There are places that shape you, and then there are places that become part of your internal map. Vail has long been that kind of place for me. Not just a mountain I skied, not just a resort where I once worked as an instructor, but a place that helped teach me what a great experience feels like when it is built by people, not just by systems.

That is why I have been thinking about Rob Katz’s return and Vail Resorts’ new “Beyond Epic” language. On one level, the strategy makes perfect sense. Vail built one of the smartest business models in modern sports by turning a weather-exposed, seasonal business into a recurring revenue machine through the Epic Pass. But once a company masters access, scale, and yield, the next question is harder: can it still create wonder?

That is the question hanging over Vail now.

Because for all the talk about experience, experience can be a slippery corporate word. Sometimes it means removing friction. Sometimes it means better data, better apps, better wayfinding, better service recovery. All of that matters, and Vail has invested heavily in it through the My Epic app, mobile passes, AI support, and other tools designed to make the day easier and more seamless. But a seamless day is not always a memorable one.

And memory is where premium brands either become beloved or become interchangeable.

The Vail I remember had texture. It had quirks. It had little flashes of humanity that made the mountain feel alive. When I was teaching in the early 90s, instructors had pockets full of candy, ribbons, and pins to hand out to kids. Lift operators brought personality to their stations with music, snow sculptures, trivia, and occasional costumes. The mountain did not feel over-managed. It felt inhabited. That may sound like nostalgia, but it is actually a serious point about brand design. Personality is not fluff. It is part of the product.

Later, I watched my son grow up on that same mountain. In the absence of what Vail delivered to me in my day, he collected pins and stickers from Charlie’s T-shirt shop. He held onto paper trail maps. He brought those things back to school and used them to tell the story of where he had been and what he had done. Those objects were small, but they carried weight. They turned a ski day into an identity marker. They extended Vail into the rest of his life.

That is what the best experience businesses understand. The product is never just the product. The real product is the story a customer gets to tell afterward.

Which is why one of Vail’s more revealing misses, at least to me, was the introduction of digital badges without a meaningful physical counterpart. The logic behind the badges is obvious enough. Track engagement. Reward participation. Build habits. But if a child earns something in the app and there is no simple way to redeem it for a patch, a sticker, a photo, or some small physical token at the base area, then the loop is incomplete. The system recognized the behavior, but it failed to create the memory.

That kind of miss matters more than it looks.

For years, Vail has been optimized brilliantly as a machine. That is not criticism. It is a fact. The company’s operating model, its pass strategy, and its scale have set the standard for the category. Even now, the company is framing its next phase as an “Epic Experience” strategy, with Rob Katz back in the CEO role and a clear acknowledgment that growth cannot come from pass sales and acquisitions alone. The problem is that optimization has a way of sanding down personality if no one is actively protecting it.

And that, more than pricing, lines, or app functionality, is what many longtime skiers feel.

The mountain has been cleaned up, standardized, and corporatized to the point that too much of it now feels emotionally neutral. It works, but it rarely surprises. It delivers, but it does not always delight. For a premium brand, that is dangerous territory. The more polished and professional the system becomes, the more deliberate the company has to be about preserving the soul.

Investors should care about that, too.

Not because the soul is sentimental, but because the soul has economic value. It shows up in return intent, in family tradition, in advocacy, in the emotional switching costs that keep people tied to one mountain over another. It is what turns a customer into an ambassador without a media budget. It is what keeps a place from becoming just another well-run asset.

That is why I find this moment so interesting. Rob Katz is not inheriting someone else’s strategy from the outside. He is returning to a position in the company he helped define at a moment when the model's logic is no longer enough on its own. The next phase is not about proving Vail can operate at scale. It already did that. The next phase is about proving that scale and soul need not be opposing forces.

I want that to be true, probably more than most. As a lifelong skier at Vail and a former instructor, I have a soft spot for the place. I want this change to be real. I want Vail to remember that what made it special was never just the acreage, the lifts, or the pass economics. It was the feeling that the mountain had a personality, and that the people who worked there were allowed to give it one.

The 1980’s slogan “VAIL: There’s No Comparison” is what I hope comes back.

Not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. Not a performative nod to heritage. Something more concrete than that. A real return to the small gestures, physical artifacts, employee discretion, and unexpected moments that make guests feel that they are somewhere with character, not just somewhere with capacity.

Because once a place loses its personality, it is very hard to get it back.

If “Vail. There’s no comparison” once meant something real, then the challenge now is not to recreate the past. It is to recover the qualities that made the past unforgettable in the first place.

That is the work.

And it is work worth doing.

I watched the bike industry ignore similar warning signs and drive itself straight into a wall. Many good people and strong brands paid the price for that denial.

Trail running is not there yet. But if you look hard enough, the patterns, as Ian alluded to in his post, are uncomfortably familiar.

Growth Has Become a Belief System

Right now, “trail is booming” is not a data point; it is a worldview.

More runners. More races. More brands. More content. More everything.

In cycling, that exact mindset turned a temporary spike in demand into a permanent planning assumption. Everyone built for more, and nobody modeled what “less” or even “normal” might look like. When demand came back to earth, the industry cratered: warehouses full of inventory, bottomless discounting, layoffs, bankruptcies, and an ugly reset.

If you are building a business focused on trail running right now and your plan does not include a sober downside case, you are not being optimistic. You are following a reckless cycling path. Growth is not the problem. Blind faith in uninterrupted growth is.

“Accessibility” Is Becoming a Convenient Excuse

You will hear a lot of people say, “We’re making trail running more accessible.” It sounds great. Who is going to argue against access?

But watch how that phrase gets used in pitches:

• Justifying permanent discount cycles

• Excusing margin erosion

• Defending promotional sprawl that trains runners to never pay full price

Cycling has already proved how this story ends. Years of heavy discounting did not democratize the sport. They destroyed pricing power, gutted specialty retail, and left brands desperate to climb out of the hole they dug for themselves.

If your version of “accessibility” depends on conditioning consumers to expect 30 to 50 percent off as a baseline, you are not helping the sport. You are hollowing it out.

Community Is Being Treated Like a Hack, Not a Responsibility

“Community” might be the most abused word in endurance sports right now.

Run clubs, group runs, trail crews: done right, these are the soul of the sport. Done wrong, they are just a cheap acquisition channel with nicer photos. And you can already see the tension:

• Branded clubs spun up in key cities to “own” the scene

• Community programs run on quarterly KPIs

• Experiences built more for social content than for the people on the ground

Here is the hard truth: if you treat community as a growth hack, do not be surprised when people eventually treat your brand like a transaction.

If you are going to use the word community, treat it like a long-term relationship. Budget for it when the numbers are great and when they are not. The fastest way to lose credibility in trail is to pull the plug the minute the funnel math gets tougher.

The Race Calendar Looks Healthy Until It Does Not

From the outside, the explosion in events looks robust: stacked calendars, new formats, new distances, new locations. More opportunity for everyone.

From the inside, anyone who has actually built or operated events knows the other side:

• Crowding in key weekends and regions

• Rising costs for permits, medical, logistics, and insurance

• Organizers caught in a race to the bottom on price and perks

The early warning signs never show up in the headline numbers. They show up when:

• Sellouts get a little slower

• Repeat rates quietly slip

• The best small races disappear without much noise

If you are cheering uncritically for more races, ask yourself a harder question: are we building a durable event ecosystem, or just setting up a wave of consolidation in which a handful of big properties survive and many of the culture-building ones do not?

We Are Overcomplicating Something People Love Because It Is Simple

This is the part that the business plans and spreadsheets never capture.

Scroll my Strava, and you will not see a “market segment.” You will see early morning solo runs in the woods. No audience except the bears, deer, squirrels, chipmunks, and whatever else happens to be moving through the trees. That is the point.

The magic of trail is brutally simple:

• Move your body.

• Go somewhere beautiful or challenging.

• Come back as a slightly different human.

Every time the industry adds another layer of noise: more tech, more content, more engagement, more monetization, we should ask: does this make the experience better for the runner or for the business model? Sometimes the answer is both. Often it is not.

If the sport starts to feel like it is built mainly for reels, dashboards, and revenue targets, pure trail runners will do the most rational thing in the world: they will go find quiet trails and leave the industry behind.

If This Feels Harsh, Good

This is not a “stop growing and go live in a cabin” manifesto. Growth is fine. Professionalization is fine. Ambition is fine.

What is not fine is collective amnesia. Cycling just gave us a very expensive case study in what happens when an industry confuses a hot cycle with permanent reality and uses “community” and “access” as covers for undisciplined decisions.

Trail running is in an extraordinary moment. The question is whether it uses this window to build something resilient, or whether it throws itself the same party the bike world did and acts surprised when the bill shows up.

So here is the challenge back to everyone questioning the growth and ‘what’s next?’ question:

• What is one thing you are publicly celebrating that makes you nervous privately?

• And what would it actually look like to act on that concern now, while you still have momentum, instead of after the reset?

If you cannot answer that, go for a long run and think about it. The trail usually tells the truth.

Private capital did not break youth sports. It moved into the vacuum that schools and communities created.

At the root of this shift is a decades-long erosion of school-based physical education, arts, and athletics. As institutions failed to keep pace with the needs of modern families and athlete development, the private sector stepped in to deliver what parents were willing to pay for.

The Long, Slow Decline of School-Based Sports and Arts

For most of the 20th century, the backbone of youth activity in America was simple: you went to school, you played for your school, and your identity as an athlete or artist was built in that environment. The gym, the chorus room, the playing field, and the auditorium were central to how communities saw themselves.

Over the last few decades, that model has been quietly hollowed out.

Several trends can be attributed to driving the decline:

• Academic pressure and a testing culture pushed physical education and the arts aside.

• Liability, compliance, and risk management made school sports more administratively complex and costly.

• Facilities aged without commensurate reinvestment, especially in resource-constrained districts.

• The teacher-coach pipeline weakened as compensation, workload, and expectations diverged.

The result is fewer robust school-based programs, less consistent daily physical education, and more variability in what a student can access depending on their zip code.

Importantly, some public and private schools have resisted this trend. There are districts and programs that still offer exceptional arts and athletics, retain athletes in local systems, and reduce reliance on travel teams through smart scheduling and community alignment. But they are the exception, not the rule.

When Schools Retreat, Demand Doesn’t Just Vanish

Demand for and the reliance on athletics and arts has only increased, and become more relevant on college applications.

To be well-rounded, competitive, and stand out on college applications, students and parents still want:

• Safe, structured environments to move, learn, and compete.

• Pathways that align with college recruiting, scholarships, and increasingly NIL opportunities.

• Development models that look more like professional systems: year-round, specialized, and data-informed.

As school systems pulled back, two things happened simultaneously.

First, local recreation struggled to absorb the gap. Municipal budgets and volunteer-led models often lacked the resources and sophistication to replace what schools had once delivered at scale.

Second, the market spotted an opening. Entrepreneurs, clubs, facility operators, and eventually private equity saw a fragmented, emotionally charged, and underserved space and began to organize it.

This is the critical distinction. Private operators did not invent the desire for youth sports and arts. They monetized the explosive growth and unmet demand.

How Private Equity Rewired the Youth Sports Ecosystem

The youth sports industry in the United States is now commonly described as a multibillion-dollar market, and that scale naturally attracts institutional capital. Private equity has moved aggressively into facilities, event operators, club systems, licensing, and technology platforms tied to participation and exposure.

Headlines focus on the downside:

• Families are paying thousands of dollars a year for travel sports.

• Consolidation and near-monopoly control over venues, fields, and ice time.

• Pricing and policies that push working-class families out of the system.

Those concerns are real and demand attention, but they are symptoms of a deeper structural reality. The center of gravity in youth sports shifted from an institution-based model rooted in schools to a market-based model rooted in the private sector, and financial optimization followed.

When the operating logic changes from serving every student in a district to maximizing return on invested capital, the ecosystem behaves differently.

That is not inherently evil, but it is inherently selective.

The True Power Shift: From Schools to the Private Sector

At the center of the system are youth talent and families, the kids and parents making daily choices about time, money, and identity. Around them, two systems now compete for influence.

On one side is the school-based system:

• Physical education

• School sports teams

• Arts and music programs

• Community identity and hometown allegiance

This system is tied to policy and public funding and historically had the mandate to serve broad populations regardless of income.

On the other side is the private sector system:

• Club and travel teams

• Training academies and performance centers

• Tournaments and showcase events

• Technology and data platforms

• Media, content, and branding

This system is tied to capital and private equity and optimizes for growth, revenue, and perceived competitive advantage.

Over the last 20 to 30 years, the arrows have shifted. Participation, especially for ambitious or elite-track athletes, now flows heavily toward the private sector, and identity is increasingly built around clubs, circuits, and training brands rather than hometown high schools.

Private equity is not ruining youth sports as much as it is scaling a model that emerged when schools couldn’t keep up.

Why Politicians Target Private Equity Instead of Fixing Schools

This is where the current political conversation starts to break down.

Local and federal politicians are focusing on private equity because it offers a clean villain and a media-friendly narrative. Bills like the Let Kids Play Act make it easy to say that lawmakers are protecting families from financial actors, and local TV coverage reinforces the message that private equity ownership is the direct cause of rising fees.

Across the country, local officials argue that private equity-backed youth leagues are pricing families out, with one report citing league fees rising by 50 percent over five years and some parents facing costs of $2,000 to $3,000 per season. That is a powerful sound bite, but it is not the same as a complete solution.

Fixing the issue at the school level is much harder. It requires school boards, mayors, county leaders, and state officials to make long-term budget choices around PE, facilities, coaching, transportation, and arts programming. It also forces politicians to confront tradeoffs, including taxes, staffing, scheduling, and whether sports and arts are treated as core youth infrastructure rather than optional extras.

Divestment, by contrast, is politically safer. It sounds like action without requiring a detailed follow-on plan for who will fund, operate, and maintain leagues, facilities, and development pathways if institutional capital exists. That is why so much of this debate feels incomplete: it names a problem in ownership structure without rebuilding the public system that created the opening in the first place.

To be fair, some local leaders are funding access programs, grants, and community sports initiatives. But these efforts are fragmented and generally too small to reverse the broader shift away from school-based sports and arts.

Risks That Must Be Addressed

None of this absolves private equity or the broader private sector from criticism. There are serious risks in the current trajectory.

