Run The Roads

This past weekend, I soaked in the Chicago Marathon and everything it had to offer. While I’ve been to many major events in our sport, a major marathon is one of the great spectacles of the sport simply because there are tens of thousands of people all taking part, meaning millions of people watching and millions passing through the expo the few days before.

In a few short days, the Chicago Marathon will take place once again, bringing 40,000+ participants and over a million spectators to the streets of Chicago.  Year after year, in cities around the United States, marathons bring thousands of participants and even more spectators, making marathoning one of the most fascinating sports in the world.

If you follow the news coverage surrounding marathons like Chicago, New York and Boston, you’ll find similar trends.  Runner’s World, Running Times and the rash of running websites covering the sport provide coverage, stories, lists, profiles, interviews, etc., all of which showcase the event to millions of readers.  Furthermore, the thousands of people that participate in each event have support staffs of millions, making marathons and other large road races some of the most intriguing and lucrative sporting events anywhere.

So what does it all mean, well, it means that road races have the power to change the sports business landscape.  Few other sporting events create the same buzz, but most of all, road races creative active participants, not passive participants.

If you’re a football fan, you can play in a flag football league, but it isn’t even remotely the same as competing in the Super Bowl, so the best you can do is watch it live or on TV.  However, in the sport of road racing, if you love to run you can race on the biggest stage, you can race in the sport’s “Super Bowl.”

This is what makes the sport different, this is what makes it unique, this is what drives millions of runners each year to participate in road races.  It allows one to be apart of something much bigger and to actively participate in it.  This is what makes the sport great.

It’s a story rarely told, but it impacts the sport in a profound way.  Prize money at major road races (i.e. Boston Marathon, NYC Marathon, Chicago Marathon) often rounds out to $500,000 or under, very rarely exceeding anything really worth putting in the newspapers or online.  However, most major road races have budgets to attract runners in that are often three to four times greater than the prize purse, a rarely discussed aspect of the sport called appearance fees.

While reading an article on the Toronto Marathon over the weekend, a read a quote from the race’s director where he stated that the Toronto Marathon was doing rather well for itself considering its appearance fee budget was a quarter of what the major marathons have.

“This has been the race for up-and-comers, with a budget of $450,000, compared with about $2-million for a major marathon.”

The best marathoners in the world attract appearance fees well into the $100,000+ range, with athletes like Ryan Hall and Deena Kastor racking up appearance fees pushing towards $250,000+.  It’s an impressive amount of money, but never manages to find its way to the press.

Money attracts sponsors, money attracts press, money attracts the sporting public’s attention.  Professional road racing has millions upon millions of dollars circulating around each and every year, but few realize it’s there because race directors don’t flash it about.  A major golf event, which usually don’t pay appearance fees, have prize purses of millions of dollars, but most major road races don’t exceed $1 million.

If race directors realized they could promote the amount of money an athlete receives just to show up and compete, that could raise the stake in professional distance running in the American sports landscape.  Money makes the world go round, and if people begin to realize that road racing has more money in it than perhaps realized, then perhaps our sport can start to gain the attention it so rightly deserves.

It’s fantasy football time across the U.S., with millions of people having their annual drafts.  While I’ve never taken part in fantasy football, I have taken part in fantasy track and field when it’s offered byUSATF (the predictions contest).  The fantasy sports realm is a growing one, that keeps becoming more profitable year after year.

One area where I think our sport would thrive is in the fantasy realm.  There are plenty of opportunities to have fantasy leagues, whether they be for cross country, track and field or road racing.  The potential there is huge.  But lets take it one step further…

If fantasy track and field/cross country/road racing really took off, I think a great way to promote the sport would be to have the top professional athletes take part as well, making their selections public so everyone could follow them and comment on their choices.

While they certainly couldn’t be part of a paying league, USATF could assemble this and have a Pro Fantasy League.  It’d be fun to follow, that’s for sure.  Plus, it would promote our sport a bit more, as the stars would be saying who they like to watch and who they think are the best in the sport.  It’s time for our sport to get aboard this crazy train of fantasy sports.

I don’t watch the TV show CSI - Las Vegas very often, but I was flipping through the TV the other day and came across the CSI episode ‘Dead Ringer.’  While I didn’t watch the entire episode, the opening scene was amazing…and yes, it pertains to running.

The opening scene, while obviously scripted and produced, mimicked the Nevada Law Enforcement relay, which runs through the desert outside of Las Vegas every year.  The opening scene (posted below) showed just how cool running can look on TV if time and a lot of money are spent on making it a show, rather than just runners going head to head.

Cycling has done a good job at producing high quality footage for TV, putting in a lot of money to make an energy filled, high impact show.  Road running needs to do the same, spending more money on production and selling the sport to the general public.  TV is powerful and the sport needs to realize this.

(photo courtesy of Sports Illustrated)

News broke today on Twitter, courtesy of former TrackShark owner Tom Borish, that Usain Bolt will be featured on Sports Illustrated’s cover later this week.  Personally, we can’t even remember the last track and field athlete featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated.  It may have been Marion Jones or Michael Johnson, but we’re looking into it.

This is a big step for the sport.  While print media is fading as a national scope of current events, Sports Illustrated remains a strong presence in the sports world, especially the cover of each issue.  Usain Bolt is quickly approaching international superstar status, if he doesn’t already hold that crown.  In the U.S., while before the World Championships, I would have questioned Bolt’s popularity and notoriety, it’s obvious now that he has captured sports fans minds and hearts, even if they still love baseball, football and basketball.

