A professional track and field contract stands as one of the more mysterious documents in elite sportd with its details—value, duration, and terms—safeguarded by strict nondisclosure agreements. The secrecy extends even to the most prominent figures, including Olympic champions, whose financial dealings and commitments often remain obscured from both their fellow athletes and the wider public.

However, in a recent and illuminating conversation shared by Fitzroy Dunkley on X, Canadian Olympic sprinter Aaron Brown has finally addressed the secrecy.

“So the shoe sponsors put the NDAs in the contracts, I think to help themselves because they know there’s only a certain amount of money for track and field,” Brown said. “And so in order to rotate that money, they don’t want you getting your full worth. If everyone’s getting their full worth, then they can’t sign as many, right?”

Brown stated that agents play a crucial role in this, serving as gatekeepers of the information that has the potential to empower their clients. “Another thing is, I think the agents know what your worth is because they have a good, they talk to each other and they have a good sense of what someone’s signing,” he explained.

“So they have the knowledge, and when they have it, and you don’t, you need them. So that’s kind of to keep them the middleman, right?… So I think it’s a way to kind of keep the athlete in the dark so that we can’t get our worth.” The Olympic sprinter highlighted an important difference between the contracts in track and field and those in more prominent sports such as the NFL and NBA.

“If a quarterback signs for like 50 million, then the next quarterback is happy because they’re like, ‘Oh, he just upped the market.’ But in track, if someone signs for, let’s just say 50,000, and the budget is a hundred thousand. Now that 50,000 is gone. There’s only 50,000 left for everyone else to get off,” he said.

The Canadian sprinter portrayed track athletes as “crabs in a barrel fighting against each other, but in the NFL and NBA, they’re working together.”

The implications of this unclear and chaotic financial structure reach far beyond mere individual paydays. The commercial framework of the sport seems alarmingly fragile. The downfall of Grand Slam Track serves as an awful reminder of this issue.

Another track and field event that failed due to financial issues

The recent downfall of the prominent startup league Grand Slam Track, established by Olympic icon Michael Johnson, has exposed the longstanding issues plaguing track and field. The league, which had pledged to deliver groundbreaking prize money, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on December 11, 2025, with debts exceeding $31 million to creditors, including more than $7 million owed to the star athletes it had sought to attract.

The league’s current financial standing, with merely $143,000 in cash reserves, highlights the fragility of even the most ambitious efforts to establish a sustainable economic framework on the sport’s unstable groundwork. Nonetheless, GST didn’t immediately collapse. The president of World Athletics, Sebastian Coe, was closely monitoring the event, having previously remarked, “It’s not good. The one thing that World Athletics has always stood strongly behind is the athletes. So yeah, this is not a good situation.”

Additionally, Coe remarked, “It’s a startup, but the athletes do need to be paid. For these things to work, they can’t be vanity projects. They have to be suffused in practicality and deliverability. I just want the events that are going to add luster, that we can find space for, and we will encourage them to at least have the courtesy of spending that kind of time and that kind of effort, both intellectual and resource, in making sure they work.”

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However, when GST collapsed, it resulted in complete chaos. Athletes such as Gabby Thomas, whose paychecks were pending, did not shy away from voicing their criticism of the event publicly. “So dope!! pls pay me…” remarked the current women’s Olympic champion in the 200m, responding to one of GST’s TikTok videos.

The frustration is obvious as the sport continues to grapple with financial challenges, and yet another unfulfilled promise only deepens the uncertainty for athletes regarding their future within it.