First is access and equity.

Pay-to-play models disproportionately exclude lower-income athletes and communities, deepening existing inequities in health, opportunity, and representation.

Second is over-scheduling and early specialization.

The race to year-round, sport-specific training can drive burnout, injury, and reduced overall physical literacy.

Third is community erosion.

When top athletes no longer play for their local schools, the shared identity that school sports once provided starts to fracture.

Fourth is data and commercialization.

As technology platforms track performance, recruiting, and monetization, youth development risks becoming hyper-transactional.

These are design problems in the system, not simply individual bad actors. They require intentional correction, not nostalgia for a model that, in many places, no longer exists.

The Emerging Hybrid: Where Solutions Live

The most interesting and hopeful developments are happening in the middle ground between pure school-based models and pure privatization.

Public school districts can partner with private facilities and training providers while keeping athletes anchored in school teams. Community-backed schools can invest in modern facilities and coaching without replicating full pay-to-play pricing. Nonprofit and municipal models can blend performance training with access, subsidizing costs for families that would otherwise be locked out.

This hybrid approach acknowledges reality. The private sector is not going away. Institutional budgets will remain constrained. Families will continue to vote with their wallets and calendars.

The real question is whether schools, communities, and private operators can be organized into a balanced ecosystem rather than a zero-sum fight. The goal should be to keep identity and access rooted locally while using private innovation and capital intelligently.

A Better Narrative for Youth Sports

The prevailing narrative that private equity is destroying youth sports misdiagnoses the problem and misdirects the anger. It suggests there was once a healthy, equitable, sustainable system that was suddenly disrupted from the outside.

In reality, school-based systems have been eroding for decades. Families have been pushed toward private solutions by necessity as much as ambition. Private equity is now scaling and consolidating what the market had already started to build.

Private equity did not break youth sports. It exposed where the system was already broken and built a business around fixing it for those who could pay.

That framing does not let capital off the hook. It reframes the challenge in a way that invites solutions: reinvest in school-based physical education, arts, and sports as essential infrastructure, design public-private partnerships that protect access and community identity, and use policy to guard against predatory practices without freezing beneficial innovation.

If youth development, health, and opportunity truly matter, the fight is not schools versus private equity. It is fragmented, inequitable systems versus intentional, balanced ecosystems where every child, not just the ones whose parents can pay, has a pathway to move, play, create, and compete.

Most people spend the week of the 4th thinking about what they’re going to throw on the grill or where they’re going to watch the fireworks. Me? Every single year, without fail, my mind goes back to Vail, Colorado. Ford Field. Bridge Street. A pile of jerseys. The sound of a crowd that actually knew what they were watching.

If you played in the Vail Lacrosse Shootout in the late 80s or early 90s, you already know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re nodding. You might be smiling. You might be a little sad.

If you didn’t, buckle up, because I need to tell you about the greatest week in sports you’ve never heard of.

Vail Was the Center of the Lacrosse Universe

The Vail Lacrosse Shootout wasn’t just a tournament. It was a pilgrimage.

Every Fourth of July, the best players in the country: current college stars, alumni of all ages, all-star squads assembled from across every lacrosse pocket in America, descended on the Vail Valley. The fields stretched 13 miles from Vail to Avon to Edwards, and every single one of them was packed. The bars and Bridge Street were shoulder-to-shoulder every night with people who could talk lacrosse for hours and never get tired of it. As a kid, I idolized the players and collected jerseys from players on tournament-eliminated teams. When I finally got to take the field with and against my heroes: Kevin Plummer, Gary and Paul Gait, Dave Pietramala, Dave Morrow, and so many others. My personal on-field highlight was my first year playing for the hometown Vail team sponsored by The Club bar, and shutting down All-American attackman Kevin Lowe of MAB Paints in a first-round close upset. Later, I made the Team Colorado roster, and there was no better feeling than playing in Vail while wearing that uniform and the home-state support.

A friend of mine put it better than I ever could: “No NIL, no craziness, just love of the game, a bunch of Coors Lights, and playing with friends. The party after the game was just as important as the game. The brotherhood in the doing.”

That’s it. That’s the whole thing right there.

You came home sunburned, exhausted, sore, and carrying a stack of jerseys from teams you’d played against, parties you barely remembered, and friendships that somehow stuck. It was a privilege to play in that setting, in front of people who genuinely loved and respected the greatest game on earth. We knew it then. We feel it even more now.

Then the Pro Leagues Appeared, And Something Left.

I say this with full respect for what the Premier Lacrosse League and professional lacrosse have built, because they’ve built something real. ESPN deal. Olympic inclusion in 2028. The sport is in nearly 100 countries. These are legitimately great developments.

But here’s what happened to Vail.

No people or excitement on the sidelines of the 2026 Elite Final game.

When professional lacrosse arrived, the best players in the country, the ones who used to show up every July because they wanted to, suddenly had contracts, schedules, and obligations. Their summers belonged to a league, not to a field in the mountains. The all-star teams stopped assembling. The electric mix of college stars and crusty alumni playing side by side thinned out. Bridge Street is still hopping, but the vibe has shifted to a more family-friendly, more subdued one, with the packed bars replaced by earlier bedtimes and younger crowds.

The tournament still happens. New generations of kids are trampling Ford Field down to dirt and dust, and that’s genuinely beautiful. But the version of Vail that lived in my bones? That was a specific, unrepeatable cultural moment, and professionalization quietly took it from us without anyone really noticing until it was already gone.

1990 Title Game

VS.

2026 Title Game

A Morning Run and a Missed Opportunity

I was running past the fields in Vail a few weeks ago during the youth Lacrosse Tournament: 120-plus teams, roughly 2,500 athletes, 4th through 12th grade, boys and girls. Play starts at first light, and the joy and cheers were echoing off the mountains.

It was hard not to smile, stop to reminisce, and soak it in.

There was a vendor area set up near the fields. I ran by for a closer look.

USA Lacrosse and the PLL are not there.

I’ll be honest, that stopped me in my tracks.

Look at who is standing on those sidelines. These are families at the very beginning of their lacrosse journey. First-time lacrosse parents trying to figure out what position their kid plays. Families two seasons in and already hooked. And this being Vail, there are more than a few CEOs, CMOs, and brand executives in that crowd; people who, on a Tuesday morning watching their kid play under the Rockies, are not thinking about quarterly results. They are emotionally open, completely bought in, and watching their child fall in love with something.

That is an extraordinary audience. And both organizations are absent from it.

USA Lacrosse needs members and advocates. The PLL needs fans who buy tickets and bring their kids back next year. With the 2028 Olympics approaching, both organizations are spending real money to grow the game, and yet they were skipping a venue with 2,500 young athletes and their families, all in peak lacrosse mode, in one of the highest-income zip codes in the country.

Both organizations will likely be at the Vail Lacrosse Shootout this week, and they should be. But that crowd already knows the game inside and out. The youth tournament is where the next generation of lacrosse families is being made. You don’t build a fanbase by only showing up where people already love you.

The Olympic Moment Is Bigger Than the Game

Lacrosse is going back to the Olympics in 2028, the first time as a medal sport in over a century. That is a massive, generational opportunity. Not just to put the sport on a global stage, but to finally tell a story that deserves to be told at scale.

The story of a game born from an Indigenous ceremony, played to heal and to honor. The story of scrappy regional cultures: Long Island, Baltimore, Syracuse, Denver, etc that kept this sport alive through sheer obsession. The story of an aging midfielder in Vail who has shown up every Fourth of July for 30 years because it’s the one week he feels most like himself.

That story doesn’t live in a press release. It lives on Bridge Street. It lives in a pile of jerseys. It lives in the “brotherhood in the doing.”

The question going into 2028 isn’t whether lacrosse can find a global audience. It’s about whether the people running the sport will be brave enough to market the people rather than the product.

Show me the athletes. Show me the families. Show me the 10-year-old girl who just made her first behind-the-back pass and doesn’t know yet that this sport is about to take over her entire life.

That’s the story. It’s always been the story.

Happy 4th, Lax People

Wherever you are this week - whether you’re grilling, watching fireworks, or sneaking away to throw around in the backyard; I hope part of your brain goes back to a field somewhere, some summer, when the game was pure, and the only thing that mattered was the next face-off.

Those of us who had Vail? We hit the jackpot.

Here’s to the brotherhood. Here’s to the pile of jerseys. And here’s to the greatest game on earth finally getting the moment it deserves.

CLICK HERE FOR PRESENTATION

Old-school and dangerous.

The next decade in sports, sports tech, and media-adjacent platforms will not reward founders who hire for optics and comfort. It will reward those who know the difference between people eager to please and those eager to win.

The Wrong Signal

Traditional hiring culture has spent decades rewarding people who fit neatly inside big systems. Stay in your lane. Be easy to manage. Accumulate tenure. Follow the expected path. In mature enterprises, that can be entirely rational. Large organizations genuinely do benefit from long-tenured, fully dedicated executives who carry institutional memory, internal trust, and the ability to shepherd multi-year agendas across complicated structures.

But startups are not mature enterprises. Growth-stage platforms with small teams, thin budgets, and unproven business models are playing a different game. Copying enterprise hiring logic into that environment is like lining up for a time trial on a beach cruiser: wrong equipment for the course.

The Sports Business Journal’s recent roundtable on “The Future of Jobs in Sports” underscores just how out of date many hiring instincts already are. The conversation centers on a post-COVID sports industry being reshaped by AI, private equity, evolving skill demands, and changing pathways into leadership. If the industry’s own CEOs, chief people officers, search executives, and athletic directors are acknowledging that talent models are changing, then dismissing experienced operators because their careers are non-linear or portfolio-driven is not discipline. It is a failure to recognize the market as it actually exists.

Fractional Is Often the Rational Choice

Fractional and portfolio leadership are no longer niche hacks. They exist because the underlying math changed.

Early-stage and growth-stage companies need senior judgment in operations, finance, product, and go-to-market. What they usually lack is the cash or stability to justify a full traditional C-suite. Fractional executives solve that gap by letting founders buy judgment, pattern recognition, and systems in stage-appropriate doses.

For a resource-constrained sports or sports tech startup, that is often the smarter move:

• Access proven operators without locking in fixed executive cost too early.

• Experiment with what kind of leadership the company actually needs before crystallizing the org chart.

• Keep the structure light enough to pivot while still avoiding obvious rookie mistakes.

A young company does not need every key role filled by a 10-year, non-fractional executive sitting in a chair five days a week. It needs the right experience showing up at the right times, in the right ways, and at the right price.

Non-Linear Does Not Mean Unserious

This is where the bias shows up most clearly. A non-linear career is still treated as a red flag by people who grew up in a one-company, one-ladder world. That might have been fair in a calmer era. It is not fair now.

Executives who built their careers across multiple platforms over the last decade have been dealing with COVID-19 disruptions, layoffs, restructurings, platform shifts, and new business models. Many deliberately chose portfolio careers and fractional work because they wanted ownership, range, and the ability to go where the hardest and most interesting work was, not because they could not hold a job.

That is not someone optimizing to be liked. That is someone optimizing to win.

There is a real difference between a career pleaser and a career competitor. One organizes a path around being easy to keep. The other organizes a path around chasing hard problems, upside, and real stakes, accepting that big wins and real misses come with the territory. On paper, those two careers look very different. In a disrupted market, the second one often produces more relevant experience.

The Title Inflation Problem

At the same time, many founders who are skeptical of seasoned fractional operators are very comfortable inflating titles for extremely young, untested talent.

Pull up a stack of sports and sports tech pitch decks, and you will see the pattern instantly:

• A team slide full of C-titles at pre-seed or seed.

• One founder with legitimate background.

• A ring of 22- to 26-year-olds listed as COO, CMO, CRO, or “Chief Athlete Officer,” with thin operating histories underneath.

Investors do not read that as ambition. They read it as compensation.

Over-titling early creates predictable problems:

• Top-heavy optics before a business has earned it.

• Confusion about who is actually accountable for product, revenue, or operations.

• A future collision when the company actually needs senior leadership and has to untangle symbolic titles from real scope.

Titles should follow scope and impact. They should not be used as résumé candy or a shortcut to maturity.

Athlete Cachet Is an Accelerant, Not an Operating System

The temptation is even stronger in athlete-led or athlete-adjacent businesses. The thinking goes like this: if we give the athlete or recent grad a big title and put them on the front of the deck, we will drive value just on the back of their name.

Athlete and creator cachet is powerful. It can open doors, drive attention, and lend authenticity that no performance marketing budget can buy. But even the most thoughtful investors in creator- and athlete-led brands will tell you that celebrity is an accelerator, not the core business model.

A real company still needs:

• A product and tech stack that works.

• A go-to-market motion that scales beyond the founder’s personal network.

• A business model and operating cadence that can survive injuries, seasonality, and the reality that stars age out.

Putting all of that weight on someone in a first job because they have a jersey or a blue-chip degree is not progressive. It is reckless.

What Investors Actually See

From an investor’s seat, the combination of fear of fractionals and love of big titles shows up as a clean red flag.

When seasoned sports investors look at a team slide, they are asking:

• Who has actually shipped and iterated a similar product?

• Who has sold into this buyer set and owned the revenue motion?

• Who has enough operational maturity to handle the upcoming pivots and personnel decisions?

If the answer is one person and a group of very young C-titles, that is a problem. Gaps are not the issue. Every early-stage team has gaps. Pretending those gaps are covered by titles and logos is the issue.

This is where fractional and portfolio executives are not a maybe. They are the obvious fix. A lean founding team that is honest about its holes and brings in real operators, even one day a week, is far more investable than a deck stacked with symbolic chiefs.

The Real Divide: Pleasing vs. Winning

Underneath all of this sits a simple divide.

Some people, and some companies, are optimized to please. They value smooth optics, stable résumés, and familiar patterns. They like careers that look good in a board packet. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, especially in mature, slow-moving organizations.

Others are optimized to win. They value hard problems, real stakes, and the freedom to move when the best opportunity shifts. They choose roles, platforms, and even sports that offer the chance to feel the full range of outcomes, not just a safe middle ground.

In a sports industry being rewritten by AI, private equity, shifting media models, NIL, global investment, and changing fan behavior, the second mindset is not a flaw. It is an asset.

