Olympic sprint kings Noah Lyles and Michael Johnson run the rule over athletics’ future

0:03Hello and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Sport Business Podcast.

0:30pre-recording this episode slightly earlier could be okay okay let's not tell anybody no coming up on the show today we're going to hear from two athletics legends past and present um these are conversations that i had in can at the festival last week um we're going to hear from noah lyles the current uh reigning uh hundred meter champion in the olympics and the world championships and And also from Michael Johnson, the decorated Olympian athlete in his own right, multiple gold medal winner and current entrepreneur, I would say, has gone on to found multiple of his own businesses. Not least current athletics disruptor, Grand Slam Track, a startup league that had its first season just this year.

1:18Yeah, this is great. We're going to hear from two of the real heavy hitters in the world of track and field coming at it from different perspectives, different generations as well. And there's a lot happening in the world of track and field, the world of athletics, certainly over the past couple of years, a general feeling that there's a need to innovate for the sport to continue to evolve and perhaps even be sort of properly disrupted. There's world athletics as the governing body, of course. There's the Olympics every four years, the world championships every two years. Tokyo will stage the world championships later this year.

1:54Those have traditionally been the standout moments for athletics to break beyond the sport and get mainstream appeal in different markets at different times. Michael Johnson's Grand Slam track and also Athlos, the Alexis Ahanian female-focused track series, have over the past year launched and been an attempt to force this innovation and also an attempt to give greater rewards to top level professional athletes, elite athletes. A couple of weeks ago before your conversations in Cannes, of course, Michael Johnson and Grand Slam Track and of course we had Steve Gera on the podcast a few months ago before the start of this inaugural season.

2:41But they announced that they were going to end their first season prematurely, citing economic headwinds. And so they won't be running their final planned event of the four they had intended to stage in this first year. The intention is, it seems, very much to come back and come back much stronger and with a more refined product. There was a lot of tinkering on the go and there was a real in some respects very admirable sense of uh changing things on the fly that didn't quite work in the first couple of events reacting to some fan feedback as well and some athlete feedback but clearly some issues um as grand slam track's first season has evolved and i'm sure you get into that with with uh the man behind it yes indeed um and we're going to hear from michael uh second um in today's episode and we're going to hear from the current champion first so noah lyles it's a really nice um nice bloke actually um you never know what you're going to get with a top level athlete um if you haven't spoken to them before but um very smart very grown up i would say and quite aware of his own brand well totally yeah i mean the focus of the interview is predominantly on the efforts and the thinking um that are going into building his personal brand he is the very definition of a modern uh athlete in that he lives very online he's he's quite happy to embrace the sort of uh all access uh style that lots of athletes have to live with these days he's very open about his relationship um on with another uh sprint another American sprinter online.

4:26He enjoys the sort of back and forth pretend spats with social influencers and being called out by athletes from other sports. And of course, he's of the generation that is having to follow Usain Bolt, who really did, you know, if ever an athlete transcended their sport, Usain Bolt did. And Noah Lyles, one of several who have sort of stepped turpin obviously he has taken on the olympic champion status and the fastest man in the world the self-style fastest man in the world uh over the blue ribboned distance and he's got a different style to usain bolt but he's he seems to be doing it at least from afar in his own way yeah and um part of the reason that he was out in can at the festival was to talk about the launch of a new his new production company he's teaming up with box to box you'll have heard of them david uh they do all the sports productions or the docu-series.

5:26He could have teamed up with Noah Media Group. He could have done that. But he didn't. He didn't. It's Box2Box. It's Box2Box and he's got a new production company called Iconic Productions. And Box2Box, of course, produced the Sprint documentary series. Which he was in and was very good in. Yeah. So without further ado, we will hear from Michael Johnson. But before that, we will hear from Noah Lyles. James Emmett here for Leaders and Sports Business Journal at Stagwell Sport Beach. and I'm here with Olympic and World 100-meter check-in. That's right. Indeed. A double-warring Mr. Noah Lars. How are you doing, Noah?

6:01I'm great. Noah, you off the record earlier and before we were running, told me we had for breakfast and honestly, it sounded awful. Yeah. Wet eggs. Wet eggs. Yeah. Scrambled eggs, just a lot of liquid at the bottom of the tray. It's almost a staple of eating in Europe for me. As an athlete, you've got to be careful about what you eat, right? I mean, yeah, you want to make sure that your diet is clean, that you're getting the right protein. It's more about how much of each you're getting, you know, not so much about the meal, but the individual things that you're eating day in and day out. And you prefer your eggs to be dry or do you like the wet?

