The women’s track meet putting more than $1 million on the line in London

ATHLOS arrives in Britain for the first time this Friday, bringing Keely Hodgkinson, Gabby Thomas and Sha’Carri Richardson to a sold out StoneX Stadium as women’s athletics experiments with a different commercial model.

Elite athletics rarely lacks stars. What it has sometimes struggled to provide them with is a stage, and a financial model, proportionate to their pulling power.

On Friday evening, ATHLOS will make its international debut in London with an unusually direct proposition: 42 elite female athletes, seven events, a sold out stadium and more than $1 million in prize money distributed over a single night.

StoneX Stadium will host the meeting on September 18, with Britain’s Keely Hodgkinson, Georgia Hunter Bell and Daryll Neita joining a field that also includes American Olympic champion Gabby Thomas, Sha’Carri Richardson and Ireland’s Rhasidat Adeleke.

The competition covers the 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, mile, 100m hurdles and long jump. But the significance of ATHLOS lies as much in the business surrounding the racing as in the results themselves.

Paying the athletes differently

A total of $1,057,000 will be distributed across the seven events, with prize money extending to every competitor. Winners receive $65,000, second place $35,000 and third $20,000, while those finishing fourth, fifth and sixth receive $15,000, $10,000 and $6,000 respectively.

Each winner will also receive a bespoke crown from Tiffany & Co., an extravagance perhaps, but one that illustrates ATHLOS’s determination to package women’s athletics differently.

More consequential is its approach to ownership. Eligible participating athletes can hold direct equity in the competition, with Thomas and Richardson serving as athlete owner advisers as well as competitors. It is an attempt to give some of the people creating the spectacle a financial interest in what happens beyond a single night.

ATHLOS was created with backing from Seven Seven Six, the venture capital firm founded by Reddit co founder Alexis Ohanian. Its format combines elite competition with elements more readily associated with entertainment events, part of a broader effort to make individual athletics meetings destinations in their own right rather than simply fixtures on a calendar.

London will provide an important test of whether that model travels.

A British audience

There are reasons to believe it might. Hodgkinson arrives as one of the most recognisable figures in British athletics, while the presence of Hunter Bell and Neita gives the home crowd an interest across several disciplines. Thomas and Richardson bring considerable international profiles of their own.

Before the professional programme begins, the stadium will also host a youth event between 6pm and 7pm, giving some of Britain’s fastest schoolgirls the opportunity to race on the same track before the main meeting.

The event has already sold out StoneX Stadium. For those without a ticket, coverage begins at 7pm on BBC Red Button, BBC iPlayer and the BBC Sport website and app, with international distribution planned across more than 150 countries.

ATHLOS is still a young proposition, and one successful evening cannot establish whether its model can alter the economics of women’s athletics. But its London debut arrives with several things professional track has long sought at the same time: prominent athletes, significant prize money, mainstream broadcasting and a full crowd.

On Friday night, the stopwatch will determine the winners. The more interesting question for the sport may be what happens if the business model works too.