Look, we’re going to level with you here. When we sat down to write this week’s newsletter, we’d entirely forgotten about the World Athletics Continental Tour’s concluding category ‘A’ “Gold” competition, which took place on Sunday in Beijing. Upon remembering this meet existed, we checked the results and were underwhelmed.

“Is this something we really need to write about?” we collectively moaned. And yet here we are. So why write at all about a meet we didn’t even consider following this weekend?

Well, based on World Athletics’s ongoing desire to push its best athletes to high-point-value competitions, Continental Tour meets are supposed to provide many of the best global competitive opportunities for athletes who for whatever reason didn’t want to sign up for or weren’t given a spot in Diamond League offerings. Unless Grand Slam Track becomes the recipient of a near-magical cash-infused resuscitation, the Continental Tour will likely remain the uncontested “next best place to race” going forward. If you’re asking WA, we as the track and field community allegedly care more about these meets than NCAAs or national championships.

And if we are going to return more of our attention to meets like the Kip Keino Classic, the Paavo Nurmi Games, and Ostrava Golden Spike, then we also need to be constructively critical when this loose federation of meets does something wacky. And so, friends, it’s with love in our hearts that we say hosting the de facto equivalent meet in your series to the DL final during what’s basically a dead week for the sport is not the way to go about elevating your offering.

Back to Beijing: It’s not that there weren’t outstanding athletes in attendance. (Gold medal threat Sarah Mitton took top honors in the shot, for instance.) It’s just that this meet shouldn’t have been held this past weekend at all. The Diamond League final was—in the eyes of… well… everybody—the end of track and field’s “regular season” and the upcoming World Championship serves as the sport’s entire playoffs. Anything slotted in between is going to inherently feel like a bizarre exhibition. In the American high school or collegiate ranks you might call it a “last chance meet,” but for the pros at this point in the year, there is literally nothing at stake, aside from one final tuneup or maybe the chance to nab some heavily inflated World Athletics points for next year. But that’s what practice, and next year’s regular season meets, respectively, are for!

Let’s touch on Grand Slam Track for a moment: if we learned anything from it beyond “be generally skeptical of the next person to brand themselves a savior of the sport,” it’s that giving athletes a reason to lace up and compete hard early in the season is a great thing! The gap from World Indoors to any other professional meets of consequence would have been pretty gaping without GST luring global medalists out of their training dungeons. Sure, that might be a harder sell next year, but maybe the Continental Tour can find some utility and help out a bit.

At its best, the Continental Tour works in harmony with the Diamond League, providing additional racing opportunities for developing elite athletes who haven’t quite earned their lane on the DL circuit, or for seasoned medal threats who strategically want to compete outside of the brightest lights. As its name implies, the non-competition goal of the series is to expand the global influence of track to areas that don’t have a ready-made DL-level offering — yet.

This year, the first meets on the Tour that earned World Athletics ‘A’ classifications started in late March—in Australia and Botswana—with the first truly well attended ones picking up in May, starting in Zagreb, Croatia. Next year, why not attempt to coordinate a schedule switch-up where the first Euro meet takes place earlier? It’s commendable that World Athletics is working to bolster the sport’s infrastructure away from the well-established competitions of Europe, but when it comes time to transition from indoor to outdoor track, we really should open things up with more of a bang, in easier to reach locales that are also closer to prominent training hubs. (That probably means an American meet once again taking up the financial mantle and checking the necessary boxes to be classified as a Continental Tour Gold label affair.)

From there, go nuts with meets all over the place! Because come May, when World rankings and standards suddenly feel like must-attain commodities, athletes will clamor for the chance to compete in the best meets that will have them. Ideally, the conclusion of the Tour comes before the Diamond League final. Athletes could qualify for Worlds this year in certain events via Continental Tour standings, but that path was so poorly publicized that plenty of potentially impacted athletes didn’t even know about it. Going forward, beat that drum loudly and often, and maybe even open up a lane in other events in the Diamond League final for athletes who have performed exceptionally well on the Tour.

Treat it as a sort of Triple-A league for the sport’s top echelon, where hungry young guns can win their way to the big times, and grizzly vets can sort out some kinks before opening their seasons in earnest. Most Tour meet organizers already understand the assignment, but to further sweeten the pot—and get directors working the phones with agents even harder—what about a relegation system not unlike what’s present in some levels of soccer? The Continental Tour meet that produces the most World Athletics points in aggregate becomes a Diamond League meet the following year, and the worst performing Diamond League meet gets bumped down. Good luck getting that idea off the ground, but hey, there are no bad ideas in brainstorming or newsletter writing.

The World Championships taking place in September has made this season a particularly compelling one, since regular season performances at the Diamond League actually mattered a whole lot more than usual. And since we got that right, we really should aim to align every other tier of professional track and field with it, too. Some of these proposals are probably too lofty to quickly implement, but at the same time, even if we just do away with weird floating meets that athletes and fans alike can largely ignore, we’re making progress.

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