6:42I like them more on the drier side. Okay, great. You've done, I've seen you here, there and everywhere around Sporker. today you've done a session up on stage yeah you've been here in the interview room what what are you doing here in cam now uh truly i'm i'm here to to grow my brand i'm here to see the new opportunities um there's countless things that i want to do and and it's been hard just to do them in you know the space of track and field so interacting with other sports and other brands helps move along the conversation and how do have you been before no this is my first year Okay. How did the kind of invitation come through to you?

7:21Was it your agent? Was it the guys at Small Beach? How did it happen? So Stagwell, somebody who worked with Stagwell, Aaron, he is a friend of my mom's or he's a friend of a friend that my mom went to college with. Okay. And he was at the Olympics with this friend. He was like, I feel like I could get to Noah. And the friend of my mom said, oh yeah, I can get you that connect. You know, You got to go through the mom first, though. So he gave him my mom's number, and my mom informed me. And then me and my agent had a call with Aaron probably around December, January. And he explained to us the idea and the concept.

8:01And me and my agent didn't quite get it, but we knew it was something special that we wanted to make sure that we had something prepared, to be honest. We didn't want to just go there with nothing on our mind. You know, we wanted to build up something that we knew that we could take full advantage of the day. And after we were certain that we could really utilize the opportunity, we said that we're in. So what do you want to take away from that? Well, today or Thursday, I announced my production company, Iconic Productions. And we are, to be honest, ready to start getting in not only just ideas, but people who want to build stories with us.

8:43partnerships, of course, and go beyond just a simple doc you follow. We're here to tell the story that all the kids want to hear about. The athletes know that are there that just haven't had the opportunity to. One example is, of course, you know the athlete, but what about the parents? Where are they in all this? And that could be as easy as doing a reality TV show, or we could simply do a short form podcast series on that. And beyond, you know, the limits of just, yeah, let's just make a TV show. Yeah. Sounds like your mother maybe angling for a show for herself maybe though. I'm angling for her.

9:27Okay.

9:30Where are we in the athletic season now for you? So what's the sort of training schedule that you're on at the moment? Yeah. This time of the year, we would normally be in nationals season, but this year, world championships are late September. So everything got pushed back a month. So we are about a month and a half removed from national seasons. Okay. And how are you feeling about your form? Well, I'm coming off of an injury, but I'm coming on the great side of it. And I'm fully healthy now. I've been able to put together a lot of good practices and you know my first meet is actually going to be in Monaco it's going to be on July 11th so if you have a chance please come out it's going to be packed it's going to be a lot of fun and I always have a I always have fun races there yeah I want to come on to talk about um you as a brand and how sort of consciously you're going about building your commercial life I suppose your life outside the track but I did going to have a couple of questions on athletics in a state of athletics at the moment how what kind of place do you think is athletics in at the moment i think at the moment we're in a state of almost limbo we have a lot of people who want to get in and don't know how we have a lot of people who believe that the sport needs saving and it doesn't so much need saving as much as it needs help you know we're very fortunate to be a sport that while being an olympic amateur sport we have normal consistent track meets outside of the olympic year and a lot of people are able to build lives off of those careers the problem is it's it could be more consistent it could be more prevalent it could be more planned and structured and that's where again we need help not saving i would say okay and what have you made of um grand slam track you knew that was coming out i did yeah um i'd say my predictions were kind of dead on unfortunately um you know they they i mean they did say that they had to uh pull out of their last competition in la due to financial issues and unfortunately that's never good to hear because that means that you weren't able to make it the first full year full season um accomplishing all the goals that you had planned and unfortunately that's that's very saddening because that doesn't just affect the the league grand slam but it affects every other athlete that you know might have leagues in their head in the future or for any athlete who's saying hey you know i was a part of this and even though i was a part of it it wasn't able to succeed to the best of ability not throwing the blame on anybody that's just how some people might perceive it going down in the future yeah and what are you particularly excited about in the after left-taker's world and is there an innovation or a particular event obviously la is sort of looming on the horizon yeah what's getting you going at the moment i'd say events like this i mean being here my production company it all leaves the opportunity to get out of that limbo space and say, hey, we have seen what works going into the Olympics, creating sprint, creating a storyline, giving people to cheer for and say, oh, I'm going to be a fan of them, no matter if they're winning or not.