(photo courtesy of Sports Illustrated)

A few weeks ago Ed Torres earned his way onto Team USA in the marathon when Fernando Cabada withdrew due to injury.  With the World Marathon Championship less than 24 hours away, Torres has withdrawn, citing an injured heel.  Torres posted this comment on his Facebook page:

“is upset at what he thought was a calve probem has turned into achilles tendonitis. I have no choice but to pull out of tomorrows world Marathon championships. Thanks for all the good vibes but it wasn’t meant to be.”

Obviously this is a blog to the U.S. squad, but the four remaining athletes seem primed and ready to run great races tomorrow in Berlin.  Go USA!

Yesterday morning I read a great article in Sports Business Journal on youth sports, and how various sports organizations (NFL, NBA, MLB, MLS) are working hard to improve their youth portion of their respective sport, not only trying to increase popularity, but trying increase the likelihood those young athletes turn into lifelong fans.

Here’s a portion of the article:

“Connecting with children 6 to 13 is paramount in turning them into lifelong fans, according to data compiled by the NFL. Fifty-five percent of avid NFL fans said they became engaged or interested in football in elementary school or earlier. Seventy-five percent of avid fans and 62 percent of casual fans participated in football at some level as a child.”

Looking at those statistics for the NFL, it is quite clear that having youth participation in a sport is a key element to creating fans for the future. Obviously playing a sport as a child doesn’t necessarily translate to becoming a fan of the sport as an adult, the example being soccer, which is maybe the sixth most popular sport in the U.S., but has the largest participation base in the 6-13 demographic. However, having some type of organized, national youth program is a key element to any sport, and one that cross country, road racing and track and field (the three branches of USATF) lack.

The lack of a well publicized youth program is one of the primary factors why track and field isn’t more popular in the U.S. If you look at high school participation, track and field is the third most popular sport behind football and basketball, but ranks well ahead of baseball/softball, swimming, tennis, golf and soccer. That type of popularity should mean good things, but it doesn’t, simply because many track and field athletes by then have played other sport, sports they’d rather watch on TV and follow when compared to track.

So, how does USATF attract new fans into the sport at that age? Well, for starters, they need to establish a youth running program in schools. I’ve actually talked with USATF about this, but starting a national cross country week and national track and field week in elementary and junior high schools would do wonders for the sport.

Second, youth track and field needs to be better organized and popularized, starting with mass organization at the USATF Association level, which the national office can lead. Third, an interactive, easily-navigated, highly organized website needs to be built and marketed to the youth sector of the sport (i.e. SI for Kids), which showcases the best athletes in our sport, so kids can follow their favorite stars, watch interviews, know when to watch a meet online or on TV, etc.

A combination of those three things would certainly help grow the youth level of the sport dramatically and could potentially create more fans at a younger age for the sport, which is always a great thing. USATF is a stretched organization, only able to put so many resources into various aspects of the sport, but this seems more like something USATF can spearhead, but put the majority of the work on the state associations. It is a complex problem, but the solutions are simple.

Ok, in case you weren’t convinced, Usain Bolt is a global superstar, and is easily the face of our sport. Track and field desperately needed a face heading into the Olympics, with Bolt appearing at the forefront and taking over the sport’s throne, but yesterday he showed why everyone needs to notice when he races. He is track and field!

No one cares about track and field. I mean, you and I do, but the general sporting public in the U.S. doesn’t care. That changed just a bit yesterday, when I saw that ESPN, YahooSports and USA Today all featured Bolt’s world record performance on their front pages, as one of the top 1-2 articles of the day. USA Today went one better by having it as the second largest story of the day, behind Tiger Woods’ dramatic loss.  Furthermore, if you look at the comments section of each piece, there are hundreds (thousands in YahooSports’ case) of comments left by sports enthusiasts.  This shows me that people care about Bolt, with the type of connection few athletes can create.

When people think of world wide celebrity athletes, Tiger Woods comes up #1 easily, with Lance Armstrong probably right behind or LeBron James or Kobe Bryant (he’s much more popular than James in Asia, which is a HUGE market). However, I’d venture to say that Bolt has the potential to be #2 in the world. Track and field is a global sport, no event is easier to understand than the 100m dash and the tag “the World’s Fastest Man” is the most notable tag you can be given in the entire athletic world.

Lets hope the IAAF, Puma, Bolt’s agent and support staff all realize that Bolt is one of a kind and needs to be marketed as such.  He is more talented than Michael Johnson, equally as charasmatic as Carl Lewis and millions of dollars need to be poured into marketing Bolt over the next few years.  Track and field needs a Tiger Woods, it needs a Lance Armstrong, and Usain Bolt is that athlete.

With the IAAF World T&F Championships taking place starting this weekend, the IAAF held their annual meetings.  Reading through the IAAF Council notes on their website, it came to my attention that the Council recommended to the IAAF Congress (the governing body that makes all final decisions) that the World Cross Country Championships take place biennially instead of the current format of being held every year.

If the IAAF Congress decides to change the current format, this could change the event dramatically.  First, the bidding process to host the World Cross Country Championships would more than likely become more competitive.  The past few years have seen fewer and fewer cities bid for the championships, so this could certainly raise the stakes, while increasing potential prize money and event sponsorship in the process.

Furthermore, this could create more interest in the event from the athlete perspective.  Especially in the United States, many of the top distance runners do not take part in the U.S. Cross Country Championships (which qualifies them for national team), or if they do, they choose not to run in the World Championships.  However, this could certainly change if there is more prestige surrounding the event, and perhaps even more bonus money from shoe sponsors.

Personally, this seems like a good decision.  The World Cross Country Championships have been losing steam over the past few years (financially, commercially, etc.), which means putting it into a more unique format could bring the event back to life.  Here’s to hoping cross country can gain popularity on the world stage once more.

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photo courtesy of ikhp123