Founders who cling to the old signals, linear tenure, big titles for youth, and skepticism of portfolio careers are screening out exactly the kind of operators they want in their corner when the game changes. Founders who get it will:

• Match leadership design to company stage.

• Combine young, ambitious talent and athlete cachet with experienced operators, fractional or full-time, who know how to build.

• Judge people by the quality of problems they have taken on and the outcomes they have driven, not just how long they sat in one chair.

Those founders will attract better talent, use capital more intelligently, and build more resilient platforms.

The ones who do not will keep hiring for comfort, titling for show, and wondering why the people who are actually wired to win keep choosing other games.

That is why decisions such as split days, expanded fields, or additional inventory are not merely operational. They are brand architecture decisions. Expanding supply changes not only who can participate, but what participation means.

Scarcity Is Part of the Product

For many iconic endurance events, demand is driven by more than course quality or production value. The appeal is built on three reinforcing forces: scarcity, narrative, and social signaling. A hard-to-get entry creates urgency; the event’s mythology creates desire; and the public display of participation turns entry into a badge of honor.

That combination creates a powerful flywheel. Registration drama fuels anticipation; anticipation fuels social sharing and conversation; social sharing and conversation fuel aspiration; and aspiration sustains pricing power. In that kind of system, the sellout is not a side effect of demand. It is part of the product itself.

Lived Experience With Growth

This argument is not theoretical. I have lived both sides in my career.

During my time with Competitor Group, as we expanded the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon Series, growth was never just about pouring more runners into the same event. The strategy was to add new destinations with their own unique identities and stories. Each city needed to feel distinct: a different music culture, a different course personality, a different “I did this one” memory that athletes could attach to their identity.

And then there was Rock ‘n’ Roll Las Vegas.

If there is a case study in how to grow without diluting the halo, it is what the team did by moving Las Vegas from a traditional morning start time to a nighttime experience and building the “Strip At Night” platform. Instead of simply increasing capacity, the product itself changed. Running under the lights on the Las Vegas Strip in prime time became its own form of social currency and a call to action.

Participants were not just doing a race. They were running the Strip At Night.

The team deserves enormous credit for turning that into something athletes instantly understood and wanted to be part of. Lucy, Dan, Maya, Megan, Stacey, and many others did a masterful job transforming “Strip At Night” into a clear call to action and a marketing platform with immediate cultural resonance. The uniqueness was the growth strategy. The experience was the marketing.

That is the critical difference. Growth can work when expansion creates new meaning. It becomes far riskier when expansion simply adds more of the same product and hopes the original aura survives.

What Happens When Supply Expands Without New Meaning

When organizers add a large amount of inventory to a scarcity-driven event without creating a new layer of meaning, three risks usually emerge.

• The status premium weakens because access is no longer as exclusive.

• Pricing becomes harder to sustain because consumers start evaluating the event more by its tangible features than by the privilege of getting in.

• The registration ritual loses heat because the waitlist, lottery tension, and instant-sellout energy no longer carry the same FOMO.

Year one can disguise these issues. Pent-up demand gets released, loyal participants are curious, and the market often rewards novelty. But the true test is what happens in years two and three, once the newness fades. If the event no longer feels like a must-have badge, demand often normalizes faster than operators expect.

Ironman as a Cautionary Case Study

Ironman’s recent handling of the World Championship offers a strong cautionary example. In 2022, the event in Kona was held over two days with roughly 5,200 athletes, about double the traditional field, which highlighted both the scale opportunity and the logistical strain of trying to grow the championship in its historic home.

From 2023 through 2025, Ironman separated the men’s and women’s World Championships across Kona and Nice, alternating venues by gender. The move was framed around practical and principled goals: reduce operational pressure in Kona, give women a dedicated race day and venue, and preserve championship prestige while expanding opportunity.

In theory, that was a thoughtful solution. In practice, it revealed how fragile the meaning of an iconic event can be when format changes disrupt the core story. Kona was not just valuable because it was difficult to reach. It was valuable because it was the shared center of gravity for the sport: one place, one mythology, one collective annual pilgrimage.

Once that unity was broken, part of the symbolic power weakened. Athletes and observers increasingly argued that the split diluted tradition and fractured the communal feeling that had made Kona singular. The men’s and women’s races may each have retained elite sporting importance, but the championship no longer carried the same concentrated cultural energy when the experience was divided across places and years.

Just as importantly, the experiment did not deliver its hoped-for growth outcome. Ironman’s own leadership later acknowledged that the split did not produce the expected increase in women’s participation. That matters because it turns a controversial format change into an even sharper lesson: if an organizer asks the market to give up tradition, shared identity, and emotional continuity, the upside has to be both real and visible.

Instead, the market response suggested a mismatch. The format solved some operational issues, but it also weakened the very narrative architecture that made the World Championship special. That is why Ironman announced that, beginning in 2026, the World Championship would return to Kona as the exclusive location, with men and women competing for world titles on the same day.

That reversal is significant. It amounts to a recognition that iconic events derive value not only from access restrictions or field composition, but from ritual, concentration, and shared meaning. In other words, scarcity alone is not enough. The event has to feel whole.

The Strategic Lesson

The lesson for endurance properties is not that growth is bad. It is that growth has to create new value rather than simply spreading existing value thinner.

There are two smarter ways to do that:

• Create deliberate tiers of exclusivity inside a broader footprint, such as heritage waves, limited-capacity premium experiences, or distinct competitive categories.

• Reimagine the product so that expansion adds a new story, such as a destination strategy or a format innovation that creates fresh cultural relevance rather than just additional capacity.

Without one of those moves, an organizer risks trading long-term brand heat for short-term revenue. That is the larger issue at stake in the current debate around split days and expanded fields. The question is not whether there is enough demand to fill more slots once. The question is whether the event will still command premium identity value after the market learns that access is no longer rare.

London Changes the Stakes

This debate is no longer hypothetical. London Marathon Events has confirmed that the 2027 TCS London Marathon will become a two-day event, allowing a record 100,000 participants to run the traditional 26.2-mile course across Saturday, April 24 and Sunday, April 25, 2027.

Many in the running industry are calling it a “massive game-changer.” They are correct. A move of that scale has the potential to reshape expectations across the endurance industry and force every major organizer to rethink capacity, format, and brand value.

The open question is whether London becomes the blueprint others follow or the cautionary tale they study. If the two-day format creates fresh layers of meaning, differentiated experiences, and new forms of social currency, it could redefine what a major city marathon can be without losing its halo. But if it simply doubles the inventory, it risks falling into the same trap that iconic events often face when growth outpaces narrative design.

That is why the implications reach beyond London. With record ballot demand and a one-off two-day format now confirmed, the 2027 race becomes a live market test not only for London Marathon Events, but for the broader Abbott World Marathon Majors ecosystem.

The next few years may answer a bigger strategic question for the category: in an era of extraordinary participation demand, do the world’s most storied races want to be bigger, or more iconic?

After publishing that piece, one of the most pointed responses came from an independent event operator. The question was direct and worth digging into:

“So if marathons are up 3 to 6%, but it appears to be all in the majors, where does that leave small business event promoters? Focus on the frontier? Isn’t that what the majors want us to do so they can continue to grab more market share? If you were me, what would you focus on?”

I spent a long morning run working through it in my head and talking it out to myself into my notes app. Here’s what I’ve landed on, and it’s more strategically interesting than either the question or the headline numbers suggest.

The Concentration Problem Is Real, But It’s Not the Whole Story

Let’s acknowledge what the data actually shows, because the optimistic read requires an honest look at the challenging one first.

The marathon recovery has been led by a handful of events at the top. The world’s largest marathons are setting all-time records simultaneously. One major broke the global finisher record in the spring, another reclaimed it in the fall of the same year. One event received over 200,000 applications for a field that accepts roughly 1 in 3 applicants. The power at the top of the market is real and intensifying.

Gran fondo cycling is following the same pattern. The UCI’s flagship mass-participation series now spans 36 events across five continents, with its world championship moving to Asia for the first time. The platforms with established brand equity, lottery systems, and international marketing infrastructure are growing faster than the overall market.

Meanwhile, RunSignup’s annual Race Trends data tells an honest story: 87% of all races have fewer than 500 participants, and small local events account for nearly 40% of all runners in America. The base of the pyramid is enormous. But the growth headlines belong to the peak.

So the question stands: what does a small operator actually do with this?

The Majors Are Great at the Harvest. They Don’t Do the Planting.

Here is the reframe that changes the strategic picture entirely.

The large destination marathon is almost never someone’s first endurance event.

Think about the actual consumer journey. A person decides to try running. They sign up for a local 5K, or a fun themed event with family or friends, a relay with a charity group, or a short trail race someone at the office is doing. They finish. They feel something. They sign up again. Over months and years, they go longer. They go faster. They try a new discipline. And eventually, years into that journey, they put a major on their bucket list.

By the time that runner crosses the finish line of a major, a dozen operators shaped who they became as an athlete. The major sees them at peak identity. It harvests the investment that others made.

This is not a criticism of the majors. They have built extraordinary products. But the harvest model has a structural dependency: it requires a continuous supply of athletes who already identify as serious participants or have set a “bucket list” goal. Someone has to create those athletes. Someone has to introduce them to the sport, give them their first finish line, nurture their confidence across distances and disciplines, and build the community that keeps them coming back.

That is the independent operator’s business. And it is not a lesser version of the major’s business. It is a categorically different one, and in several important ways, a structurally stronger one.

The Upstream Advantage

You are upstream of the majors. Not behind them. Upstream of them.

The first-time participant who does a fun, accessible, occasion-driven event is not yet on the major’s radar. They haven’t created the bucket list or self-identified as a serious athlete. They are simply having a good time and feeling something they want to feel again.

Whoever holds that first relationship has something the majors cannot buy retroactively: trust. The operator who introduces a participant to endurance sport, keeps them engaged across distances, and meets them where they are across a progression of events earns a kind of loyalty that no marketing spend can manufacture. The participant doesn’t just remember the race. They remember who made it accessible. Who made it fun. Who made them feel like they belonged.

That is the upstream advantage. It compounds quietly over time, and it is genuinely defensible in ways that road race market share is not.

The Frontier Question, Answered Honestly

Now to the pointed part of the question: isn’t focusing on the frontier exactly what the majors want independent operators to do, so they can consolidate road racing at the top?

It’s a smart and legitimate concern. The pattern exists. Scaled operators are already in gravel and trail. The discipline pioneers did the cultural work; the big platforms arrived with capital. It will happen again.

But here’s what the concern misses: the independent operator’s advantage in frontier disciplines is not primarily about being early to a format. It’s about being deeply rooted in a community and place in a way that scaled operators structurally cannot replicate.

The data from the fastest-growing trail and gravel events is instructive. More than 70% of participants at the world’s largest trail running series come from the host country or a neighboring region. Repeat attendance rates in trail and gravel significantly outpace road racing. The events winning in these disciplines are not winning on scale. They are winning on belonging. On the sense that this event, in this place, was built by people who live here and care about this community.

That is not a competitive position a major can buy. They can acquire the event. They cannot acquire the legitimacy.

Two Lanes. One Portfolio.

The most durable answer to the question, “what should an independent operator actually build?” is not a single lane. It’s two, and they hedge each other in ways that make the portfolio genuinely resilient.

Lane One: Occasion-Driven and Branded Events

Fun, themed, accessible events built around identity and experience rather than sport performance are a powerful tool for reaching first-time participants. These events don’t compete with majors. They compete with other leisure occasions: a weekend trip, a concert, a group activity. The participant is buying a social experience that happens to involve physical activity.

The strategic strength is differentiated acquisition. You are reaching net-new entrants to endurance, and you are their first introduction to it. The strategic risk is dependency. Branded and licensed events rely on IP that belongs to someone else. If this is the only lane, the operator is a contractor with a great client, not a brand with owned equity.

Lane Two: Community-Rooted Events in Emerging Disciplines

Trail running, gravel cycling, mountain biking, and adventure formats are the fastest-growing segments in endurance sports, and they are dramatically underserved at the regional level in most markets. These events derive their value not from a licensed property but from terrain, community, and the sense of place that a well-run regional event builds over time. That equity is owned. It compounds. It cannot be taken away.

Together, these two lanes form a portfolio that makes structural sense. Lane One drives volume, cash flow, and top-of-funnel reach with first-time participants. Lane Two builds owned equity, loyalty, and long-term defensibility. And the participant who enters through a fun branded event today is a candidate for your trail series or gravel event next year, if you build both lanes and connect them deliberately.

The Flywheel the Majors Are Ignoring

There is a consumer flywheel operating in endurance sports that almost no one is talking about explicitly. It works like this:

1. A first-time participant enters through an accessible, low-intimidation event

2. They finish. They feel something. They return.

3. The operator who guided that experience introduces them to longer distances, new disciplines, and deeper community

4. The participant’s identity as an athlete develops, and so does their lifetime event spend

5. Eventually, some percentage of them puts a bucket list major on their calendar

Step five gets all the press. Steps one through four create the athlete who gets there.

The independent operator who builds and nurtures this journey deliberately is not a feeder system for the majors. They are the architect of the participant’s athletic identity. They hold the first, most trusted, and longest relationship in that athlete’s event career.

The majors only see the runner at the finish line. You can see them at the starting line, the very first one, when they weren’t even sure they were a runner yet.

But only if you remember them.

The Data Layer: Turning the Flywheel Into a Business Asset

The upstream advantage is only as durable as your ability to remember the participant.

This is where most independent operators leave the most value on the table. A first-time participant crosses your finish line, feels something, collects their medal, and then disappears into a registration platform’s database that you may or may not own, a timing file that lives in a spreadsheet, and a social media follower count that an algorithm controls. The relationship existed. The data didn’t go anywhere useful.

The majors have solved this problem with scale: dedicated CRM teams, loyalty programs, and marketing technology stacks that would embarrass most mid-size companies. What most independent operators don’t realize is that the tools to build a functionally equivalent zero and first-party data infrastructure are now accessible at a fraction of that cost. The gap is not money. It is intentionality.

Registration is a data collection event, not just a transaction. Every registration is an opportunity to learn who your participant is, where they came from, what they’ve done before, and where they want to go. A well-designed registration flow asks a few questions beyond the basics: Is this your first endurance event? What other disciplines are you curious about? How did you hear about us? What’s on your bucket list? That data, collected consistently over time, builds a participant profile that tells you exactly where each person sits in the journey and what the right next offer is.

