Athlete Gabby Thomas Joins Grand Slam Track for Inaugural Season—Here’s What to Expect

The Olympian is hopeful that the new league will benefit athletes and fans alike.

Gabby Thomas / Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

Grand Slam Track, the new track and field league set to begin in April 2025, just secured its latest star: Gabby Thomas.

Fresh off of her second Olympic training cycle and a standout performance at the Paris games—where she secured three gold medals—the 27-year-old has announced that she will be participating in the inaugural season of the new venture.

Founded by former American professional sprinter Michael Johnson, the league will feature four annual “Slams,” as they call them, during which participants will compete for more prize money than is traditionally offered to track athletes. It is “obviously, a lot more than we’re used to traditionally in our sport,” Thomas explained in a recent interview with People.

But that’s only one of the many benefits that Grand Slam Track intends to bring to American professional track and field competitors. Additionally, the league hopes to create more visibility for the sport as a whole. As it stands, most spectators only watch track and field events every four years during the Olympics. In fact, “people don’t really know how to watch track if it’s not the Olympics every four years,” Thomas said. “We need opportunities to race more frequently, especially in the United States. So I think this will really help with that.”

Gabby Thomas / Michael Steele/Getty Images

Thomas is also looking forward to the stability that the set schedule will bring. Most track and field athletes are “making last-minute decisions and choosing which meets to go to on a whim,” she said. That’s just the nature of the sport. But this new league intends to flip that script. There will be four “Slams,” or meets, between the months of April and September, and each athlete will compete twice over the course of the weekend-long Slam. Because of the set schedule, Thomas believes she will be better able to prepare. “l know what I’m training for and when I’ll be competing, so I can balance my schedule and manage my expectations accordingly,” she remarked, “and I think that’s one of the better things about this league.”

Of all the new and exciting aspects that Grand Slam Track intends to bring to the table, Thomas is particularly excited about the greater opportunity to meet her fans—“one of [her] favorite parts about track.” By making track spectatorship more accessible to fans, she expects that she will likewise have more opportunities to meet—and inspire—the next generation.