Fixing the Sport, Part 3 (of 3)

With the Olympics starting this week (!), I thought this would be the perfect time for a three-part series about the state of the sport. After all, this is the one time every four years when people outside of the insular track world actually care about athletics. It would be easy to come up with a list of complaints about the sport; however, I'm deciding to take a positive outlook (on both the topic and my own running performance), so instead I'm going to fix running (and jumping and throwing) in three easy steps.

The Marathon Major Model

When it comes to road racing, only one event really matters: the marathon. Oh sure, every other distance from one mile on up may be contested and may be competitive, but the only one that people really care about is the marathon. It's the standard by which all other distance races are judged.

As it currently exists, the Abbot World Marathon Major series is actually the closest thing athletics has to a fully professional circuit. There are six major marathons (Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago, New York, and any World Championship/Olympic marathon) which each pay prize purses in the hundred of thousands of dollars plus a half million dollar bonus for each year's series winner. Very similar to professional individual sports like tennis and gold.

The series operates on a one-year scoring basis, starting at one marathon and culminating with that same marathon the next year. The next year's series then starts and finishes with the next race, and so on so that all marathons are at one point a "championship." Winners of a major get 25 points towards the series title, 2nd gets 16, 3rd is 9 points, 4th is 4, and 5th 1. Runners can compete in as many races as they wish, but only their two highest point totals will be scored. After one year and the next race, points are tallied and series winners -- and bonuses -- are announced.

It's the most professional (and lucrative) model that exists in Athletics.

Problems With This Model

Of course, in my opinion there are a few limitations to this model:

• The scoring is too limited -- and complicated. By scoring only the top five, it limits the depth of competition for the series as a whole. The stars will succeed and have plenty of opportunity, but what about those outside of the top-five? And not to mention, point values like 16 and 9 and 4 are needlessly arbitrary and complicated.
• It reinforces the norm of racing only twice per year. By scoring only your best two marathons, you're essentially sending the message that athletes only really need to race twice a year. Many runners, especially the East Africans, will train in anonymity for months at a time, and then emerge for one or two races and a huge payday. For the sport to succeed, we want the opposite to be true: we want athletes to compete against each other often.
• It struggles to market the East Africans who dominate the sport. This is partly the fault of Western and Asian runners who haven't risen to the bar set by the Africans, but it is also a failure of the marketing powers in the industry that haven't figured out how to sell the amazing feats of the African athletes. This is partly due to the point above, that they're in anonymous training so often.

Solutions

Here are my solutions addressing these main issues and others:

Expand Major scoring to the top-15 places. Put a premium on winning and top-5 places, but still open up the scoring to a wider depth. This would welcome many near-world class runners into the fold and encourage them to race more. The more consistent depth you can foster, the more marketable opportunities there will be.

To foster that depth, each individual race needs to change its approach. Each Major race pays appearance fees (getting paid just for showing up) to attract top talent. These appearance fees are nothing but holdovers from the amateur days when under-the-table payments were common, though technically illegal. They might attract a star, but they don't guarantee a competitive race. Stop paying appearance fees and reinvest those funds in expanded prize money: the top-20-30 placers should all go home with more than $1,000. Again, this is all about fostering depth of competition. All of the Majors would also do well to incorporate some "domestic only" or "continental only" regulations into that expanded prize money. It's not discriminatory; it's marketing -- these separate, parallel prize pots are more likely to attract the depth of competition that your audience (spectators and participants alike) will more closely relate to.

On the series scoring side of things, keep it simple: the most points every calendar year is the winner -- no matter how many races you do. We want the stars of the sport to compete as much as possible! Since a calendar year comes naturally to people, this is how the series should play out every year. Tokyo starts the series and the NYC Marathon is the championship every year -- so be it. Every other sport has a routine, consistent year-to-year season; running should as well. Also, expand the circuit prize beyond solely the winner -- say, top 8 or 10 scorers all double their year's prize money. Again, we're promoting depth and frequency of competition.

In a common theme with my two previous posts, stop enforcing IAAF uniform restrictions. Let the athletes be as brazen a billboard as they wish. This can be done immediately, as the Marathon Majors brand has more clout and prestige than the IAAF -- the Majors have enough brand recognition that they don't need the IAAF anymore, so they can (and should) operate as a fully professional organization under their own rules.

On one final note, the individual races should begin to shift their financial focus from participant registration to professional production. For the longest time, road races have relied on participant registrations (and the accompanying corporate sponsorships) as the primary means of finance. But if modern professional sport teaches us anything, it's that media partnerships (read: TV deals) are more lucrative than ticket sales (which are the equivalent of runner registrations). The brand awareness and licensing, sponsor associations, and broadcast rights that make up this shift in focus all have the potential to be more financially sound than relying on participant registration. Lest you think a shift in focus away from catering to participants will drive them from the event, ironically the opposite is true: increasing your brand's awareness through media and sponsor partners (as opposed to word-of-mouth registration) will actually make your race's brand more ubiquitous and thus drive more registration demand. You become not a race or a marathon, but rather the race in the minds of consumers.

So there it is. Three simple steps to professionalism in Athletics. Powers that be: time to get on it.