Own your email list like the business asset it is. Social media reach is rented. Email is owned. An engaged list of participants who have crossed one of your finish lines is worth more than a multiple of social followers, because you control the channel, the timing, and the message. The operators winning on retention send communications that feel like they come from someone who knows the participant, because they do. Segmentation by distance history, discipline, and event tenure turns a broadcast list into a personalized conversation.

Use post-event data to map movement through the flywheel. Which participants who did your entry-level event came back for something longer? Which road runners tried your trail event? Which first-timers became annual attendees? This movement data is the most valuable intelligence an independent operator can possess. It tells you which events are feeding which other events, where participants are dropping off the flywheel, and where a well-timed communication could re-engage someone who hasn’t returned. Most operators have this data in fragmented form across registration systems and timing files. Consolidating it into even a basic CRM creates a participant journey map that fundamentally changes how you market and program.

Build a loyalty structure that rewards the journey, not just the event. The participant who has attended five of your events across three disciplines over four years is your most valuable asset: as an attendee, a referral source, and a brand ambassador. Most operators treat every registration as a discrete transaction. The operators building durable businesses treat multi-event, multi-year participants as members of something. A simple loyalty program, including priority registration, recognition at events, and earned discounts, costs relatively little to operate and dramatically increases the data signal you receive about your most engaged participants.

Respect the data and the relationship in equal measure. Zero and First-party data is only a competitive advantage if participants trust you with it. The operator who uses participant data to send relevant, timely, genuinely useful communications builds something the majors struggle to replicate at scale: the feeling that someone is paying attention. Use it to tell participants about events that fit where they are in their journey. Use it to celebrate milestones. Use it to ask what they want next.

The majors have the marketing budgets. Independent operators have the intimacy. Technology makes intimacy scalable, but only if you build the system intentionally, starting at the first finish line.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Map the participant journey, not just the event. What does your participant look like at year one, year three, year five? Build a portfolio of events and experiences that serves the whole arc, not just the entry point.

Connect the lanes deliberately. If you run branded occasion events and frontier discipline events, make sure participants in one know about the other. The crossover rate will surprise you. The person who ran your themed 5K is more open to trying a trail 10K than you think, especially if the invitation comes from an operator they already trust.

Build community between events, not just at them. The operators winning on retention are building engagement year-round through training groups, local partnerships, social runs, and online communities. Community is what converts a one-time participant into a multi-year follower. It is also the thing that scaled operators, with their global infrastructure, are worst at.

Own a discipline before you scale it. The fastest-growing independent operators in trail and gravel right now are the ones who planted a flag early in a specific region and built the culture before the discipline went mainstream. First-mover advantage in frontier formats is real. It is also closing.

Tell the upstream story. The participant who did your entry-level event in year one and is now training for their first trail race or century ride is a story worth telling: to your community, to potential sponsors, and to the industry. That narrative is your competitive moat made visible.

Build the data infrastructure before you need it. Registration, email, post-event survey, CRM. These are not marketing tools. They are the memory of your business. Every participant who passes through your corrals without a meaningful data touchpoint is a relationship you held briefly and let go.

The flywheel only compounds if you remember who is on it.

The Bigger Picture

The endurance sports paradox described in the previous article; that the more crowded the mainstream becomes, the more valuable the frontier gets is not just a cultural observation. It is a business structure.

The majors win by harvesting. Independent operators win by cultivating. These are not competing strategies in the same market. They are complementary roles within the same ecosystem, with different time horizons, competitive dynamics, and sources of durable advantage.

The question for the independent operator is not whether to focus on the frontier or defend the mainstream. It is whether to build a portfolio that captures the origin of the participant journey and nurtures it across the full arc of athletic identity development. With the right events in the right lanes, backed by a zero and first-party data infrastructure that remembers every participant at every step, the flywheel doesn’t just turn.

It compounds.

The majors are getting bigger. The base of the pyramid is not getting smaller. And the operator who owns the first, most trusted, and longest relationship in an athlete’s event career is not behind the majors.

They are upstream of them.

That is not a consolation. That is a strategy.

As road marathons return to being bucket-list experiences and status symbols, packed with influencers, medal chasers, and Type-A personalities, a parallel migration is underway to the dirt. Trail running, mountain biking, and gravel cycling are no longer fringe pursuits. They are the fastest-growing sectors in endurance sports, and their growth is not incidental to the mainstreaming of road racing.

It is caused by it.

This is the endurance sports paradox: the more crowded the mainstream becomes, the more valuable the frontier gets.

The Marathon Is Having a Moment, and That Is Dominating the Industry

Let’s address the known: marathons are experiencing a genuine resurgence in participation:

• The U.S. marathon ecosystem grew an additional 3% to 6% over the Running USA report finisher baseline of 432,562 marathon finishers in 2024.

• The 2025 TCS New York City Marathon recorded 59,226 official finishers, the largest field in its history.

• Chicago 2025 drew 54,318 finishers, up 12.2% from 2023, and is expanding to 55,000+ for fall 2026, its largest field ever.

• Boston 2026 recorded 29,033 finishers, a 9% jump from its 2023 post-pandemic high, and the BAA is actively working with crowd scientists to keep expanding the field.

That surge in participation is real, and it’s commercially significant. But something else is happening alongside it. The marathon, once a badge of personal transformation, has become a social media currency. Gen Z is running marathons as their generation’s answer to luxury goods, with Fortune noting that marathon times are replacing designer suits as status symbols on Wall Street. A sport built on solitary suffering has become a performance for an audience.

For a meaningful and growing segment of athletes, that’s exactly the problem.

The Counterculture Counterpart

Enter the frontier disciplines.

Trail running is now a $20 billion economy, with participation up 231% over the past decade. Trail run uploads to Strava have doubled over the past three years. UTMB World Series participants surged 2.4x since 2022, with over 800,000 race starts in just the first half of 2025. Strikingly, 42% of those UTMB participants were competing in their first-ever trail event. Trail running is no longer only a sport for grizzled veterans. It’s a sport welcoming newcomers who are making a deliberate choice to go off-road.

Gravel cycling tells a similar story. From 34 participants at the first edition of what is now Unbound Gravel in 2006, the event now draws 5,000 riders across five distances, generated an estimated $21.7 million in economic impact in 2024, and has spawned an entirely new segment of the cycling industry. Gravel bikes are among the few bicycle categories to have gained market share since before the pandemic, with a 55% increase in participation on Strava in 2023 alone.

Mountain biking had over 9.2 million Americans participating in 2023, a 4.1% increase year-over-year, and the global market is projected to grow from $10 billion in 2025 to $14 billion by 2029.

The numbers don’t lie. These are the growth curves that endurance sports hasn’t seen since the marathon boom of the early 2000s.

Same Athlete Profile. Different Values.

Here’s what makes this more than a market trend: the psychographic profile driving growth in trail, gravel, and mountain biking is largely the same as that of the core of road racing and gran fondos.

Affluent, fitness-driven, experience-seeking. Per Fitt Insider, 66% of trail runners earn $100K+. They’re not abandoning endurance sports. They’re graduating from the performative version of it toward something they consider more authentic.

Trail running, as Fitt Insider describes it, trades “external validation for flow states and ego death, the thrill of dissolving into nature.” Gravel riders talk about “authenticity, exploration, and connection to place.” Mountain bikers are building trail networks and communities.

The emotional currency is different. And in a world where social media has colonized every marathon finish line, that difference is increasingly priceless.

The Organizational Parallel: Mass Participation Formats Are Following

What’s fascinating from a sports business perspective is that the event infrastructure in these emerging disciplines is now intentionally replicating, and simultaneously trying not to replicate, the mass participation model that made road racing great.

UTMB World Series ran 55 events in 28 countries across five continents in 2025, bringing together 146,933 runners. Yet 73% came from the host country or a neighboring nation; the growth is deeply rooted in local community, not globalized spectacle tourism. More than 50% of runners arrive with friends or family, turning race weekends into shared adventures.

Gran fondos, the mass-participation cycling equivalent of road marathons, are evolving similarly, with organizers layering in festivals, multi-day experiences, and boutique distances alongside the signature ride. The small-scale event with under 200 participants and a curated experience is now the fastest-growing format in the gravel world.

The parallel to marathon evolution is striking: the sport formats that once felt exclusive are becoming accessible, and the once fringe sports are actively managing the tension between growth and soul.

The Strategic Implication for Sports Business

For those of us working in mass participation sports, this dynamic should force a genuine rethink.

The marathon and gran fondo formats are not dying; the participation numbers prove that. But the meaning that once differentiated them is migrating. The intrinsic motivation, the authentic challenge, the quiet grit, and the community earned through shared suffering are moving from urban settings to more remote destinations.

This creates a genuine opportunity for event operators, brands, and platform builders:

1. Don’t just build bigger. Build deeper. The events winning in trail, gravel, and MTB are not the ones with the largest fields. They’re the ones with the strongest sense of place and culture. Emporia, Kansas. Chamonix. Moab. These are not just race venues; they are pilgrimages.

2. Authenticity is a product feature. The brands growing fastest in trail running: HOKA, Norda, NNormal, SATISFY are not trying to be Nike. They’re building for the psychographic that is actively running away from mainstream. That’s a defensible position if you hold it with integrity.

3. The participation flywheel is just starting. With 42% of UTMB participants running their first-ever trail event and gravel cycling growing at double-digit rates globally, we are not at peak participation in these disciplines. We’re still at the early majority stage. The early adopter culture that makes these sports feel authentic today is the same culture that will power the mainstream wave of the next decade.

Going Deeper to Spot Patterns

Every generation of endurance sport follows the same arc. A difficult, countercultural pursuit is discovered by the mainstream, packaged for mass consumption, and spawns a generation of performative participants, thereby creating the conditions for the next countercultural pursuit to emerge.

Road racing → trail running. Gran fondo → gravel. Cross-country mountain biking → enduro and bikepacking.

The athletes aren’t leaving endurance sports. They’re chasing the next frontier. And the frontier keeps moving.

The question for our industry isn’t whether to follow them. It’s whether we can build platforms, events, and brands worthy of the journey without paving the dirt road in the process.

Over the last year, going through the recruiting process with my son, I’ve had a front-row seat to a shift I’ve suspected for a while, and it has now become very real.

In too many college programs, “player development” has quietly been replaced by roster management, and the difference between those two things is not small.

Publicly, coaches still say the right things:

They praise multisport athletes. They talk about leadership, resilience, long-term upside, and building the whole person. They warn against early specialization and position themselves as mentors shaping young people for life beyond sport.

That public message also aligns with what sports medicine and athlete-development experts have been saying for years: delayed specialization and broader sport sampling are generally healthier for young athletes and are associated with lower risk of overuse injuries and less burnout.

Privately, though, many recruiting conversations tell a very different story. Behind closed doors, the message often becomes much simpler and much colder: are you specialized enough, polished enough, physically mature enough, and immediately useful enough to help win now? If not, many coaching staffs move on.

As a sports business professional and a dad who has actively encouraged my son to stay the course as a four-year three-sport high school varsity athlete and leader, I find that disconnect hard to stomach. It is even harder when you see it register on my son’s face and in his voice, and realize he is silently asking the question so many kids (and their parents) must be asking now: “Why didn’t I just specialize?”

The cruel irony is that the very path that I have stayed unapologetically and resolute in, and following along with health experts and development frameworks that recommend delayed specialization, diversified movement, broader athleticism, can still be treated as a recruiting disadvantage in the wrong room.

The Public Message & The Private Market

This is what makes the current environment so frustrating for many families. The public-facing story and the private decision-making criteria are no longer aligned.

Consensus recommendations from groups such as the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM) and National Athletic Trainers Association (NATA) explicitly support delaying specialization, participating in a variety of sports, and limiting year-round single-sport exposure because specialization is associated with overuse injury and burnout. Reviews of the literature continue to reach the same conclusion: diversification is protective, while intensive specialization carries meaningful physical and psychological costs.

Yet once recruiting decisions get real, many college coaches narrow their lens to a tiny set of immediate performance signals. The broader athletic profile, leadership background, and developmental runway that are praised in public can become secondary the second a stopwatch, ranking list, or position-specific needs takes over.

That does not mean every coach is being dishonest. It means the incentive structure has changed. A philosophy of development may still be sincere, but sincerity gets sidelined when roster spots, budgets, retention, and wins are all under pressure simultaneously.

Why Coaches Have Changed

The coaching profession has not changed because every coach suddenly stopped caring about teaching. It has changed because the job has changed. The portal and NIL era has turned college sports into a far more fluid, transactional labor market, and coaches are increasingly forced to act like general managers, cap managers, and personnel directors all at once.

The transfer portal has created a marketplace of known quantities. A staff can evaluate a 20-year-old with college film, proven production, and a more mature body, then compare that athlete against a 17-year-old who may have tremendous upside but still needs time and coaching. In an environment built around urgency, the known quantity often wins.

NIL adds another layer. Once money, donor expectations, and competitive resource gaps intensify, the tolerance for developmental uncertainty shrinks further. A miss on a high school recruit is no longer just a missed evaluation; it can also feel like a wasted roster asset in a system that increasingly rewards immediate output.

And now there is another competitive lever available to programs that want to win right away: the international recruiting market. In a growing number of NCAA sports, especially in Olympic and individual sports, coaches are looking globally for older, more fully developed, and highly specialized athletes who can step in and score immediately. International athletes now make up a meaningful share of Division I participation overall, and in some sports they represent an even larger competitive force; in men’s NCAA swimming, top programs have drawn an outsized share of championship points from athletes developed outside the United States.

To be clear, this is not an argument against international athletes. They are talented, deserving, and often come from outstanding development systems. It is, however, another example of how the incentives now favor finished products over developmental bets. If a coach can add a proven transfer, a more mature international athlete, or a highly specialized recruit who is already close to scoring level, the appetite for taking a broad-based, late-blooming high school athlete and developing him over time naturally shrinks.

Even outside revenue sports, this logic spreads. Coaches are judged on results, roster stability, retention, and their ability to put competitive lineups on the field, court, track, or in the pool quickly. That pushes them toward athletes who require less imagination and less runway. It also helps explain why so many families now experience recruiting as a process driven less by projection and development and more by risk minimization.

