut through for fans at a global level. And so, this is our focus.
“We need people around our league who believe in the sport, believe in the league, believe in our vision and want to contribute positively to that effort. The people at Rekortan are some of the best people that I’ve met in the track industry.”
What’s the thinking behind your Racer and Challenger structure?
The reality in track, up until now, is that you might see the two people you really want to see running against each other once a year if you're lucky. In fact, they often avoid each other. Bringing those rival characters together more regularly is at the heart of everything we do.
So, we have 48 Racers that are signed to the league on an annual multi-year basis. They are our base and then we bring in the Challengers for each Slam. This means you're gonna see the best Racers go head-to-head across four different, high-end track meets. In doing that, we bring a consistency and clarity of competition that has never happened before.
It’s also going to create fame and fandom for the Racers. By showing them more regularly, fans become more invested in their stories. That’s why the storytelling platform we are building around the athletes is so powerful.
Is this head-to-head racing simply about speed?
There’s a difference between being fast in a time trial and fast in a race and that’s one of the things that’s overlooked. There's so much strategy, so many tactics, so much that goes into a race. There is a highly skilled competitive nature to those who win in the head-to-head clashes.
Take the men’s 1,500 meters. If you were to just do a time trial, there are plenty of people who might be faster than Cole Hocker, Yared Nuguse and Josh Kerr, who are all part of our league. But when you go four laps around the track head-to-head, those three are really hard to beat.
The tactics and the way that you grind each other down in true head-to-head racing is something that gets lost when there's not a clear and consistent storytelling platform for these athletes.
You’ve brought a new level of professionalism, marketing and accessibility to the sport and its stars. How important is that?
Professionalism and accessibility are core pillars for Grand Slam Track.
It’s crucial that athletes are taken care of and given the same quality and quantity of resources that your average NFL player or WNBA player would get on a consistent basis (not just at the Olympics or a World Champs.)
This means a greater level of professionalism in how athletes show up for fans on a regular basis. We are going to create a fully-fledged memorabilia program. We’re going to have a trading card deal. Very simple things that help extend and create fandom for our athletes.
We also need to present the fans with an accessible, exciting format that they can drop into on NBC, The CW or TNT and understand, very quickly, that this is a professional sport with amazing athletes. If you give the fans what they want, the athletes can be compensated for doing that.
Why did you choose Rekortan as your track partner?
It starts with the people.
We need people around our league who believe in the sport, believe in the league, believe in our vision and want to contribute positively to that effort. The people at Rekortan are some of the best people that I've met in the track industry.
Secondly, having a partner who can be flexible in the things that they can do for our athletes is just amazing. From resurfacing a track, to providing equipment, to innovating and problem solving alongside us, Rekortan and its affiliated companies such as Astroturf and Polytan, provide us with the breadth and depth of resources we need now and in the future. That’s such a valuable offering to bring to the table.
Thirdly, you build fast tracks.
For a long time Rekortan has been manufacturing and building amazing tracks that our Racers love racing on, so we couldn’t be happier and more excited to have you as a partner.