12:59Now they're in a state of we want to get more of it. That's the best place you want people. Now our job is to give them more. You know, we have a high demand. Let's give them the supply. I think you're a really interesting example of an athlete at athlete at the very top kind of level internationally, because you're so willing to try things outside the field of just training and competing, right? Yeah. Like talking about your production company. I know you've been in kind of Netflix documentaries and podcast series before. You're quite happy to talk openly about even about your relationship. And, you know, you're, you're very willing to embrace a modern era of kind of living at least a certain aspect of your life, like out in the open, right?

13:43To engage with fans and followers in a different way than just as a sportsman, right? You're also, I know, passionate about anime and passionate about things outside the boundaries of sports. And I know you're also willing to engage with kind of influencer culture, right? And the thing that you did with iShowSpeed. do um i know you've got a thing it's not influences but i know you've got a thing going on with tyrick hill at the moment as well i wonder whether that was a conscious decision that you made at any point yeah career no it was it was conscious from the beginning um when i was coming out of high school in 2016 i looked at the culture of track and field and i said what i want to transition the sport what is going to be something that's going to make me different and as i looked around I noticed that nobody really used the power of social media all that well.

14:36Of course, they had it, but I believe they were popular because they won races. So when you want to go after the fan that's a casual or maybe doesn't even know they're a fan yet, how do you get their attention? Well, you do things that are natural that other people do. You know, I'm an anime fan, but I share that because there are also other anime fans out there. I pull out a Blue Eyes White Dragon because they're, you know, as a fan of the show, I know that other people will connect to that. They might not come to watch me run, but they came to watch me pull out another card or see what I'm going to do next.

15:07I share my love of fashion because I love to create and I love to put on different outfits and I love to show who I am. And somebody is going to connect to that. And if they don't, fine. But I promise you, somebody will. And I share, you know, my disabilities. I share my dyslexia, my ADD, my asthma, because there's somebody out there who connects. Again, it's all about connecting. It's all about storytelling. And if you never tell them, they'll never know. And how does that attitude and approach and work translate into the type of opportunities that you get with brands and the type of work that you're able to do with them?

15:45I'm very under the belief that if you got to speak things into existence, if it's never said, it'll never come true. How is anybody supposed to know you have a dream if you never told somebody your dream? Of course, everybody's not out there to help you with your dream, but the right people will. and finding those right people, getting in that space like today here at Sports Beach, that's what it's really about. And imagine if I never told anybody, you know, I have an aspiration to transcend the sport. You know, I don't believe I'd be here sitting with you right now because I'd just be another track guy in their eyes.

16:18Yeah. Did you know there's an anime day on the beaches tomorrow? You said there's an anime on what? There's an anime day tomorrow at one of the beaches. Why didn't anybody tell me? Are you here tomorrow? I am here tomorrow. I'm going to show you after we finish. Yes, please. I mean, I would have had a whole outfit planned for that. Well, there's still time. I'm going to show you. Don't worry. And I can't say the name of what it is on. Okay, fair enough. We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it afterwards. When you retired from track, already an Olympic champion, a world champion, like hopefully many more sort of medals and titles to come.

16:54What do you want to be known for? I would definitely say changing the sport of course having a consistent legacy so I knew that I wasn't going to be satisfied with one medal I was going to want to keep getting more but also being able to provide a different outlook of how to handle the sport whether that's how I interview whether that's the people that I bring in the people that I go to whether the conversations i interject myself in and i mean i've said it many times whether you like me or you don't you still watch very good yeah frederick richard fred flips right i love freddy what's happening there oh he's a great guy you're are you training him with some we we he came down he came to claremont you came to my training group yeah because he said he wanted to get faster you know we made a whole video on it for him in the olympics i'm like hey man you should actually come down I'll teach you how to actually get faster.

17:53So he came comes down. He came on hill day. And he, you know, ran up the hill. I showed him how to go through warmups. I showed him the proper technique that you would want. And I'm like, hey, you know, the reason that you're, you know, you're trying to run with straight arms is because you're not strong enough through your core here to be actually able to bend your arms to actually get more force through your lats and all this stuff. And I'm taking them through my weight room program. I'm like, this is why you do this exercise. This is why you do this one. If you want to get better at this, this is how you do it.

