You don’t hear much about the featherless chicken any more, which on reflection is probably for the best. The idea was simple enough: for poultry-rearing purposes feathers are a nuisance, bearing significant costs in labour and industrial plant, so by breeding genetically modified feather-free chickens you could save the industry billions. Just imagine if you could also convince the chicken to eat sage and onion stuffing. Perhaps even baste itself in lemon butter at regular intervals.
Alas, when it was unveiled in 2002 by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the featherless chicken failed to take flight for one simple reason: it looked freaky as hell. It turned out that the feather layer, while gastronomically extrinsic, provided vastly underrated context. Above all, people did not want to see their Sunday dinner walking around in front of them. “It’s a normal chicken,” pleaded the geneticist Avigdor Cahaner, “except for the fact it has no feathers.”
Right now, we have to assume that Michael Johnson has more pressing matters on his agenda than the history of genetically modified poultry. But as he fights to save his cherished Grand Slam Track project – currently on the verge of collapse and being pursued by unpaid creditors in Lycra – the parable of the featherless chicken offers a salutary lesson in the dangers of injudicious plucking.
Grand Slam Track made perfect sense in PDF format. Take a well-liked but struggling sport. Shear off all the extraneous matter: the discus, the funny walks, the triple jumps, the relays. Repackage and resell it to a new audience. And in condensing the entire sport of athletics down to its purest essence – running – Johnson reckoned he could unlock the fresh revenue streams and casual fans that would turn his enterprise into what he described as “the Formula One of athlete racing”.
Initially, GST managed to generate a good deal of buzz. Johnson announced an initial funding round of $30m (£23.5m), more than $12.5m in prize money, broadcast deals with NBC and TNT Sports. The world’s greatest runners – Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Gabby Thomas, Josh Kerr – would be flown out and accommodated in luxury befitting their status. The first event was scheduled for Jamaica in early April.
At which point Grand Slam Track’s grand visions received their first jolt of reality. The National Stadium in Kingston was virtually empty on opening weekend. Many of the races were distinctly lacking in intensity or jeopardy. The men’s 5,000m was run at a glacial crawl, the winning time almost 90 seconds slower than the Paris Olympic final. After all, why bother straining the pace if you’re all getting a fat cheque in the post afterwards? Um. Anyway. About that.
The athletes all went home and waited for their cheques to arrive. The cheques did not arrive. The roadshow moved on to Miami in May, where crowds were a little healthier and the staging a little less flabby. By the next event in Philadelphia a three-day meeting had been cut to two and the two distance events cut to one. The social media content continued to roll. “So dope!! Pls pay me,” Thomas commented under one TikTok post. But the league “dedicated to transparency” had put up a shroud of stoic silence.
Behind the scenes, Grand Slam Track was in chaos. A major investor had pulled out a few days after seeing the Kingston event, blowing an eight-figure hole in the business. The fourth event, in Los Angeles, was cancelled, most athletes have not been paid for Miami and Philadelphia and still no one knows when they might be. Johnson insists Grand Slam Track will return in 2026, although whether anybody will actually want to run in it remains to be seen.
So where did it all go wrong? Within the sport a number of credible theories have been posited. The scarcity of genuine household names: no Noah Lyles, no Jakob Ingebrigtsen, no Keely Hodgkinson, no Karsten Warholm, no Femke Bol. A misguided focus on the North American market. Spending too much on prize money and not enough on, say, bonuses for world records. Often you would hear the commentators insisting that times didn’t matter, which felt like an interesting angle, to be sure.
But Grand Slam Track’s biggest selling point was also its biggest blind spot. There is a reason digital radios often styled to look like retro analogue radios, why ebooks try to recreate the sensation of turning a page, why Christmas crackers consist of a colourful cardboard wrapper and not just a single exploding stick. Sometimes substance matters less than the texture and feel. The consumer experience must be sensory, or it is nothing.
Field events may appear a superfluity, but without them the whole product falls apart. The essential appeal of elite athletics lies in its sprawling, village-fete ambience. The bits between the bits. The bits brushing up against other bits. The bits that can often be safely ignored, right until the moment they can’t. Mondo Duplantis going for another world record. Nafi Thiam’s and Katarina Johnson-Thompson’s epic duels in the heptathlon.
Bob Beamon, Yelena Isinbayeva, Daley Thompson, Jan Zelezny, the chaos of the 4x400m, the high-jumper waiting for the steeplechase to go by, the whirling geometric beauty of a perfectly flung hammer. The javelin throwers of south Asia, the triple jumpers of Latin America, the wild panoply of body types and body shapes, the sense that this is ultimately a festival of humanity. Strip it all out and none of the rest makes sense. Johnson was trying to sell the world a chicken without feathers. You’re meant to be looking at the meat. But you can’t help noticing the thing that’s missing.
Other sports have already learned these lessons to varying extents. The Tour de France may sell itself on its mountain duels but without the sprint stages, the subplots, the rest days, the kamikaze breakaways, it is largely indistinguishable from the world’s hardest and most picturesque spin class. Cricket basically becomes less interesting the shorter it gets, more reliant on tactical gimmicks and window dressing. Sevens rugby is a tight, visceral spectacle that nonetheless can never touch the sides of an epic Test match.
Of course athletics remains a sport ripe for disruption and innovation, and while Johnson’s wheeze may have failed others will not stop trying. Alexis Ohanian’s female-only Athlos will stage its second event in New York in October. World Athletics has devised its own Ultimate Championship, to be held for the first time in Budapest in September next year. But for all the lavish prize money on offer, none of this really addresses the core issue: who is really asking for any of this? Who, other than athletes, is furiously demanding more athletics?
Perhaps Johnson was always the wrong guy to answer this question. As a brilliantly economical runner and then a brilliantly straight-talking pundit, his enduring superpower is a kind of super-efficiency, the ability to strip away ruthlessly that which did not matter and cut to the very core of the task. But mastering a sport and marketing a sport are very different skills. The path to adoration is littered with false economies and false compromises. And there are always – always – some feathers that simply cannot be plucked.
