Liberty Media’s main goal when it bought Formula One was to crack the United States. Viewing figures in the US for Drive to Survive and race attendances there for the past year suggest it has done just that.
Athletics has struggled to attain relevance much beyond the Olympic Games or the country’s collegiate system.
But in Eugene, a city with a population just shy of 180,000 — of which only two London boroughs (Kingston and Kensington and Chelsea) have a smaller population — the plan is to alter that starting with the World Athletics Championships from today.
This is a place better known as TrackTown USA, the home of athletics in the States and where the craze for nation’s amateur running was born as well as the birthplace of the Nike brand.
In the build-up to the 10-day event, Dina Asher-Smith talked of the merits of a Netflix-style documentary to follow the sport’s biggest stars and put a spotlight on athletics.
From a British perspective, Asher-Smith is the No1 sell. The problem is that, while she has had some good results — Diamond League wins in Birmingham and Stockholm — she is not even the fastest woman in Britain currently having lost to Daryll Neita at last month’s British Championships.
Times are not everything but being ranked 29th for the 100metres in the world this year and 18th for the 200m, the event in which she is the defending world champion, suggests she has her work cut out to even make the final of either event.
But then Asher-Smith has an impressive record of major championship medals — 12 outdoors, half of them gold — and is long since rid of the hamstring tear that derailed her Olympic ambitions last year when seen as one of the clear medal contenders.
“What happened in Tokyo doesn’t affect my calibre,” she said. “It was just really unfortunate timing. You never know the hurdles someone is facing behind the scenes, and that means that nobody is unbeatable and everything is up for play. That’s why I think every single race is a clean slate, and that’s why I don’t bring whatever happened last year to this year.”
It would be hard to look much beyond the Jamaicans for the 100m medals. It was on the Haywards Field track in Eugene that Elaine Thompson-Herah ran the second fastest time in history last year and only two women this season have gone quicker than her – countrywomen Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Shericka Jackson.
From a British perspective, it will be an audience of insomniacs or else seriously diehard athletics fans, watching that women’s 100m taking place just before 4am on Monday.
It is a scheduling aimed at a primetime American audience, and World Athletics will be watching nervously to see how many people tune in. The ripples have not yet been felt. In yesterday’s USA Today on the eve of the championships, athletics did not feature once, and yet the hope is interest will ignite at the first starter’s gun.
The other GB world champion aside from Asher-Smith from Doha three years ago, Katarina Johnson-Thompson, is struggling to get back to her best following her own injury issues with an Achilles.
This is a British team in dire need of a good championships after the athletics team had an Olympics to forget.
Silver medallists from Tokyo, Keely Hodgkinson and Laura Muir, are expected to lead the way once more in the search for medals but neither will be favoured to take home the gold. And it is over distance that Britain has its best shot.
Muir’s training partner Jemma Reekie is another in the medal conversation, so too Jake Wightman, whose father Geoff will be commentating over the PA system at the track in Eugene, and the rising star of the 800m Max Burgin.
Meanwhile, Eilish McColgan can consider the prospect of a medal in the event in which mother Liz won gold 31 years ago in Tokyo. And there are the sprint relays where the British men, denied a medal in Japan last year by CJ Ujah’s failed drugs test, and women again have medal chances.