18:20You want to get stable this how you do it and it's like oh wow you're being opened up to this whole new culture of this one part of your event but having more speed obviously is going to help him be a better gymnast yeah yeah so there's a technical aspect and you're helping and coaching a kind of fellow u.s uh olympian athlete i guess um and then it's a cool crossover but it's a cool crossover that is a cool crossover right and that element of kind of oh it's a collab you know like there's yeah people are going to be interested in this beyond like him learning from you you may be learning from him like what areas of your life do you sort of keep for yourself where where like a collab maybe isn't isn't gonna happen um i i guess my kids yeah when i do have kids um i think that's gonna be private it's gonna be off limits yeah you know keeping them out of it i want them to be able to grow up with a normal life as normal as possible and there might be a time when you you know, Janelle might say, hey, it's getting too public.

19:22And I'm like, all right, because at the end of the day, I made the decision to get married. I made the decision to have kids. So that means I made the decision to have a family. And if it's not for the public, it's for them. Yeah. And finally, thinking about Cannes the next few days, obviously I'm going to take you to the anime section tomorrow. You might have already seen someone that's inspired you or you found really interesting to me, but what do you look like? Who are you looking to see or be inspired by over the time that you're there in town? I recently had a talk with Carmelo Anthony, and he's been here since the first one.

19:59He's always going to sell his wine. Well, it's funny because we have the same attorney, and he told me about his wine company. And I was like, what? That's so cool. Here you are, an athlete who has his own wine company, because so many people think you're just there. But I've also played with the same concept. Why is it that I'm not finishing a race, popping a bottle of my own champagne into the crowd? You know, it seems so odd until you make it natural. And him coming here every year and talking about how he's been, you know, basically trying to make it better and better each year and it's still not to the level he's at.

20:36I love it. and the fact that I'm able to be here in the third year, I feel like I've seen the effects of his work even though he might not see it to the level that he wants it to be at yet. It's already something that is truly needed and truly appreciated. Dwayne Wade's coming in the next couple of days as well. Another guy who has a great wine. Oh yeah, we met at a Spades tournament last year. Why aren't you allowed to finish a race in popular champagne? Have you actively discussed that? Yeah, it has to do with legal issues. There's so many rules in track and field, but yes, legally issues. It looks bad on TV, but there are cultures that do it.

21:20They do it in Formula One. They do it after triathlons, and it's a very weird thing. But it really comes down to whoever controls the meat gets to control the rules. Yeah, that might change. It might very much change. might change no one else thank you very much indeed thank you james emmett here for sports business journal and leaders in sport at stagwell sport beach and i'm with olympic champion uh founder ceo of grand slam track mr michael johnson michael how are you doing i'm doing great great great to be here michael are those sunglasses or those prescription spectacles with the tinted uh these are sunglasses okay yeah yeah they look they look cool they look fresh yeah how many um How many outfits did you bring to Cannes?

22:08Not too many. I travel light. So I've been here three days and that brought maybe five outfits, but they're all interchangeable. I've won only half of that. Wow. So you've got a day now after going wild. Yeah. What's the plan for you here in Cannes? What's your schedule been like? I know you've been to quite a fancy dinner at Picasso, one of Picasso's old haunts. Yeah, yeah. So this is always great. You know, you run into people that you need to see that you didn't know you needed to see, which is great. Everybody's here, so you can get so much done in one go. So it's always a good time. It's always very productive.

22:52Um, I'm doing a lot of fireside chats and, you know, podcasts and, you know, different, uh, panel discussions around squad, of course. Um, so yeah, so it's good. It's, uh, it's always, uh, it's always full on. It seems like every time I'm here also it's warm. Uh-huh. Yeah. So it's very warm, um, but all good. Yeah. And who have you, is there any particular person, uh, that you've met or heard from that's really impressed you or surprised you this year? Um, oh, I say no. No, that's fine. You know, look, everyone here is, you know, um, you know, in their own right, you know, accomplished for the most part.

23:35So a lot of the, you know, I've always found that I'm, when I'm here, you know, there's a lot that I learned about different trends or figuring out where things are going, which is, you know, very, very useful as you're trying to, you know, sort of navigate, you know, what's next. Um, so yeah, I mean, just, you know, most of these panel discussions that I've attended and listened to, you know, very, very thoughtful and, and I'm always learning something and there's always something you can take away from it. Yeah. Um, so Michael, what's the state of play with Grand Slam track? We've just come to the end of the first season.

24:08Now we had the news that the LA event wasn't going to take place as planned. Give us your top line view on state of play. Yeah. we're very pleased with this first season. We sort of proved that there is definitely the latent fan base that we thought was there for a track outside of the Olympics every four years. So we proved that. The athletes love it, fans love it. So for me, it was just a matter for us of just where do we go next in terms of expansion of the league, what cities or venues are appropriate, how quickly we should expand the lead. So those are things that we will spend this offseason thinking about.

