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The timing could hardly be better. After a week when the discourse around women’s sport has been dominated by the actor Sydney Sweeney posing naked – and the intense backlash and counter-backlash – London will stage a major all-female track‑and‑field event on Friday.
A sell-out crowd at the Athlos meeting at the StoneX Stadium in Hendon will feature Britain’s Keely Hodgkinson, along with the American stars Gabby Thomas and Tara Davis-Woodhall, competing for a prize fund of $1m (£750,000). There will be a red-carpet parade, celebrities galore and a celebration of the best of female sport.
The man behind it all, the US entrepreneur and investor Alexis Ohanian, believes this is just the start. Having made millions after cofounding the social media platform Reddit, and having set up the Angel City FC women’s football team, he is betting that track and field will thrive because of to the running boom and the Los Angeles Olympics.
“You can’t go anywhere without seeing joggers, runners and run clubs,” he says. “London is a hotbed for it; the US, too. It is such an accessible sport. So why can’t it be a hundred times more popular? Or even a thousand times more popular?”
We will talk more about that later, but Ohanian also has thoughts on Sweeney’s controversial advert for the US sports prediction company Novig, and the reaction from hundreds of female athletes from around the globe. He is also aware that Sweeney then retaliated by sharing covers of semi‑nude athletes from ESPN magazine’s Body Issue, including one of Ohanian’s wife, Serena Williams – a post that many took to be implying hypocrisy among her critics.
“I’m not even mad,” Ohanian says. “If she wants to be naked for a commercial, that’s great, fine. It’s the false equivalence that I really support our athletes calling out about. The irony is my feed, at least, has been full of women athletes showing off, doing great women athlete stuff, which is awesome.”
Ohanian also says that when an athlete poses for ESPN or Sports Illustrated it is very different. “You don’t have to look very hard to find reasons to celebrate actual women athletes. There’s a ton of them. They have massive followings. They have incredible stories. And, you know, them deciding to do an ESPN Body Issue is very obviously different from an actress just being naked for a commercial.
“These are professional athletes who have devoted decades of their life towards a physical goal and their body is their résumé. So I have no problem understanding why it is totally OK for an athlete, man or woman, to pose naked tastefully. They are physically fit and showing it off because they grinded in the gym every morning to play football, ski, or whatever the hell they do.” ”
Ohanian makes for engaging company. But he is never more passionate than when making the case that women’s sports will be far bigger in a decade. “Ten years from now, there will be multiple billion-dollar women’s teams in basketball and soccer, and they will be doing at least a hundred million in revenue easily,” he says. “And Chelsea will be the first in England.
“The quality of play is also going to go up, because now there’s a business behind women’s sport,” he says, pointing to how a young girl will get far better coaching and support than 10 or 20 years ago, as money and standards rise. “Women’s tennis is an example of this because you can see the impact Serena and Venus made, where a decade later, the entire nature of women’s tennis looks very different. Consciousness is warped by, or moulded by, excellence.”
Ohanian’s journey into investing in women’s sport began in March 2019 when he started tweeting about how women’s football must be hugely undervalued given the USA women’s soccer team was so successful and had millions of followers. “I laid this all out in a rant and I finished it by saying: ‘I’m going to either start a team, or buy one, and who can help?’”
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The USA soccer star Alex Morgan replied. Soon afterwards Ohanian backed words with his wallet by launching Angel City FC. Having invested $7m, the club are now worth £$350m.
“It was one of the first things I did after leaving Reddit. And I feel so blessed that it went on to be so successful so quickly, and had such a ripple effect of investment around women’s sports. For me, the lens after leaving Reddit is everything I build going forward is going to be something I’m really proud to tell my kids.”
So why is he betting big on track and field? “When the Olympics were coming to LA, I said: ‘OK, what’s another sport where you have this massive popularity every four years and then it goes to zero?’ We have 300 million-plus people in America who love sport, who love cheering our athletes during the Olympics, but have no clue outside of that what’s going on. And that’s what I want to break.
“I love the fact it’s the oldest sport. It’s immediately understandable – my eight‑year‑old can understand who wins. You can tell the entire story of an event in a short-form video. It’s perfect for the digital age. There’s a beauty to it. And it is high stakes. As soon as that gun goes off, you know you can’t blink.”
Ohanian also promises that Athlos will end up a very different proposition to Grand Slam Track, the Michael Johnson-led venture that filed for bankruptcy after three events last year. “We held our first race five months after our announcement in 2024 and 3.25 million people tuned in,” he says. “We had brands like Tiffany, who are not from this world, to be a part of this. And most importantly the athletes had a great time, got paid, and it was great.
“But this is just the start. By 2036 I want us to have at least half a dozen races in the cities that are important stops in the calendar for these athletes.”