The Timeline Problem

There is another part of this that is not talked about enough:

Student-athletes are being judged heavily in their junior years, before they have completed critical summer competition and before they have had a full senior year to mature physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Recruiting timelines and outreach windows in many sports now become meaningful by the end of sophomore year or during junior year, which means some of the biggest evaluations occur before an athlete’s development is nearly finished.

That matters because so much real growth happens late:

• Strength catches up.

• Confidence catches up.

• Bodies change.

• Competitive maturity changes.

• Senior-year performance can look very different from junior-year performance, especially for multisport athletes and later bloomers who may not have spent every month of the year building one sport-specific stat sheet.

But the process keeps moving younger. The pressure to identify, rank, contact, and secure athletes earlier means that later-developing kids can be left fighting for fewer spots just as they are beginning to make their biggest jumps. They are often competing against peers who may already have one or two more full years of high school development built into the way they were evaluated, marketed, and slotted. That dynamic can heavily favor early physical bloomers and early specializers, while leaving high-ceiling late developers trying to prove themselves on a compressed timeline.

In other words, the system is not just biased toward specialization. It is also biased toward early visibility. And when early visibility is mistaken for long-term superiority, many future contributors and leaders are screened out before they can fully become who they are.

What Families Experience

For families, the translation is painful but clear.

You hear:

• “We love multisport athletes.”

• “We care about the whole person.”

• “Leadership matters.”

• “Specialization too early can be harmful.”

Then, in the actual recruiting meeting, the subtext becomes:

• You may be a terrific young man, but are you ready right now?

• You may have leadership and range, but are you sport-specific enough?

• You may have upside, but are you developed enough to help immediately?

That gap between what is said in public and what is rewarded in private is where trust starts to erode.

And for teenagers, it can be brutal. A 17-year-old who has done exactly what adults said was healthy and valuable can suddenly be made to feel as though he misplayed the whole thing. That emotional collision is not theoretical. It is real, and it happens in recruiting conversations every day.

The Moment It Crystallized

One recent conversation brought all of this into focus for me.

Recently, a coach looked my son in the eye and said, in so many words, that being a three-sport varsity athlete for all four years of high school might help him get into the school, but he was not fast enough to be recruited for the team.

That moment landed hard not simply because of the evaluation itself, but because of the contrast. This is the kind of coach who, like many others in college athletics, I have listened to on podcasts and read interviews with who has publicly emphasized leadership, whole-person development, and building future leaders rather than simply chasing athletic output. Yet in the private meeting, the full-athlete narrative disappeared the second the program-specific performance threshold took over.

Publicly, the philosophy sounded expansive. Privately, the filter was singular.

That is the disconnect in one sentence. The same qualities that institutions often celebrate in admissions language and development rhetoric promoting leadership, breadth, resilience, and long-term potential take a back seat when a coach is filling a performance slot on a roster. The athlete is viewed and judged more narrowly than the person. The metric overtakes the mission.

I’m not blind to the fact, and to be fair, I am fully aware that elite programs do have real standards. In swimming and many other sports, there are hard performance thresholds because coaches are trying to score points, win meets, and remain competitive against peer institutions and conference rivals. But that is also exactly why the broader recruiting messaging matters so much.

If the real standard is “help us now, or you are not for us,” then families deserve radical honesty, not generalized praise for multisport development that does not survive first contact with a roster decision.

The Death of Player Development

When people talk about the death of player development, this is what they mean.

They do not mean coaching has vanished. They mean that the system increasingly rewards acquisition over cultivation. They mean fewer coaching staffs are willing or able to take a raw but compelling prospect and spend two or three years turning upside into production. They mean the market now prioritizes ready-made contributors over diamonds in the rough.

This shift shows up in several ways:

• Fewer true developmental bets coming out of high school.

• Greater preference for specialized athletes with cleaner, earlier sport-specific stat sheets.

• Increased reliance on transfers who have already been “finished” somewhere else.

• Less patience for freshman growth curves and more pressure for immediate return.

There are still programs and coaches who believe deeply in development. Some have to out-develop because they cannot outspend or outbid. Some still see their real edge in teaching, culture, and long-term investment. But the gravitational pull of the system is moving in the other direction. Transaction is replacing transformation.

What This Means for My Son

So what does this mean for my son and my family?

It means trying to help a 17-year-old process a recruiting world that says one thing on podcasts, in marketing materials, in recruiting emails, and on stage, and another thing in the room face-to-face. It means seeing and hearing the disappointment after a meeting and understanding that he is trying to reconcile his lived experience with everything he was told to value. It means hearing the unspoken question in his eyes:

Did I do this wrong by not specializing?

My answer to him is no.

I tell him to use it as fuel. I tell him to keep chasing his dreams and build toward faster. I tell him someday some of these coaches will see him beat their top recruits. I tell him this is not the end of the road; this is only a hurdle to jump. I tell him we are not going to chase every program that only sees him as a transactional roster piece. We are going to prove to this coach and talk to other coaches and programs who see what he actually is: a four-year high school three-sport varsity athlete, a leader, a competitor, a young man with range, resilience, and room to grow.

That is the line in the sand for us.

We are not looking for a coach who values leadership only in podcasts, emails, and marketing materials but abandons it when lineup decisions begin. We are looking for the coach who believes a broad athletic background is not an inconvenience but an asset. We are looking for an environment where upside is cultivated rather than discarded because it requires patience.

My son may still be admitted to some of these schools. He may still be a walk-on to some of these teams, for these same coaches. He may still become a great teammate and contributor if that path opens. Shit, he may develop into something greater, like an All-American or, dare I say it, an Olympian (one can dream). And if it does, he will throw himself into that opportunity the way he always has.

But that is not our only goal.

We are committed to finding a school where he can achieve more than being a great athlete. We are looking for a place where he can develop into a great leader in society. We are not here because we believe college athletics is a guaranteed runway to the Olympics, professional sport, or some financial windfall. We are here because we believe athletics can be a vehicle for becoming a leader and a teammate, a leader and teammate on the field, a leader and teammate in the classroom, and eventually a better person in the business world and in life.

That can be hard for a teenager to hear. At 17, all he wants is the chance to compete at the highest level, especially for programs he admires and coaches for whom he has the utmost respect.

So yes, there is a pit in my stomach sometimes. Yes, there is sadness in my son’s eyes and voice after certain conversations. But we move on. To become better. To the next practice. To the next race. To the next opportunity.

And we will come out stronger on the other side - We have a few sayings in our family:

Make It Happen

Tough To Beat Pool

Win The Day, One At A Time

Because somewhere in this process there are still coaches who believe their job is not just to manage a roster but to build people. There are still schools that understand athletics as a crucible for character, leadership, and long-term development. There are still places where being a four-year tri-varsity high school athlete and a broad-based competitor is seen as a marker of substance, not a mark against you.

That is where we are headed.

The Road Forward

The challenge for families in similar situations is not just finding a program. It is finding an honest one. The challenge for coaches is not just winning. It is about deciding whether they still want to be in the development business or are comfortable becoming full-time asset managers in team-issued gear. And the challenge for the rest of the sports ecosystem is deciding whether it truly believes what it says about multisport participation, whole-person growth, and long-term athlete development.

Until those things align, more families will keep discovering the same hard truth:

The public message celebrates the whole athlete, but too often the private market rewards only the finished product.

Earlier this year, I did something that, on paper, sounds almost too simple to write about: I joined a small accountability squad and committed to posting on LinkedIn twice a week for 90 days: February 1 through April 30.

No growth hacks. No paid amplification. No algorithm whispering. Just a handful of people in different time zones, a shared agreement, and a rule that we’d actually show up for each other.

Here’s what happened: the numbers, the mechanics, and the part nobody puts in the case study: how it actually felt, and what I learned about writing with AI without letting it write for me.

The setup

The idea was almost embarrassingly low-tech. A few professionals who respected each other’s work signed a one-page agreement and committed to a 90-day sprint. The terms were specific and, crucially, sustainable:

• Two posts a week. No more. The cap mattered as much as the floor. The goal wasn’t to flood the feed; it was to be consistent without burning out.

• Engage with each other. Each week, you committed to genuinely liking and commenting on a chunk of the group’s posts. Not essays. A real “love this” was enough.

• Keep it clean. Nothing political, nothing engineered to provoke. If you wouldn’t want the group to amplify it, you didn’t post it.

• Show up or step out. Ghost your commitments and you were out; no drama, but the whole thing only worked if everyone was actually in.

We set two measurable goals: grow followers by 25%, and grow profile views by 25%, measured from day one to day ninety. We checked in weekly over messaging and did a snapshot review every couple of weeks.

That was it. The entire “program” fit on a single page.

The results

I’ll give you the honest version, not the LinkedIn-flex version.

Reach exploded. This was the headline I didn’t see coming. Over the 90 days, my monthly impressions climbed from roughly 22,000 to nearly 96,000; more than a 4x jump. Total impressions across the sprint cleared 97,000, reaching over 50,000 unique people. For someone posting twice a week from a standing start, that compounding still surprises me.

Profile views blew past the goal. The target was +25%. Profile viewers nearly doubled over the period, up close to 80%. To me, this is the metric that actually matters. Impressions are vanity-adjacent; a profile view means someone got curious enough about you to click.

Followers grew, but I missed the stretch goal. I added several hundred net new followers over the sprint. Real, steady growth. But I did not hit the +25% target. I landed meaningfully short of it. And I want to sit with that for a second rather than spin it.

Engagement stayed real. My engagement rate hovered around 1.5% across 45 posts over the 90 days, a few breakout pieces, a lot of solid middles, and the occasional thing that landed with a thud. The posts that performed best weren’t the ones I labored over. They were the ones closest to what I actually think about all day.

What actually drove it

A few patterns held up across the whole sprint:

1. Consistency beat brilliance. The single biggest lever wasn’t any individual post. It was just showing up twice a week, every week. The algorithm rewards rhythm, and so do humans, people start to expect you.

2. The pod was the unlock. Early engagement from even a handful of committed people gives a post initial velocity, and velocity is what the feed reads as “this is worth showing to more people.” A small group that genuinely shows up for each other punches far above its size.

3. Niche outperformed breadth. My best-performing content was tightly in my lane, the stuff I have actual conviction about. When I drifted toward generic “thought leadership,” it sank. The numbers were unambiguous: specificity wins.

4. The cap protected the quality. Two posts a week sounds like a constraint. It was actually a gift. It forced me to choose, which meant fewer throwaway posts and more that I’d stand behind.

   

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How it felt

Here’s the part I almost left out.

For the first couple of weeks, it felt like homework. There’s a specific flavor of dread in opening the app on a Tuesday knowing you owe the group a post and you’ve got nothing. I resented it a little. I questioned whether any of this was a good use of a serious person’s time.

Then something shifted. Somewhere in the first month, the obligation turned into a rhythm, and the rhythm turned into something I actually looked forward to. Knowing a few people would read and respond, really respond, changed how I wrote. I stopped performing for a faceless feed and started writing to specific humans I respected. The work improved because the audience became real.

The accountability cut both ways, and that’s the point. There were weeks I didn’t feel like engaging with anyone’s posts, but I’d committed, so I did, and half the time I’d learn something or reconnect with someone in the process. The reciprocity wasn’t a tax. It was the whole engine.

And the missed goal? I’ve made peace with it. Falling short of +25% followers while nearly doubling profile views taught me which number I actually care about. Followers are a lagging vanity metric. Profile views are intent. If I had to choose, I’d take the curiosity every time.

But I won’t pretend it didn’t sting a little. I’m competitive. I signed an agreement, I named a target, and I didn’t hit it. That tension, between the result I wanted and the result I got, is more useful to me than a clean win would have been. It tells me exactly what to fix next time: not the consistency (that worked) but the invitation, giving people a clearer reason to follow, not just to glance.

A note on the writing itself

Here’s the part I almost left out, and the part I now think matters most.

I’ve never considered myself a “writer.” I’ve always respected the craft and the people who truly dedicate themselves to it; those like Steve Madden, Bill Strickland, Mario Fraioli, and others. My own process has been different: capturing thoughts in notebooks, voice notes, and conversations, often while running or cycling, narrating ideas to no one at mile six. The hard part was never having the thoughts. It was taking those scattered inputs and turning them into something coherent and intentional, and then into something I’d actually put my name on. This is the first time since college that I’ve consistently engaged in longer-form writing outside of business decks and memos, where the argument has to carry itself.

And this is where I have to be honest about AI, because writing about consistency and self-improvement while quietly papering over how the words got made would be its own kind of dishonesty.

At its best, it has been a tool for clarity and depth. I’ve used AI primarily to help structure ideas, surface relevant data, and pressure-test perspectives. When I came in with one confident take, I could ask it to argue the other side, and more than once that forced me off a lazy conclusion. It pushed me beyond a single source of truth to explore multiple perspectives, engage more rigorously with the data, and better articulate my own point of view. That is genuinely how I want to use the tool: as a sparring partner that raises the floor on rigor.

At its worst, I’ve caught myself leaning on it too heavily; using it as a shortcut rather than doing the harder work of thinking. I won’t pretend otherwise. The danger isn’t that AI writes a bad sentence. It’s that it writes a perfectly fine one, and you nod, and a little bit of your own voice quietly goes missing. That tension, between using it for clarity and leaning on it as a crutch, has been part of the learning.

So the real discipline of these 90 days wasn’t the posting cadence. It was staying honest about where AI fits, while keeping the core ideas grounded in my own experience and thinking. That line between tool and shortcut is thinner than people admit, and it doesn’t hold itself. You have to choose it, sentence by sentence, especially on the days you’re tired.

The process has been both rewarding and uncomfortable, full of moments of frustration and self-doubt, as well as genuine enjoyment. It made me think harder than I have in years, not in spite of the AI, but because using it honestly demanded that I show up with something real for it to work on.

Would I do it again?

Yes. Without hesitation.

Not because of the impressions, though those were nice. Because the thing I was quietly afraid of, that I’d commit publicly, fall short, and feel foolish, happened in miniature, and it was completely survivable. I learned more from the goal I missed than the ones I cleared.

