The world’s fastest man is being trash-talked by a YouTuber. “Are you ready man?” asks Darren Watkins, AKA IShowSpeed, on a live stream broadcast around the world. “You know my name’s Speed, right? And you know I am going to win.” Noah Lyles, the Olympic and world 100m champion, smiles at the teenage upstart. Then he bites back. “You gave yourself that name? That’s so cute.”
The pair agree to race over 50m for $100,000. Speed confesses that he has never worn a pair of spikes before, but keeps telling his 43.8m followers that he can beat Lyles. As the pair line up, Speed does a backflip. Then the YouTube megastar, Mr Beast, who has 431m followers, fires the starter’s gun.
This isn’t track and field as we know it. But thousands of people are watching, commenting, waiting to see what happens. The result isn’t a surprise. But that hardly matters. The 39-minute video of the encounter last November has now had 3.5m views on YouTube – making it by far the most watched athletics race on the platform since the 2024 Olympics.
This had completely passed me by until a couple of days ago when the British 200m athlete Toby Harries mentioned it. We were discussing the state of athletics before the world championships starting this week in Tokyo, and Harries was arguing that Speed v Lyles had created more hype and drama – and had more views – than this year’s Diamond League.
It sounds preposterous. But Lyles’ 100m race in London has been viewed 137,000 times on YouTube. While perhaps the most thrilling race of 2025 – in which the young Dutch star Niels Laros comes from 50m back to win the Bowerman mile in Eugene, has just 5,700 views.
“Athletics and athletes have a lot to learn,” says Harries, who posts regular training clips and insights to his 24,000 Instagram followers. “They come at the sport being like, ‘if I run fast, I get paid, and that’s all I need to do.’ Sadly, that’s not the reality of it any more.”
Call it the great athletics paradox. It is the most popular Olympic sport by far. Millions were transfixed by Lyles, Mondo Duplantis, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Keely Hodgkinson and Femke Bol in Paris. But in Tokyo only a fraction of those casual fans will be back – and it is not just because it is on the other side of the world. So what needs to change? Here is my five-point plan.
First, athletics can’t keep kidding itself. “It is not a dying sport,” says Stuart McMillan, a leading sprint coach who works with top athletes and NFL players. “But the authorities need to treat it as if it is. Because it’s trending in the wrong direction.
“Everybody is making less money,” he says. “There’s less eyeballs, sponsors and meets. Athletes, agents, meet directors, federations, and governing bodies all have a responsibility for this. There needs to be some sort of come to Jesus moment about the current state of the sport.”
Second, athletes need to embrace the fact that they are entertainers. They are not just competing against their rivals but other sports and even Netflix for people’s attention and affection. Jake Paul is far from the best boxer in the world but he is one of the richest. Why? Because he engages with young people, inspires love and hate, and makes people care.
Third, athletics needs to find far better ways to appeal to Gen Z. Yes, Speed v Lyles was a gimmick. But it worked. Could an England footballer beat Keely Hodgkinson over 800m? I doubt it. But I bet Trent Alexander-Arnold v Keely would get the kids watching. Ditto if Lyles raced the Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill.
Australian sprinter Gout Gout has been tipped to be the next Usain Bolt. Photograph: Maya Thompson/Getty Images
Some will scoff. But the athletics season runs from February to October. It’s time to throw things against the wall to see what sticks. As the British 100m and 200m sprinter Amy Hunt puts it: “We speak about this all the time in groups, and I don’t think that every race should be 100% serious. What about having a man racing 150m and I’m doing 120m and see if he can catch me?”
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Fourth, TV still doesn’t capture just how fast, powerful or compelling athletes are. Use drones. Put cameras in the call room and in the warmup area. Conduct interviews but make them less happy-clappy. Duplantis can vault way over the height of a doubledecker bus. Lyles can run at blurring speeds. But you don’t get that sense from television.
Fifth, learn from how other sports attract young audiences. Speak to Barry Hearn. Get 20 ideas from him and pick five that may work. “If you look at darts and MMA, that means gambling, drinking and having fun,” says Harries. “Those sports understand how to get people excited.”
Athletics can do it – look at the Night of the 10K PBs, which attracts about 5,000 fans who stand on lane eight of the track while drinking beers and eating burgers.
Of course it would also help if high-profile athletes lined up against each other more often – something Michael Johnson’s Grand Slam Track tried to do before it fell apart in failure and recriminations, having not so far been able to pay its athletes. AsMcLaughlin-Levrone, the world 400m hurdles record holder and GST’s poster girl, said last week: “Yes, having exciting races is part of it, but I also think that if nobody can see those races. It doesn’t really help anybody.”
Some athletes do get it. Jakob Ingebrigtsen announced he would be competing in Tokyo after injury with an Instagram video that painted him as a gambler rolling the dice. The Olympic 200m champion, Gabby Thomas, has called for coaches who doped to be banned for life. Gout Gout, the astonishing 17-year-old Australian who could be the next Usain Bolt, brings new hope too.
Fortunes can change. Formula One has shown that. It has gone from being a sport for old dads, to being huge with Gen Z and female fans. A friend, who attends most races, talks of how on Thursdays teams all film silly clips in the paddock for social media. “F1 drivers understand they are like puppets but they get the game,” he says.
There is a sense of a sport pulling together to wring every last eyeball and dollar from it, which athletics can learn from. As Hunt said last week: “Sometimes you have to bring the glitz into the sport if we want others to treat us like a glitzy sport.” And that means athletes supplying the razzle dazzle off the track as well as on it.
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