I’m always fascinated by attempts to create something new and disruptive within sport.

So much of the structure of modern sport still harks back to how things were set up 100 or 150 years ago, in a completely different world. There’s a lot of “we do it this way because this is the way it’s always been done”.

There is value in maintaining some of this of course, in terms of tradition, history and heritage. You’d be mad to throw all of those things away.

But things always need to evolve. Sport is in the entertainment business, competing with, well, everything else, for people’s time, attention and money.

There are exceptions (T20 cricket being the classic case and maybe The Hundred) but usually the best new ideas in sport come from outside of the official governing bodies and federations. It’s tough to truly innovate when you’re also responsible for maintaining things as they are.

Michael Johnson’s Grand Slam Track is a really interesting example of this.

“Track and Field” is always bundled together because…it always has been. But in entertainment and commercial terms, the sprints and shorter races are far more valuable than the hammer, the discus and the 10k.

So, MJ is making a $30m attempt to take the best parts of the sport and create something new, built around what fans might find exciting, and designed to reward the athletes (or racers, as he prefers to call them).

It’s something World Athletics could probably never have done, at least not without a huge amount of political shenanigans.

Like any new launch, success will come down to the quality of the product itself and the athletes involved, but also how well it’s positioned and marketed to the audience.

It feels like this one is off to a good start, with a pretty clear-eyed focus on how to make this an exciting and different proposition for fans. It’ll take time, but I feel like this could be a real success.

(By the way, The Game Plan podcast with Dylan Pugh and Radha Balani has some really good insight from the man himself.)