If you’re a professional who keeps meaning to “be more consistent on LinkedIn,” I’ll save you the long version: the platform isn’t the obstacle, and neither is your content. The obstacle is showing up alone. Find three or four people who’ll hold you to it and hold you back. Cap your output so it’s sustainable. Pick a lane and stay in it. Then just do it for 90 days and measure honestly.

The growth is real. But the part that lasts is what showing up consistently does to your relationship with your own work, and, in my case, to the act of writing itself. This feels like the beginning of something, not necessarily a perfectly consistent habit, but a meaningful step in how I process, develop, and share ideas going forward. I’ll keep doing the work of getting it out of my head and onto the page, using AI as a sharpener, not a substitute, and keeping the voice honestly my own.

90 days. Two posts a week. AI as a sparring partner, not a ghostwriter. Turns out the discipline was never the cadence — it was keeping the voice my own.

Every once in a while, something on social media stops the 'doomscroll' and makes you rethink an entire sport (not the AI slop or crazy wipeout videos, although those are a fun diversion from the real world).

The Instagram series “Run This Town” by Vik Singh has my head spinning, and I keep coming back to watch it, probably 100 times by now.

The seven-part series is nominally about the professionalization of skiing, and is right on point and continues to draw me in with how sharply it captures the lived reality of elite athletes trying to build a career in a system that was never really designed for them or included them in the conversations (hint, hint, NCAA).
💰 The prize money vs. cost to compete.
🏅 The dependence on the Olympics.
🏛️ The governance conflicts.
💃 The private equity dance.

It all feels uncomfortably familiar if you spend any time around the U.S. Olympic movement.

As a parent, a fan, and someone who’s spent a lot of time in and around Olympic pathways, a lot of this aligns with what I have written in the past and hits close to home.

You see the same pattern: world‑class athletes operating on thin margins, federations and committees juggling “democracy” and commercial survival, and a constant question of whom the machine is actually built to serve.

It’s rare to see that whole story told this clearly, in this format. The delivery, the visuals, and the Sopranos references are all so spot-on.

This is too good not to watch, and too important not to think about and share.

This is an Instagram rabbit hole absolutely worth going down, FULL STOP!

Red Bull innovated. Enhanced Games “juiced” it.

And in the process, exposed something the Olympic movement has been quietly hoping nobody would notice.

I’ve been writing and talking about this for months. Back in February I published “The Broken Pipeline.” It highlights that the NCAA settlement didn’t just shake up college sports, it’s actively gutting the talent pipeline that feeds Team USA. Swimming programs. Track teams. Wrestling rosters. Tennis programs. Schools cutting them one by one to fund football and basketball NIL packages and revenue sharing mandates that have nothing to do with Olympic development.

USOPC CEO Sarah Hirshland said it plainly:

“If we let this get to the point of crisis, it will decimate these programs and Team USA for decades to come.”

She’s right. And we’re closer to that point than most people want to admit. The Enhanced Games didn’t create this problem. But they are constructing a $1.3 billion business on top of it.

This is content marketing. Brilliant, aggressive content marketing.

Memorial Day weekend in Vegas isn’t a league launch. It’s the most audacious marketing campaign sports has ever produced.

Red Bull sold energy drinks through cliff dives and stratosphere jumps. People who will never leap off a cliff bought cases of the stuff because the brand made extreme performance feel personal. Red Bull created aspirational events, sponsored relatable athletes, and built authentic moments the weekend warrior devoured, shared, and bought into. Enhanced Group is running the same play, using doped world-record performances under an undisclosed PED protocol to sell peptides, GLP-1s, and testosterone therapies to a 40-year-old weekend warrior who’s never thought about any of it. Same playbook. Just “juiced.” Events designed for TikTok. Races under 60 seconds. A $1.3B NYSE valuation riding on whether viral clips convert to product sales.

Enhanced CEO Maximilian Martin didn’t bury the strategy:

“If I want to advertise peptides, the algorithm on Meta will put me in front of people interested in peptides. What they will not do is put me in front of a 40-year-old who never had peptides in their lives. How do you reach that person? Through sports.”

That’s honest. And it’s a direct shot at every governing body that has sat atop the world’s most compelling live content and elite athletic performance, and failed to build a modern commercial model around it.

What this actually exposes.

Enhanced isn’t just writing checks. They built a machine around athletes that no NGB has come close to matching.

Personalized PED protocols designed around individual biology. Constant biomarker monitoring. An independent medical commission overseeing athletes through training camp and competition. Sports science baked into the core deal, not offered as a perk.

Prize money that beats a decade of Olympic medals. Appearance fees on top. A single race in Vegas can be worth more than most Olympic champions earn from prize money across an entire career. That’s not a random number, it’s a deliberate indictment of how the traditional system treats athletes as the commercial product while keeping them at the margins of the revenue model.

Athletes signing on have to quit their national teams. Give up existing funding. And there are still no public details on long-term health coverage for when the side effects from years of PED protocols surface down the road.

But the pitch lands anyway: we treat you like the asset you actually are.

That’s a sentence the USOPC and no NGB has figured out how to say. And until they do, Enhanced Games will keep finding athletes willing to listen.

College sports right now is a flashing red warning light.

America’s Olympic pipeline runs through colleges. Except college sports right now looks like a hockey fight that spilled into the stands.

House settlement. Revenue sharing mandates. NIL free-for-all. Transfer portal chaos. Coaches bolting mid-season. Recruits ghosting programs that developed them. Conference realignment driven entirely by TV money with zero consideration for what it does to everything underneath.

The NCAA spent decades treating athletes as a liability to be managed. When the lawsuits finally forced change, nobody had the athletes at the table. Nobody had a plan. The dam broke without a blueprint. Now everyone is rebuilding mid-crisis; trust gone, relationships frayed, and the institutions that needed athlete goodwill most have the least of it.

Change without a plan isn’t reform. It’s chaos with a press release.

Johnson v. NCAA logic doesn’t stop at the campus gate.

Courts are asking the same question in different forms: who controls the work? Who profits from it? What do the performers get in return?

That logic flows upstream into every NGB and governing body that generates commercial value from athlete performance, IP, and likeness without a corresponding obligation. The USOPC has no federal funding parachute. Congress is paying close attention. And Enhanced Games just put a very public price tag on what “pro athlete treatment” actually means.

The warning from college sports isn’t academic. It’s a live preview. Governing bodies that wait for external forces to mandate change end up doing exactly what the NCAA is doing now; reverse-engineering a system mid-competition, at enormous cost, without the trust of the people they depend on most.

Cameron McEvoy already killed the whole premise.

March 2026. Australian sprinter goes 20.88 to shatter Cesar Cielo‘s 50m freestyle world record, a mark that had survived the supersuit era since 2009. Clean. WADA-compliant. Not a single banned substance.

His method: he stopped swimming. Dropped weekly pool volume from 30 kilometers down to two. Rebuilt his entire model around dry-land sprint science borrowed from athletics and track cycling. Developed explosive power at 31, an age when most elite swimmers are winding down or already gone.

That story hits just as hard as anything coming out of Vegas. It’s just as shareable. And the commercial model it supports: here’s what’s possible at the absolute legal limit of human performance, is infinitely more defensible, more scalable, and more honest than “here’s what happens when we give athletes whatever they want under medical supervision.”

You don’t need to legalize steroids to build a platform around the outer limits of human performance. You need to pay athletes like the product they are, resource them like the investment they represent, and give them a seat at the table in the systems that profit from their work.

What “right lessons learned” actually looks like.

The Enhanced Games model, minus the illegal PEDs, is worth studying seriously.

Short-form events built for viral platforms. Record-chase formats that live naturally on the channels athletes already use. Prize structures that make elite sport a financially rational career choice rather than a patriotic sacrifice.

Add the infrastructure that should have always been there, fully funded high-performance environments, integrated medical and sports science, mental health resources, housing support, and you have a system that competes for talent on merit rather than hoping national pride fills the gap indefinitely.

The Enhanced Games will cross 600 million social views before Memorial Day weekend is over. Their audience skews majority male, and 25 to 44; people who want to believe human performance has no ceiling. That’s not a fringe market. That’s exactly the audience the Olympic movement should be building for.

The USOPC and NGBs should be building for that same audience. With a model that lasts longer than a SPAC cycle.

The movement is worth saving. But it has to earn it, before the pipeline runs completely dry.

What used to take years now takes months. In some cases, weeks. Research from McKinsey & Company found that developers using AI-powered tools can complete coding tasks up to twice as fast, and a controlled experiment with GitHub Copilot showed task completion rates improving by 55.8% faster than those without AI assistance. Teams using AI tools also report 31% faster overall feature development cycles. The barrier to building has collapsed, and that changes everything.

Layer that on top of the rapid growth of sports as an investable asset class: youth sports, mass participation, data, media, performance, and you get an explosion of innovation across the ecosystem. Sports assets have compounded at roughly 13% annually for six decades, and 2025 saw total sports tech deal value hit $200 billion, the strongest year on record, across more than 1,000 transactions. Private equity alone deployed $6.33 billion globally into sports services in the first three quarters of 2025, the highest in at least eight years.

Some of it is genuinely valuable. Some of it makes you stop and think. And some of it feels like solutions desperately searching for problems.

What’s more interesting, though, is what’s happening beneath the surface; the human side of this shift.

Over the past few months, I’ve been to trade shows and on a number of calls that reflect just how disorienting this moment is, even for experienced operators and investors.

On one call, a founder, clearly successful, clearly seasoned, openly admitted something you don’t often hear out loud:

“This is a world I don’t live in. I hate this world. It’s the shittiest, grossest business I’ve ever seen. This is my last venture.”

It wasn’t performative. It was frustration. Real frustration with the velocity of change, the constant need to adapt to new tools, and the creeping sense that the ground is shifting faster than strategy can keep up.

On another call, the conversation turned to capital and market structure in sportstech:

“The space is getting squeezed. Institutional capital isn’t seeing unicorn outcomes unless companies expand beyond sports. At the same time, most of what’s out there aren’t really companies, they’re features. Put those together, and you’ve got a wave of companies that won’t get funded and will need to partner, sell, or shut down. That’s going to put pressure on pricing across the board.” - Jonathan Schecter

That observation hits at something critical, and the data backs it up.

The Numbers Behind the Feeling

Sports tech investment in 2024 was nearly a nine-year low, barely edging past 2023’s depressed numbers. And yet, even as confidence returned in 2025, with private financing in H1 2025 alone reaching a record $6.6 billion across 239 deals, the nature of the capital has fundamentally changed. Equity financing deal volume in sports tech actually declined from 34 transactions in YTD 2024 to 29 in YTD 2025, even as total equity capital deployed jumped 53.1% year-over-year to $5.7 billion.

The message is clear: investors are writing bigger checks to fewer, more proven companies. The long tail is getting cut.

This is the bifurcation point. AI has not only lowered the cost of building but also flooded the market. In 2025, AI alone accounted for nearly half of all global venture funding, while the majority of private companies in crowded SaaS verticals still face prolonged holding periods or valuation resets. In sportstech specifically, deal numbers are down even as deal value is up.

The math tells you everything: scale wins, and scale is scarce.

The “Feature vs. Company” Distinction Is Unavoidable

Teams and leagues are hitting what one industry analyst described as a “fragmentation ceiling” exhausted by the cognitive load of managing 50 disconnected APIs without the internal resources to stitch them together. The market’s response is consolidation. Companies like Hudl have made 18 acquisitions; Teamworks reached a $1 billion valuation backed by a $235 million funding round. Catapult, Genius Sports, Sony, and Sportradar have all made multiple acquisitions, with one CEO summing up the industry mindset simply:

“The leagues and teams don’t want to have fragmented systems anymore. You want to have one provider who can aggregate a lot of this stuff.”

The private equity number tells the same story. PE investments in European sports alone nearly doubled from 96 deals in 2023 to 190 deals in 2025, with firms deploying €10.6 billion, more than triple the previous year. The sports and entertainment industry has posted a 20.8% CAGR over the past three years, significantly outpacing global economic growth.

This is not a bubble. It is institutionalization.

But the capital is flowing to platforms, rights holders, and infrastructure, not to isolated point solutions. Companies that built niche tools in the hope of a strategic exit are facing a much more brutal reckoning: M&A activity in sports tech reached $156 billion in 2025 across 450 announced deals, but the bulk of that value was concentrated in mega-deals like EA ($55B) and Netflix/Warner Bros. Discovery ($82.7B). Mid-market consolidation is accelerating precisely because there are so many undercapitalized features looking for a home at any price.

The Three Realities Taking Shape

Speed is no longer a differentiator; it’s table stakes.

AI has removed many of the traditional barriers to building. McKinsey found that top-performing organizations using AI in software development achieved 16–30% improvements in productivity and time-to-market, alongside 31–45% gains in software quality. But the ability to launch quickly is now assumed by every investor and every buyer. What matters is whether what you’ve built solves a meaningful, persistent problem inside the sports ecosystem, not whether you built it fast.

The feature vs. company distinction is becoming unavoidable.

Many sportstech offerings were never full businesses. They were tools, modules, or capabilities that lived best inside a larger platform. In a tighter capital environment, those distinctions matter. A feature without distribution, defensibility, or integration pathways is now exposed on every due diligence call, and there are more of those calls than ever.

Strategic buyers are gaining leverage.

As capital tightens around smaller players, established organizations, leagues, platforms, event operators, and governing bodies are operating from an increasingly advantaged position in buy/build/partner analysis. When early-stage companies can’t raise, they don’t just disappear; they become acquisition or partnership opportunities at compressed valuations. The M&A market in sportstech is not evidence of overall industry health. For many, it’s a fire sale dressed in a press release.

Where This Leaves Founders and Operators

For founders, especially those coming into sports from the outside, this is a brutal adjustment. Sports is not a typical SaaS vertical. It’s fragmented, relationship-driven, operationally complex, and often resistant to change unless the value proposition is undeniable. Add AI-driven acceleration, and you get a paradox: it’s easier than ever to build something, and harder than ever to build something that matters.

For operators inside the industry, there’s a different kind of pressure. You’re being pitched constantly. New tools, new platforms, new “solutions,” many of which overlap, few of which integrate cleanly, and some of which create more complexity than they remove. The global sports technology market is projected to grow from $44.9 billion in 2026 to $121.6 billion by 2033, and the noise will get louder before it gets quieter.

