Track and Screen: World Athletics in a New Content Race

On the red carpet of the World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest, no one was wearing a competition kit. Suits, evening gowns, smiles calibrated for phone lenses. Noah Lyles stood between two groups of reporters, one hand on a microphone. A few metres away, Mondo Duplantis answered an independent podcast. Andre De Grasse shook hands with a man I assumed was an investor. There was no starting line in that frame, yet everyone was running — on a different track, where the stopwatch has been replaced by view counts.

I once stood outside a training ground fence in Shenzhen in 2026, watching a local club captain talk to a young player who had just been substituted. I wrote a piece about Uncle Tran, a supporter who had followed the team for 18 years, and it was shared 342 times — four times more than the 4-2-3-1 tactical breakdown I had written before it. People love sport because of people, not because of formations. The Budapest night brought that feeling back at a different scale: this time, the athletes are writing their own stories, and the federations are learning how to let them do it without breaking the competition.

The World Athletics Ultimate Championship is a new event format designed by World Athletics — an effort to reposition a sport that lives on the four-year Olympic spotlight. But what stood out in Budapest was not on the track. It was the presence of a new class: content creators with credentials, dedicated zones, and an invitation to the red carpet.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. USATF — USA Track & Field — has set up a "content creator zone" at national meets. World Athletics staged "The Day Before" as a separate media space, detached from competition day. These initiatives did not come from an aesthetic impulse. They came from a stark economic reality: most track and field athletes have no guaranteed salary.

Brian Levine, who represents Andre De Grasse and other stars at Envision Sports & Entertainment, puts it plainly: an athlete's goal is to "optimize earning potential during a brief career". That is not a slogan. It is a job description.

Track and field is a sport of individual competitors, but it operates as a thin financial ecosystem. Unlike football or the NBA — where even a bench player can hold a contract worth hundreds of thousands a year — most track athletes live on prize money, unstable personal sponsorship, and, in recent years, content they produce themselves.

That income structure has three clear tiers. Tier one is the elite — Noah Lyles with 1.5 million Instagram followers, Mondo Duplantis at a similar level — who can sign major sponsorship deals and turn their names into brands. Tier two is made up of athletes with results but not yet enough media pull, living on prize money and a handful of small deals. Tier three is the rest, whom Levine describes as the subjects of a "brief career" — with no safety net but themselves.

The striking thing is not that athletes earn extra money from content, but that they now operate as micro-enterprises — building diversified revenue portfolios rather than waiting on prize money. Look at De Grasse's portfolio: a charitable foundation, equity in AFC Toronto — a women's football club, a children's television show, and a biopic in production. These are not impulsive investments. They are a brand-asset structure, designed for the period after competitive retirement.

By the same logic, Lyles' trading-card collection and Jake Wightman's Last Rep Coffee — selected as an official event supplier — point to a product layer forming around athlete names. This derivative market is not as large as in football or basketball, but it is expanding, and it turns athletes from sponsored figures into asset owners.

What caught my attention most is how this model transmits into team sports. De Grasse's investment in AFC Toronto is a flow of sports capital moving directly from athletics into football. Creator zones, red carpets, "Day Before" events — all of these existed in elite football before athletics copied them. In other words, athletics is not inventing this trend; it is chasing a standard football and basketball already set.

I have followed dozens of press conferences and media days at Asian football competitions over the past five years. What I learned: when a federation opens its doors to content creators, it is not just inviting more cameras. It is shifting part of the storytelling power from the press conference to personal algorithms.

That is why the US Open incident — at a tennis major — became the centre of an article about track and field. A content creator disrupted Naomi Osaka as she prepared to serve, forcing the chair umpire to intervene. Noah Lyles, watching from outside, said the footage made him "cringe". Emmanouil Karalis — a young pole vaulter who calls himself a "kid from social media" — framed it more clearly: there is a time and a place for everything.

The boundary between promotion and interference is not drawn in advance by regulations; it is drawn afterwards, by the incidents themselves. Matt Choi was disqualified from the 2026 New York City Marathon and banned by NYRR for bringing an unauthorised camera crew. That is the clearest precedent that uncontrolled content production can trigger hard sanctions. At the same time, USATF's dedicated zone and World Athletics' "Day Before" time window show that institutions are reacting, not designing from the outset.

There is a misunderstanding I want to name: many commentaries treat the creator economy as the solution to athletes' income problem. It is not. It is a supplement, and an unevenly distributed one. Athletes with media skills, an existing audience, and a professional management team will benefit first. Those without those three things — often young athletes from low-resource countries, or athletes at the end of their careers — will be left behind inside a system that already pays very few.

In other words, content creation does not fix the income gap. It only makes that gap more visible, because for the first time it attaches direct economic value to the ability to attract attention — a skill that is not trained on the track.

I once failed in front of a microphone. In 2026, during a live commentary of a World Cup semi-final, I mispronounced Luka Modrić's name three times in the first half. At home, I replayed the tape and wrote out every player's name for all 32 teams. The lesson was not "don't make mistakes". The lesson was: a voice in front of a microphone does not need to be perfect, only on rhythm. The 2026 microphone taught me that a companion writer does not need to be perfect, only on rhythm. And watching track athletes hold their own cameras, I see a generation learning that lesson faster than I ever did.

But the consequence of that is not just freedom. It is a transfer of risk. When income depends on content, the pressure no longer comes only from the track. It comes from posting frequency, from algorithms, from the need to be present in every frame. In 2026, in an empty dressing room in Shenzhen, I sat next to reserve goalkeeper Wang Jiahui as he whispered that every day he thought he had no place left. He spoke about sleepless nights. The piece that followed, published anonymously, reached 1.2 million reads and the club arranged a psychologist for him.

I tell that story because it connects directly to track and field in the content age. In an empty dressing room, I heard a match that was never broadcast. Now every dressing room has an audience — but a digital one, measurable, and often silent. That silence may be better than jeers, but the sleepless nights do not disappear just because there are more followers.

This is the point I want to place beside the optimism in most analyses. When the story is pushed toward "the biggest winners may be those who excel both on the track and on the screen", a new pressure is created: athletes must not only run fast, they must tell good stories. And those who do not want to — or cannot — do so will be judged as lacking effort, when in reality they are only focusing on their craft.

There is another thing short articles often miss: concentration. Track and field's content platform is being built on the shoulders of a small group of stars — Lyles, Duplantis, De Grasse. If one of them leaves the track, loses form, or suffers a long-term injury, the sport's entire commercial narrative loses a pillar. Football does not have that problem at the same scale, because it has 20 clubs and hundreds of recognisable players. Athletics has a handful of names.

I remember a line I once wrote in a piece about the transfer market: however loud the transfer market gets, the footfall of those who stay does not change. It is the same here. The noise of the creator economy can shake how this sport makes money. But the footfall of someone training at five in the morning on a track with no cameras does not change. And that remains the truest part of this sport.

What I want to watch over the next six to eighteen months is not the next red carpets. It is whether federations turn creator zones from a stop-gap into a clearly regulated standard — and whether anyone is thinking about building content programmes for athletes in tier three of the income structure, those without 1.5 million followers.

I write for those who stay in the dressing room after the stadium lights go out. In track and field's case, those people may be staying in a training hall with no phones, no sponsors, and no one recording. If the creator economy only serves those who are already famous, it is not a revolution. It is a new income tier for an old group.

The question ahead is not whether athletes should make content. The question is who pays for the footfall of the person no one is filming.