Athletics WA Grand Slam Track League 2025

[Federer91 2,904]

  On 4/5/2025 at 5:44 AM, Biathlonfan said:

watching it now,also that commentary somehow doesn't sound all that impressive

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Don't know about the world feed, but commentary here is from our usual guy, that has been doing athletics commentary for 20+ years, so this was the best part of the event so far 

[phelps 7,862]

  On 3/31/2025 at 4:13 PM, Grassmarket said:

Seemingly there will be highlights on YT, probably with the advert frequency set to Maximally Annoying.

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Albanian (or from the Bahamas) VPN (need to be a good one, not all of them do the trick) and free YT advertising is gone  

 

actually, there's a full list of small Countries where YT doesn't have any ad, just check on the www 

[justony 460]

I agree, it was a decent event, but nothing more than that. 

[Swewi 429]

  On 4/5/2025 at 6:46 AM, FireRun said:

This could have been a rival to the diamond league if done right, but this isn't it. It's boring, too many breaks not enough action. It would have been much more interesting as a league, say you get top 32 athletes in every track discipline together. You have 3 rounds or 2 in longer disciplines. So QF, SF and Finals. Essentially how sprints work in cross country skiing. For the disciplines that need longer recovery limit the amount of participants. Maybe you switch it up for some races and you do 1v1 like the Warholm vs Duplantis thing. That would provide constant action without breaks. But the biggest issue for me is no field events. I hope Coe sees this failure and realises how important they are. I also hope he stops trying to reinvent them with new rules every year. 

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Not so big difference to the Diamond league, except DL has the field events to show during the breaks between races but DL also give the running to much tv time when if they at least have the field events. Maybe DL even more can focus on the field events now that GST has the running.

also what is the point of putting together for example 400m and 400 hurdles in the same category🤔

[heywoodu 15,355]

Just finished watching. Let's see if they manage to improve the format for next time, this was arguably the biggest flop I've seen in terms of athletics events....I don't mean the races themselves, the few events that were there were fine, but man this was mostly a waiting game. Glad HBO has it here, so it was easy to skip through the many, many, many minutes of nothing. This was sort of like an undressed Diamond League evening.

 

If they do this within one hour instead of two and also create a Grand Slam Field, who knows, it may become more interesting. 

Edited April 5 by heywoodu

[heywoodu 15,355]

  On 4/5/2025 at 7:14 AM, Federer91 said:

Don't know about the world feed, but commentary here is from our usual guy, that has been doing athletics commentary for 20+ years, so this was the best part of the event so far 

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Same here, Eurosport/HBO had one of the two usual Dutch athletics commentators (who is also an athlete manager I believe, so someone who knows what he's talking about luckily ).

[heywoodu 15,355]

Ah yeah, Dutch commentator's closing words: "Let's hope the few people who were on the grandstands enjoyed it and will bring some friends tomorrow"

[Orangehair43 258]

  On 4/5/2025 at 10:59 AM, heywoodu said:

Ah yeah, Dutch commentator's closing words: "Let's hope the few people who were on the grandstands enjoyed it and will bring some friends tomorrow"

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Different what the UK got on TNT where Steve Cram (The voice of Athletics on the BBC for the last 25 years) took part in the praising of the Atmosphere (Which sounded ridiculous as it wasn’t very good).
 

Some of the races were ok but it was so flat. The hurdles are a big flaw because 1 hurdle and 1 flat race is not a mixing of different categories and skills in the way the other events can be. 3000 and 5000m  be too similar 

 as well I think. 
 

I don’t get why they started in Kingston. Anyone could tell it would struggle for attendance there more than in the USA. 
 

Also I’m surprised Johnson invited Naser with her ban.

Edited April 5 by Orangehair43

[Grassmarket 3,626]

Attendance decent on day 2_ but it was the old problem of the stadium being too big for the event.

[FireRun 197]

  On 4/6/2025 at 7:31 PM, Grassmarket said:

Attendance decent on day 2_ but it was the old problem of the stadium being too big for the event.

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Something around 10k would be more than enough and it would look a lot more full.