Increasingly, operators are being asked to make decisions not just about adoption, but about architecture: What do we own? What do we partner for? What do we ignore?

The Shift That’s Coming

The next phase of sportstech will not be defined by how many companies get created. It will be defined by how many actually get absorbed into platforms, into workflows, into ecosystems that already have distribution and trust. Consolidators are now looking for platforms that can aggregate capabilities, not add-ons that require a dedicated IT resource to maintain.

The uncomfortable truth is that we are moving from a phase of expansion to a phase of filtration.

AI made it easier to enter. The market is making it harder to survive.

And not everyone who got in during the rush is going to make it through to the other side.

Data sources: Drake Star Sports Tech Report 2025, SportsTechX Global VC Report 2025, Capstone Partners Sports Technology M&A Update, S&P Global Market Intelligence, Apollo Global Insights, McKinsey & Company, GitHub/Microsoft Research, Sports Business Journal, Deloitte Sports Investment Outlook.

Running, triathlon, cycling, gravel, trail, IMBA‑style MTB, charity events… all drawing from the same participants and communities. All are fighting similar battles on access, economics, and participation.

Very few are actually pulling in the same direction.

The endurance economy is no longer niche.

Destination races and event weekends move real money: travel, hotels, restaurants, retail, and local services. Major marathons and branded events generate hundreds of millions for big cities; mid‑sized races and triathlons deliver multi‑million‑dollar weekends to smaller markets.

This is no longer a cottage industry. It’s an under‑organized economic engine.

And participants already behave that way. The same person might:

• Run a 10K in April

• Ride a gravel event in July

• Volunteer at a charity ride in September

• Jump into a sprint triathlon relay next spring

To them, that’s one connected endurance lifestyle. To most institutions, it’s four different markets.

How we ended up with “individual oceans.”

Over time, we’ve built a complex map of organizations, each with a rational mandate:

• NGBs: USA Triathlon, USA Cycling, USA Track & Field, and many others

• Trade/industry: Running USA, The Running Event, National Bicycle Dealers Association, Bicycle Industry Summit, Running Industry Alliance (RIA), and too many more sport‑specific associations

• Advocacy: PeopleForBikes, International Mountain Bicycling Association, League of American Bicyclists, and local chapters, safe‑streets and trail alliances

• Event owners: city marathons, tri series, gravel and trail races, obstacle / hybrid events

• B2B: registration and timing platforms, data and insights firms, sponsors, agencies

• Community: clubs, youth programs, coaches, local nonprofits, volunteers

• Civic: CVBs, sports commissions, DOTs, parks and land managers, tourism boards

Each is trying to grow its discipline, serve its members, protect its calendar, and sustain its P&L.

That’s understandable. But at the system level, it means:

• Separate advocacy campaigns, often aimed at the same city or agency

• Separate studies and surveys, often asking the same questions

• Separate conferences and conversations, often with overlapping audiences

• Separate views of a consumer who is actually the same person in different gear

We talk like separate oceans, even though the current underneath is shared.

IMBA, PeopleForBikes, Running USA, USAT… same puzzle, different pieces

• IMBA focuses on creating and protecting great places to ride. The trails they help build are used by mountain bikers, trail runners, hikers, youth programs, and tourists.

• PeopleForBikes pushes for better bike infrastructure, grant programs, and local innovation. Protected lanes and complete streets also help runners, walkers, and communities at large.

• Running USA is trying to evolve from “the conference” to a year‑round support and advocacy platform for the running industry.

• USA Triathlon is wrestling with long‑term participation and accessibility, trying to reframe tri for new audiences.

None of this work is wrong. The problem is how rarely it’s organized around a shared endurance agenda.

Instead, cities, DOTs, land managers, and sponsors hear multiple, uncoordinated pitches that all point to the same underlying value: safer places to be active, stronger local economies, healthier communities.

The cost of staying fragmented

Staying in our own oceans has a price:

• We dilute our advocacy power at the exact moment we should be presenting one compelling, data‑backed story about endurance to cities and agencies.

• We duplicate effort across research, events, and tech instead of building shared infrastructure.

• We make it harder for participants to move across disciplines with intention, missing opportunities to extend their “endurance lifetime value.”

Triathlon’s participation challenges are a case study. Running’s post‑boom volatility is another. Youth and diversity gaps are a third.

These aren’t just “tri problems” or “running problems.” They’re endurance system problems.

What a real “tide” could look like

A better model doesn’t erase identities. It connects them.

Think about:

• Cross‑sport advocacy coalitions: A standing table where running, tri, cycling, IMBA‑style trail orgs, and outdoor / health partners align around safe streets, trail access, permitting, and insurance. One set of numbers. One story per market.

• Pooled data and economic insight: A shared layer that tracks how people actually move across running, tri, cycling, gravel, trail, and more. So cities, brands, and investors see the combined endurance footprint, not sport‑by‑sport snapshots.

• Coordinated destination strategies: Weekends that intentionally bundle a 5K/10K, a gran fondo, a short‑course tri, and a trail race. Same destination. More nights. Bigger impact.

• Unified storytelling: Content and platforms that treat endurance as a lifestyle, not a silo, where a runner can discover tri, a gravel rider can discover trail, and a charity walker can discover their first race.

The opportunity

The endurance economy already behaves like one ecosystem:

• One participant moves across sports.

• One city benefits from multiple weekends.

• One set of roads, trails, and parks carries it all.

• One active consumer buys running shoes, bikes, gear, and travel.

The question is whether our institutions are willing to catch up.

If you sit on a board, run an organization, or work with these stakeholders, consider a few questions:

• Where are you duplicating effort that could be shared?

• Who in an “adjacent ocean” should you be planning with, not just bumping into at conferences?

• What would it take to organize your work at the scale of the whole endurance economy, not just your slice?

A rising tide does lift all boats.

In endurance sports, the next step is simple but not easy: stop behaving like separate oceans and start building the tide together.

When a runner books a flight to Tokyo for a marathon, she isn’t just entering a race. She’s funding a hotel room, filling a restaurant, hiring a local guide, and becoming a walking billboard for a destination. Multiply that story by tens of thousands, and you begin to understand why endurance sports travel has quietly become one of the most powerful economic forces in global tourism, and why the smartest cities, brands, and event organizers are racing to own it.

The Numbers No One Is Talking About Loudly Enough

Let’s start with scale. Sports tourism now accounts for roughly 10% of global tourism revenue, according to UN Tourism, a market that surpassed $560 billion in value and is projected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2032. Within that massive pool, endurance sports sit at the premium end, and the growth trajectory is extraordinary.

The endurance sports event market alone was valued at $14.8 billion in 2025 and is expected to nearly double to $28.6 billion by 2034, growing at a CAGR of 7.6%. Running events lead the sector with 38.4% of total event-type revenue, while triathlon continues to expand its global footprint. North America commands 36.2% of the market, but the Asia-Pacific region is the fastest-growing region, signaling that endurance participation is a global megatrend, not a Western niche.

The Sports Events & Tourism Association (Sports ETA) reported that Americans took a record 204.9 million sports event-related trips in 2023, generating $52.2 billion in direct travel spending. The lodging sector alone accounted for 73.5 million room nights, a 6.5% increase over 2019 pre-pandemic levels.

The Destination Race as Economic Engine

Here’s the business insight most CVBs and DMOs still undervalue: a single endurance event can rival or outperform a Super Bowl in economic return, at a fraction of the hosting cost.

The TCS New York City Marathon generated $692 million in economic impact in 2024, with all New York Road Runners (NYRR) events combined approaching $1 billion, supporting over 5,000 jobs and generating $54 million in city tax revenue. Visitor spending included $425 million from international and out-of-town participants:

• $178 million on lodging,

• $109 million on dining

• $51 million on shopping

That’s a 139% increase since the 2019 edition.

The 2024 Bank of America Chicago Marathon broke its own record with a $683 million economic impact, a 22% year-over-year increase. Nearly 53,000 participants toed the start line, representing all 50 U.S. states and more than 140 countries, with 37% coming from outside the United States. Tourism-related industries received $177 million in direct revenue, with participants spending an average of $322 per day on accommodations.

Boston’s story is equally compelling. The 128th Boston Marathon generated $509 million in economic impact across a weekend that drew 29,333 runners and another 10,000 participants in the B.A.A. 5K. Spectators stayed an average of three nights at approximately $380 per night.

This is what separates endurance events from almost every other tourism driver: participants travel further, stay longer, spend more, and bring their families.

Research on The IRONMAN Group participants confirms that they travel with larger groups, make multiple visits to the host destination, and come from household demographics that are “extremely attractive” to local economies.

The Rise of the “Runcation” — and What It Means for Business

Tripadvisor‘s 2026 Trendcast identified “sweat jetting,” trips built entirely around athletic experiences, as one of tourism’s fastest-growing categories. Accor reported a 50% surge in searches for “workout holidays” over the past year. National Geographic called runcations “part sport, part pilgrimage”.

This isn’t a fad. It’s a structural shift in how an affluent, health-conscious, experience-driven demographic allocates its leisure dollars.

Strava‘s 2024 Year in Sport report revealed a 59% global increase in running club participation, with clubs on the platform now exceeding one million. Those clubs are organizing group travel, bloc-booking race entries, and turning individual fitness into collective tourism. The social infrastructure of endurance sports has become a distribution channel.

The Expedia Group‘s research puts hard numbers behind the trend: the average sports traveler spends more than $1,500 per trip, and 44% of sports fans travel internationally for events, rising to 56% among travelers ages 16–34. Notably, three in five sports travelers stay outside the host city, multiplying economic benefits across entire regions.

What does a typical endurance athlete spend when they travel? The CNN profile is well-constructed: entry fees alone can range from a few hundred dollars for a local marathon to nearly $1,000 for premium IRONMAN events. Ultramarathons like the MARATHON DES SABLES carry entry fees of $4,500–$5,000, before flights, gear, or accommodation. For athletes pursuing an IRONMAN in a destination market, all-in trip costs commonly exceed $3,000–$4,000 per person.

The IRONMAN Effect: A Case Study in Destination Value

No brand in endurance sports has better illustrated the economic multiplier of destination racing than IRONMAN. Founded in Hawaii and grown under multiple private equity owners, from Providence Equity Partners to Dalian Wanda Group ($650 million, 2015) to Advance ($730 million, 2020), IRONMAN today operates over 200 events in 27 countries, with more than one million registered athletes.

The community-level impact is repeatable and measurable. Ottawa’s first full IRONMAN in 2025 brought over 10,000 attendees and generated more than $8 million in tourism dollars from a single weekend. The Tri-Cities (Washington) IRONMAN 70.3 delivered approximately $7 million in economic impact, and is expected to grow in its second year. Research conducted on the Boulder IRONMAN found that participants consistently travel with larger groups, stay longer, and spend more than attendees of virtually any other athletic event.

The rural impact may be even more striking. The Leadville 100 trail race series, built around a dying Colorado mining town, now generates an estimated $15 million annually for the local economy. Race weekends transform small communities overnight, filling hotels, coffee shops, gear stores, and local restaurants with high-income travelers who came specifically to suffer and spend.

The Business Model of Destination Events: What Smart Organizers Know

The endurance event industry is evolving from single-race operations into year-round revenue businesses. The most sophisticated operators now understand that race day is just one touchpoint in a much longer customer relationship.

Multiple revenue streams are maturing:

• Registration fees continue to climb, with premium events commanding $400–$1,000 per entry

• Sponsorship and title partnerships (Bank of America/Chicago, TCS/NYC) now anchor the category as legitimate brand platforms

• Race travel packages through companies like Marathon Tours & Travel and Destination Sport Experiences bundle hotel, guaranteed entry, and logistics for international athletes

• Merchandise and finisher gear drives significant ancillary revenue, particularly for branded events like IRONMAN and Abbott World Marathon Majors

• Digital and community platforms: training apps, coaching subscriptions, and event data are emerging as high-margin extensions

The shift to year-round brand thinking is measurable. U.S. per-race participation grew roughly 8% in 2024, and the calendar has become crowded. As the market matures, brand loyalty and community differentiation will separate the events athletes return to year after year from those they visit once and forget. Social media has accelerated this dynamic: demand models show that Instagram followership has a statistically significant positive effect on marathon participant numbers; a direct link between digital community-building and race-day revenue.

The DMO Opportunity: Endurance Events as Strategic Tourism Infrastructure

For destination marketing organizations, endurance sports events represent a category that solves their hardest problem: filling off-peak periods with high-spending, pre-committed visitors.

Event attendees are pre-committed to attending in a way leisure travelers simply are not; they’ve registered months in advance, made hotel reservations, and brought family and friends. The Sports ETA data confirms that sports event travelers generate proportionally higher lodging revenue, with the lodging sector accounting for 21% of all sports-related travel spending and serving as a primary funding source for most DMOs’ marketing budgets.

Smart DMOs are making the strategic pivot explicitly. Research shows that events drive year-round demand, generate higher per-visitor spending, create long-term halo effects for destination branding, and attract international visitors who tend to stay longer and spend more. The 2024 Chicago Marathon’s 22% economic growth was directly attributed to increased international participation, a powerful argument for DMOs in mid-size markets looking to compete for the global sports traveler.

The formula is proven:

Identify authentic geographic assets (a scenic waterway, mountain terrain, iconic urban course) → recruit an established endurance brand → invest in logistics and hospitality infrastructure → market the destination as a race experience, not just an event.

Cities like Ottawa, Tri-Cities, and Boulder have all demonstrated the model at different scales.

The Participant Has Changed: Demographics, Demand & the New Athlete-Traveler

The modern endurance sports traveler is not the same as the one the industry marketed to 20 years ago. The participant base has broadened dramatically in both age and economic profile.

IRONMAN data shows a 39% increase since 2019 in first-time athletes under 30 entering IRONMAN-branded events. The millennial cohort is now the primary driver of sports tourism growth. Hilton’s 2025 Trends Report found that 67% of millennials organize trips centered on their interests, including sports and wellness. U.S. millennials are reportedly 80% more likely to schedule vacations around tennis and 87% more likely to do so around pickleball, illustrating how the “active vacation” mindset extends well beyond running.

