The Meaning of Slam

Photo of Grant Fisher (in the 5000m) by Howard Lao

The Meaning of Slam

“I don’t need religion or God (finishing time or Instagram) to give my life meaning. Time gives it meaning.” -The White Lotus

Words Jeff Merrill

In the second race of the men’s Long Distance event group at the inaugural Grand Slam Track meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, which happened to be the 3,000m, Hagos Gebrhiwet shot out to an early lead followed closely by Telahun Haile Bekele. 2 days prior, the same field had taken part in the 5,000m leg of the Slam, which was won by 5000m indoor World Record holder Grant Fister, who was followed closely by 2 more Americans, Cooper Teare and Dylan Jacobs.

In the 3,000m on a windy afternoon in the Jamaican National Stadium, Gebrhiwet continued to build a lead while Bekele followed. Noticeably absent from the breakaway was the man who sat atop the standings in the event grouping by way of his victory in the 5,000m- a tactical 14:39 win. He had done some quick calculating and realized that he needed only to secure third in the race to remain in the champion’s position and take home the $100,000 prize purse. Had Cooper Teare gone with the breakaway, Fisher would have followed, or maybe even Dylan Jacobs, but they did not, and so Fisher opted to take his chances in a kicker’s affair for the minor medal. The strategy worked and Grant Fisher kicked to third and secured the bag without having to contend with the most dangerous athletes in the race.

It’s a wrinkle exposed in the first run-through of GST’s new 2 race, combined scoring format, and one that the GST team will have to address whether they make changes to disincentivize a Fisher strategy or let it ride and hope that doubling down on the new approach will provide more opportunity for strategy analysis and pique the interest of viewers… which is possible. It would just be a new way of viewing a sport that has always championed the first person to cross the line in championship-style racing. It will take time to adjust to it.

Cycling fans are used to seeing the Tour de France leader regularly roll through the finish line well behind the stage winner. The Tour is a grueling odyssey that requires a careful accounting of physiological resources and efforts. The Grand Champion will plan with careful consideration their days of attack and defense. The Tour’s scoring system, with various color jerseys for champions of the sprints, mountains, young rider, stage winners and overall champ is complicated to a new-coming spectator as well. The strategy developed from it, with lead-outs and pace trains is also elaborate. All of this did not develop overnight. It’s not as if in 1903, the Tour emerged fully formed in the product we see today, it took over 100 years of alterations and molding to get to what we understand it to be today… and pre-1903 cycling fans are not around to criticize what it has become. The Tour is Cycling.

The difference between Grand Slam Track and the Tour de France is that the investment into the initial GST is much greater than what the French newspaper L’Auto fronted to stage the first Tour. Longevity for any product requires careful stewarding, decision-making and luck. More than anything, it needs time, like a rock rolling downhill, time helps to strengthen the familiarity and attachment amongst fans that leads to longevity.

GST I as a first-time track meet was a success. If the team had managed to fill a 35,000 seat stadium on the first go-round, I would have questioned everything I know about track fandom and life itself, and whether spoons exist. It is not abnormal to see first-time track meets pop up, but it is rare for them to make it to year 2, and it’s a big success to make it to year 3, while showing growth each time. It is hard to put on a track meet. It’s hard to get the functional, technical and organizational athlete-focused aspects of it down so that you can also devote attention to the audience-focused aspects. Those who try to focus too heavily on the audience and neglect the athletes wind up with a hollow product, and those who lack the resources to dedicate to entertainment find it difficult to justify their existence as a professional sporting event. The event is the product and fans are the consumers.

Aside from the wrinkle exposed by the strategic mind of Grant Fisher, the visual quality of the product on-screen was above standard for high-level track meets. The producers could get tighter on what information is shown on the screen from a timing and new format-scoring perspective and fill out the down-time of the 3 hour program with pieces that build-up to the action and transition from it. If this was a once-a-year event, I would be worried about their ability to improve for next year, but the fact that they will be Slamming 3 more times this season gives me hope that with steady fine-tuning, the final Slam on the narrative and storytelling front will be greatly improved from the first one. The benefit of a nightly talk show is getting the reps and shifting the focus.

Because of the unprecedented investment in GST (at least $30m), the outfit has to show the potential for success in the first year, so time is of the essence, but time is also on GST’s side, because unlike most startup track meets, they have 4 meets totaling 12 days to show growth in both quality of product and subsequently, viewership.

Time serves the function of allowing for tweaks and incremental improvements to be made, but equally, if not more importantly, as Carrie Coon’s character Laurie so eloquently stated in the finale of the White Lotus: “time gives it meaning”.

Maybe that’s why as people age they tend to become more conservative in their relationship to change- there is comfort in what you know, and what you know becomes a reflection of who you are, necessary to defend. The youth and new fans have not had as much time to have something sink in and become a relied-upon post in their environment. They’re more prone to throwing out the old for something new, because it’s all relatively new to them.

The things that stand the test of time become part of our worlds, and losing them alters our reality. Getting to that status is what every startup hopes to accomplish. They want to be the tried and true blue box of Kraft Mac & Cheese, not the strange, new-comer in pastel color-scheme on the shelf.

GST has to be different enough to attract the new and familiar enough to keep the old, until enough time has passed where it can be the thing that is just the thing.

Grand Slam Track is in the early stages of its courting phase with all of us. Athletes will still compete in other track meets around the globe, and we’ll be able to watch them there. GST’s marketing of athletes and promotion of track will serve other meets along with itself. What will embed GST into our psyches as THE professional home of the sport is not what they show us between meets, but how they show up and what they deliver to us in their remaining 3.