24:52One of the things that is a real bright spot for us in this season that was a surprise is just the engagement of our content. When you think about track as a sport, it's sort of perfect for today's audience. Two-thirds of our races take place in under one minute. So that content performs really, really well on social because as opposed to a basketball game or a football match where you take one highlight, which is, you know, sort of, oh, wow, that happened and you put it on social. It's not the entire story of the whole game. And for us, that highlight of that race is the entire story in its entirety from start to finish.

25:37So we can set that up with, you know, the heroes and the villains and the protagonists, you know, who's, you know, all have a chance to win. You can set that up and start to tell that story and then let the race run and then celebrate it on the other end with the winner. And you can go all of that in less than five minutes. So that sort of content I think performs very well on social. So, you know, media is obviously a very, very important part of what we're doing. And so, you know, how do we take that forward is one of many things that we need to pick about and figure out over the last season.

26:14Yeah. So positive news on how the formats are landing, how the media is being chopped up and distributed and landing. uh obviously some challenges as well and i alluded to the la event that didn't take place could you set the record straight on on that one there are suggestions that the the money wasn't there um to get that event done what's your what's your sort of official view on that yeah so these events are very good stuff so you think about this i've been in the startup world for many years and when you develop a product you develop a version one with the idea you're going to eventually get to a version two and then version three, you don't keep pouring money into version one when you know that, okay, there's going to be a version two, right?

26:58So, you know, while we all wanted to be in LA, which is very expensive, you know, for us as a startup, you're always raising. Finances are always a challenge for a startup. And you just have to be very, very judicious about where you put the resources. And quite frankly, we're not in time. I wish we were. I wish we were in position to just say, Hey, yeah, let's just go do LA too. It'd be great. And then no one's going to say, Hey, you know what's, what's going on. We just not in position to do that and no startup is. So we have to be very smart, which we're doing. And I think if that was the right decision.

27:33Now we felt like we proved what we needed to in the first few slams. Um, our last one in Philadelphia was amazing. And, uh, so we felt like we're where we need to be. And we're going to now just start a step back, spend the rest of this year regrouping and figuring out what we'll do for next year. Tell us about that process of raising money. It can be, you know, it's the biggest thing for any kind of startup, uh, in any kind of industry, I suppose. And it can be exhausting, frustrating, uh, rollercoaster. Tell, tell us how you approach that process, those meetings. How do you maintain your energy for it?

28:10How do you, yeah. How do you pitch? I suppose. Yeah, it is all of those things I've done it multiple times now. on both sides. You know, I think the best way to describe it is, as you mentioned, it's a roller coaster where you have positives and then you have some, you know, you get a lot of no's, of course, you know, but then you get a yes. So, you know, and it's just a matter of looking for the right fit as well. It's not always just about the actual money. It's about, you know, products that can come in and strategically help with the vision and understand the vision, but also that can help you, you know, to navigate all of the different challenges that come with a startup.

28:49So I approach it the same way I do anything else with focus, you know, and and understanding at the very beginning. Like, look, I mean, it's always interesting. And I think it's when you had success with something, there's always a surprise that there are challenges. I'm never I expect hard things to be hard, you know, and whether it's winning gold medals or whether it's making history as an athlete, you know, that's going to be It's going to come up as challenges and you have to be ready for that. It's not for everyone. And it's the same thing with startups, you know, especially when you're trying to do something that is revolutionary and no one's ever done before.

29:26Those things are going to be difficult. And that's not for anyone who, you know, if you're under the illusion that, you know, doing something hard is actually going to be easy, shame on you. That's just not the way that it works. And so, so I approach it, um, you know, the same way I do everything else. amount of insight that we're going to start doing our life and my career. We choose hard things, which I tend to do, and I expect them to be hard. Yeah. I don't think anyone's going to question your determination in this one, at least. You mentioned version one, there's going to be a version two.

30:05I guess you'll be iterating, you'll be tweaking some things, changing the product, what it looks like. Can you give us a glimpse of what some of those changes might be? The feedback that you're getting from investors and would-be investors, like how can you change this so it's better next year? Yeah, I think, you know, the product itself, you know, was, you know, the response to it has been great. Our television partners, we're told us in over 200 countries around the world, our television partners have been thrilled with what we've produced this year. Our brands seem to love it. Athletes absolutely love it.