The Strike: Grant Holloway, Diamond League fees and fighting for what's due

Seventeen stops on tram 93 separate Gillon from Stade. The line ascends the Heysel Plateau and terminates at Stade, the King Baudouin Stadium of Brussels dominating the plain. The Memorial Van Damme track meet has been held at this stadium every year since 1977. Late August or early September has come to mark the end of the professional circuit and the changing of the seasons. This year, the meet demarcates a different transition.

The tram proceeds slowly. Onboard digital displays lag behind actual progress. They mislead passengers into thinking the next stop is the previous stop. With the malfunctioning screens and sluggish uphill progress, the train conductor dares track fans. Go on then, hop off and start jogging and see if you can arrive at the stadium more quickly.

This year’s Memorial Van Damme meet doubles as the Diamond League Final. It’s a two-day event. The conclusion to the 14-meet Wanda Diamond League circuit. Maybe, something of an encore to the Paris Olympics which occurred just a few hundred kilometers away just a few hundred hours prior. Between then and now, the world’s best athletes have criss-crossed Europe, honing themselves in Diamond League meetings and duller events, battling for prize money and regional treasures, such as the basil plants awarded in the Italian Meeting Arcobaleno EAP.

These athletes haven’t all converged on Brussels, however. As tram 93 cuts through the entanglement of avenues, spectators discuss Grant Holloway’s withdrawal from the 110m hurdle final three days before he was slated to arrive at this terminus. 

And when Sasha Zhoya wins the race in 13.16, soundly defeating the four Americans who did line up for the final, the question is not whether the Olympic champion Holloway would have won. Rather, the question is, did Holloway’s protest win him anything?

This author’s hapless position in tribune 2 section C row 8 seat 13 meant an obstructed clock and a blurry view of athlete’s expressions on Friday night. Still, we can be sure that at least one man in the field aside from Zhoya was happy that Holloway wasn’t there — Eric Edwards. With Holloway’s last-minute bail, the American ranked 11th in Diamond League standings was a last-minute substitute.

The 2024 Diamond League Final paid $30,000 to first-place finishers. For all but the titans of the sport, $30,000 is a significant amount of money. The last race Grant Holloway participated in, the Galà dei Castelli meet in Switzerland, was a World Athletics Silver meet for which the minimum required prize purse was just $5,000 per event.

Athletes who draw crowds also demand appearance fees from meet organizers. Grant Holloway gets paid for showing up, win, lose, or draw.

When a track and field athlete isn’t happy with those terms and conditions, there aren’t many options. In a sport with no player’s union or collective bargaining, the options are to run faster to improve rank and marketability, find another gig, or, simply, not run the meet in question. 

If enough runners don’t run, the event sheds significance. The meet loses intrigue. The demand for tickets drops. Only then does it become a matter of business impact. If the organizers of Van Damme generated widespread strife that resulted in athlete dropouts to the point that Japan’s Shunsuke Izumaya ended up winning the high hurdles, I would have been left wondering why I paid $120 for my lousy resale ticket. Broadcasters would have been wondering why they paid so much for the rights.

Until this year, “making a living” in the sport outside of sponsorship contracts was dictated by the Diamond League prize pool, which for the 2024 regular season awarded $10,000 for first place through $500 for eighth. 110m hurdles world No. 2 Daniel Roberts, who is American, won $30,250 after competing in six Diamond League meets.

Roberts had his worst race of the season in Brussels, at a meet that was overshadowed by the Olympics. The other looming figure was Michael Johnson. Not as a competitor but as the mastermind behind a new track league that is set to start in 2025.

Johnson’s new league is called Grand Slam Track. First place in any event group at any of the four “Slam” events earns an athlete $100,000. That’s more than Mondo Duplantis earned after dominating the pole vault on the circuit all season — in one meet!

Grant Holloway’s pulling out of the Diamond League likely was just a protest against the meet organizer paying an insufficient appearance fee. However, the writing is on the wall: #NeverCompeteForLess. Grant Holloway and others who may be unhappy with the way the Diamond League is administered are aware that, in 2025, the Diamond League won’t be the only show in town. For the first time this century, there exists a replacement league. An alternative. A competitor. More.

Saturday night. I’m on tram 93 again. Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone is set to run the 200m. Only, she hasn’t qualified for the Diamond League Final, so a special heat has been created just for her to test her speed. The hope is that she will dip under 22 seconds for the first time. The other hope is that Sydney, the first athlete to sign with Grand Slam Track for 2025, won’t dip out of the Diamond League circuit, never to return.

An entire meet could be assembled around Sydney’s participation. She’s pivotal in driving interest to an entirely new league. The stadium is filled for her race though it occurs before the start of the broadcast window. There’s a certain bravado to the crowd’s cheers. According to LetsRun co-founder Weldon Johnson, “Brussels [Diamond League organizers] spend [sic] 6 figures for sure on Sydney.” 

Meanwhile, Olympic gold medalist Grant Holloway was rumored to have elected not to compete because the organizers weren’t willing to pay him any appearance fee.

Grant Holloway was oppressed by meet organizers. Slapped in the face. Denied his overtime. Opening the STIB-MIVB app while boarding tram 93 revealed a clash not unlike this one: Belgium was due for a National Strike. The unionized automotive workers would be protesting at the northern train station on Monday morning. The Brussels Intercommunal Transport Company would be joining them in solidarity. On Monday morning, nearly everyone who traveled to Brussels for the Van Damme meet would need to pass through that train station to proceed to the airport to catch return flights.

Organized labor wields considerable power. In the same way, so do professional athletes. If participants organized and withdrew from meets in protest, perhaps in solidarity with Holloway, maybe the tide would rise for everyone. Maybe athletes yet to reach superstar status could clinch more bargaining power, more guarantees and more comfortable lives. Transparent contracts and appearance fees could make for a more popular sport. More visibility and trust in the professional support system might lead more athletes to chase pro standards and pro contracts, which in turn would trickle down to more participation in track and field at every level. Setting world records doesn’t have to be just for the world’s best athletes, as one Reddit user asked of STIB-MIVB’s frequency of strikes: “are they trying to get in the Guinness book?”

Sydney doesn’t break 22 seconds but wins her heat easily. The rest of the final day of the meet unfurls with $30,000 here, $30,000 there, but no superlative performances. Watching the competitors as if they are lone wolves, independent contractors, or exploited workers, reveals a different side of the sport. The in-app strike messaging is effective. It consumes my thoughts. What if the sport of athletics had an athlete union?

The athletes, spent, tired, finished with their seasons, board buses. They are to receive a police escort back to the DoubleTree by Hilton on Rue Gineste. They’re returning after toiling in the field. A policeman stops fans on Av de Bouchot so the buses can turn left. A dramatic procession into the cool night. The windows of the buses are tinted, but not so much. We point our camera phones at the buses; the athletes point their camera phones at us. It would turn out that running back was faster than taking tram 93.

While Grant Holloway’s agent pondered a response to questions submitted for this article, the Wanda Diamond League organizers forwarded a press release indicating a humongous increase to the prize money allocated for the 2025 season. The league will pay out $9,240,000 next year.