The community dimension of endurance sports travel is commercially important. Expedia’s research found that most sports travelers attend events with friends (35%), partners (34%), or family (33%), meaning the per-trip economic multiplier extends well beyond the athlete. An IRONMAN with 2,500 registered athletes may bring 7,500–10,000 people to a destination when support crews and family are counted. Ottawa’s experience confirmed this: 2,500 competitors created 10,000 total attendees.

This is the metric DMOs, hotels, and local businesses should be tracking, not just athlete registrations, but the travel party multiplier that turns a race into a destination event.

What This Means for the Industry

The business of endurance sports travel isn’t a niche anymore. It’s a convergence of the wellness economy, the experience economy, and the destination marketing industry, and the financial case is now airtight.

For event organizers, the opportunity is to evolve from single-event transactional businesses into year-round engagement platforms that own the athlete relationship from the first race to the fiftieth. The winners will build loyalty, own their data, and create destination experiences that participants return to annually.

For host cities and DMOs, the opportunity is to treat endurance events as strategic economic infrastructure, not entertainment, but a tourism pipeline. A well-executed IRONMAN or marathon series is a more reliable economic generator than a one-time stadium event, and it builds the kind of international brand awareness that compounds over the years.

For sponsors and brands, the endurance sports traveler represents a high-income, brand-loyal, health-conscious consumer who has demonstrated willingness to spend across every category: gear, nutrition, travel, hospitality, and recovery. The Bank of America Chicago Marathon partnership and TCS New York City Marathon are templates for how legacy brands can own a moment in culture while delivering measurable ROI.

The “runcation” is real. The athlete-tourist has arrived. And the business case for building around them, whether you’re a race director, a CVB, a hotel group, or a sponsor brand, has never been stronger.

THE NUMBERS THAT CHANGE THE CONVERSATION

Let’s start with the data that should be stopping people in boardrooms.

For the 130th running of the Boston Marathon on April 20, the Boston Athletic Association (B.A.A.) received 33,267 qualifier applications for a field of 30,000 spots, drawn from 116 countries and all 50 U.S. states. The cutoff ran 4 minutes and 34 seconds faster than the qualifying standard. That is not a waitlist problem. That is a structural undersupply problem, and it is getting more acute every year.

Now look at London. The 2026 TCS London Marathon Events received 1,133,813 ballot applications, a 36% increase over the previous world record of 840,318. That is a 37-to-1 demand-to-supply ratio. To put that in context: if you applied to every major-league sports franchise in America for a single ticket, your odds would be dramatically better. There is no “product” in professional sports, spectator or otherwise, that is this undersupplied.

The economic proof is now official. The first-ever formal economic impact study of the Boston Marathon, conducted by UMass Donahue Institute, put the 2024 race at $509.1 million in total economic impact. That number breaks down to approximately $209 million from B.A.A. operations and $300 million from runners and spectators, 51% of whom came from outside New England, with a median weekend spend of $500 per participant and 68% staying in Boston-area hotels.

Zoom out, and the trend lines are even more compelling. Gen Z marathon finishers (age 20–29) grew from 16.4% to 24.5% of all finishers between 2021 and 2024. The global endurance sports market is projected to reach $285.6 billion by 2032. This is not a niche recovering from COVID. This is a structural demand shift.

THE PARTICIPANT IS THE PRODUCT

I spent two decades on the operational side of mass-participation events, as CMO at Competitor Group, where we produced 28 Rock ‘n’ Roll Series marathons and half marathons annually, and before that at Rodale (Runner’s World, Bicycling, Nen’s Health, Women’s Health, Backpacker, Prevention, and Best Life). One thing I understood early was that conventional sports finance still mismodels: in endurance events, the participant is simultaneously the ticket buyer, the sponsor audience, the media subject, and the merchandise customer.

Spectator sports have one revenue model: sell eyeballs to advertisers and seats to fans. The “product” is the athlete performing. The sponsor buys access to the viewer.

Endurance events flip this entirely. The runner IS the viewer. They are paying a registration fee to be the content. They are buying the gear, nutrition, travel, and hotel. They are generating the social content. The brand has direct, unmediated access to its target customer, not through a camera, but through a mile-18 aid station.

I watched brands misunderstand this for years. A logo on a finish line arch is the worst possible execution for a marathon sponsorship, and it’s still the most common. The runner doesn’t see the arch. They are staring at the pavement, the clock, and their watch. The brand opportunity is at mile 18, at the bag check, in the week of community programming before the gun goes off. That insight took most sponsors a decade to absorb.

Which brings us back to the $509 million. That entire impact flows into Boston’s hotels, restaurants, transportation network, and retail economy. Almost none of it flows back into the race infrastructure. The B.A.A. does not own the roads, the parks, or the finish line on Boylston Street. It borrows all of it. The event that generates half a billion dollars in regional economic activity has essentially zero durable asset base to show for it. That structural gap is exactly what I argued in my TriHabitat Endurance Sports Park piece, and it is where the investment thesis lives.

THE RUN CLUB IS THE NEW STADIUM

Here is the behavioral shift that I think investors and brand strategists are still underweighting.

Run clubs nearly quadrupled in 2025, according to Strava data. Strava run club membership was up 59% in 2024. Seventy-two percent of Gen Z participants attend run clubs primarily to meet people. 22% describe run clubs as “the new dating app.”

That last data point sounds like a cultural footnote. It is actually a capital allocation signal. What it tells you is that endurance sport has become the primary IRL community infrastructure for a generation that grew up digitally native and is now actively seeking in-person connection. The run club is not supplementing community; it is replacing the bar, the church, the gym class, and the neighborhood block party.

Brands that understand this are not buying banner space. They are buying presence inside the community itself.

Look at what Clif Bar is doing around Boston 2026. Multi-year presenting partnership with the B.A.A. Pop-up activation — “The CLIF Bar” — at Rosebar Boston throughout race week. National “Raise Your Bar” challenge on Strava running from March 21 through April 21. That is not a sponsorship. That is a full-ecosystem community play: race-week presence, digital integration, and a brand narrative that lives inside the training journey, not just at the finish line.

At the LA Marathon in March, adidas, ASICS, and Zappos activated with shakeout runs, product launches, and experiential programming, all before the starting gun. The event itself almost becomes secondary to the week of community touchpoints leading up to it.

The idea I keep coming back to from the Athletech News analysis of LA: stores are becoming starting lines. Brands are not sponsoring events. They are joining communities. This is a fundamentally different media buy. The user-generated content is created by the participants themselves: Instagram reels, Strava segments, and finish-line photos shared to personal networks. The content loop is organic, the reach is authentic, and no media budget produced it. Try modeling that in a traditional sponsorship deck.

THE GAP THAT REPRESENTS THE OPPORTUNITY

London’s 1.1 million applicants cannot be served by one race. Or by two. The math on that 37-to-1 demand ratio implies that genuine demand exists for 37 Boston-sized events in the London market alone, assuming you could build them.

You cannot. Not on borrowed public infrastructure.

This is the structural reality that my “Great Reset” piece identified at the participation-event level and that the Endurance Sports Park thesis takes to its logical conclusion: the event-production model is running on infrastructure that was never designed for it. Roads built for commuters. Parks permitted for recreation. Waterfronts managed by municipal authorities who are increasingly uncomfortable with the liability, the disruption, and the logistical burden of hosting 30,000 athletes.

Permitting windows are shrinking. Municipal friction is increasing. And demand, as the London ballot just documented, is at an all-time high and continues to accelerate.

The $509 million that flows through Boston every April tells us the economics work. It tells us the demand is real, durable, and demographically improving. What it does not do is generate the purpose-built infrastructure that could serve the 37x latent demand that currently has nowhere to go. That is the purpose-built endurance infrastructure thesis, the one I am building toward with Trihabitat, and it remains, for now, almost entirely unaddressed by institutional capital.

Here is what makes this early: the institutional capital that has been chasing sports franchise multiples, $13 billion for the Cowboys, $10 billion for the Lakers, has not yet found its way into the infrastructure layer beneath these events. The franchise market is crowded, expensive, and, as I argued in “The Emperor’s New Franchise,” structurally misfit for traditional PE logic. The participation event infrastructure market, by contrast, has proven unit economics, a demographic tailwind, a demand surplus that is widening annually, and almost no purpose-built supply. That combination does not stay undiscovered forever.

WHAT BOSTON WEEK TELLS INVESTORS TO WATCH

If you are paying attention to endurance sport as an investment category, the next seven days are a real-time seminar. Here is what I am watching.

1. The brand activation patterns, not the banners, but the community presence. Which brands show up in the run clubs, the shakeout runs, the pre-race programming? Those are the brands that have understood the new playbook. The ones still buying finish-line arch placements have not.

2. The qualifier math. Boston’s qualifying standard tightens incrementally as the applicant pool grows. As that happens, the run club ecosystem becomes the primary training infrastructure feeding the next wave of qualifiers. That is not incidental; it means the brands, coaches, platforms, and community spaces that anchor run clubs are sitting at the top of the qualification funnel. That is a structural position with durable commercial value.

3. Collegiate running. The same Gen Z surge driving marathon growth, from 16.4% to 24.5% of all finishers over three years, is creating a new institutional customer for endurance infrastructure. These are not recreational joggers. They are competitive, data-driven, and take training seriously. The collegiate pipeline is producing the next decade of Boston qualifiers, and the infrastructure they train on is largely inadequate.

The $285.6 billion market projection is not linear, nor is it a matter of demographic luck. It is being driven by the convergence of three tailwinds:

1. Gen Z’s IRL community turn.

2. The cultural legitimacy of endurance sport as identity (not just a hobby).

3. A supply deficit that has no near-term resolution through conventional infrastructure channels.

Those three forces compound. The market does not grow; it accelerates.

The marathon is not a content product. It is a participation product. That distinction matters enormously for how you model the investment thesis. A content product lives or dies on distribution, rights fees, and viewership. A participation product lives or dies on whether you can build enough capacity to serve the people who are already trying to buy it.

Boston has been doing this for 130 years. The demand has never been higher. The supply has not moved.

The question I keep coming back to:

When the $509 million impact study out of Boston becomes the proof-of-concept that institutional capital was waiting for, and it might already be that, will sports investors still be bidding up franchise multiples at 20x revenue, or will they finally start looking at the infrastructure layer that is generating that half-billion in impact without owning a single durable asset?

THE HEADLINE VS. THE REALITY

On April 3, 2026, hours before the women’s Final Four tipped off, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Urgent National Action to Save College Sports.” The timing was either brilliant symbolism or pure coincidence. Either way, the substance deserves a harder look than the cheerleading it received.

Here is what the order actually does :

• Threatens federal funding for universities that violate NCAA rules, framing athletics noncompliance as potential grounds for suspension or debarment from federal grants and contracts

• Establishes a 5-year eligibility window, standardizing the clock for all athletes

• Restricts transfers to one free move during the 5-year window, with a second transfer possible only after earning a four-year degree (and triggering an automatic redshirt)

• Bans professional athletes from returning to college competition

• Defines “fraudulent NIL schemes” — pay above fair market value through collectives, and directs the FTC to enforce against violators

• Requires data collection on roster spots by team and spending by gender

• Directs the Attorney General to invalidate state laws conflicting with NCAA rules on Commerce Clause and Contracts Clause grounds

• Mandates that revenue-sharing preserve or expand women’s and Olympic sports opportunities

The NCAA’s Charlie Baker called it a reinforcement of “many of our mandatory protections.” USOPC CEO Sarah Hirshland said it “sends an important signal.” The Power 4 commissioners lined up to praise it and urge Congress to pass the SCORE Act.

When the same system that created the problem is delighted with the proposed solution, pause before celebrating.

THE STRUCTURAL PROBLEM THE EO CAN’T FIX

I want to be precise here, because the EO’s limitations are not about politics; they are about math.

The House v. NCAA settlement, approved by Judge Claudia Wilken on June 6, 2025, is a court-authorized consent decree. It established:

• $2.8 billion in back damages paid over 10 years to athletes from 2016–2025

• A revenue-sharing cap of $20.5 million per school per year, rising to $32.9 million by 2034–35

• A revenue allocation formula: 75% to football, 15% to men’s basketball, 5% to women’s basketball, 5% to all other sports combined

• New roster limits by sport, replacing scholarship caps

That last line, the allocation formula, is where the structural crisis lives. The EO directs that revenue-sharing must “preserve or expand” women’s and Olympic sports. But the settlement’s math, which the EO cannot override without protracted litigation, dedicates 90% of every shared revenue dollar to two sports. The remaining 5% covering every swimming, wrestling, gymnastics, track, rowing, and field hockey program in America is not a rounding error. It is a policy statement.

Schools are already acting on that statement. Since the settlement was approved :

• Washington State dissolved its track and field “field events” program — a program that produced four Olympians

• Grand Canyon University cut men’s volleyball after a Final Four appearance

• Cal Poly gutted its swimming roster

• More than 32 Division I Olympic sports programs have been cut or consolidated

Meanwhile, at least two major programs carry $535 million and $437 million in athletics-related debt, respectively. The underlying economics always favor concentrating resources in football and basketball. No executive order rewrites that gravity.

Trump himself acknowledged at the March roundtable what would follow: “We will get sued. That’s the only thing I know for sure.” Attorney Mit Winter and others have been clear that the conflict between court-approved settlements and executive directives will prompt immediate legal challenges. The August 1 effective date forces the NCAA to draft new rules within a litigation timeline, making compliance a moving target.

WHAT THE EO GETS RIGHT

Acknowledging the problem at the presidential level matters. College sports restructuring has been treated as a sports business story. The EO correctly frames it as a national infrastructure issue, touching on defense research contractors, medical institutions, and a pipeline that has historically produced 75% of U.S. Olympians. That framing shifts the conversation.

Federal funding leverage is the only enforcement mechanism with real teeth. The NCAA has spent two decades discovering that it cannot enforce its own rules without being sued. The threat of suspension or debarment from federal grants and contracts, which flow to the same universities that operate these athletic programs, is the first credible lever anyone has proposed.

Data transparency is underrated. The requirement that the Education Department collect and publish roster spots by team and spending by gender creates a public record that doesn’t currently exist in a standardized form. You cannot fix what you cannot measure.

Naming “fraudulent NIL schemes” directly, collectives paying above fair market value as a workaround to roster competition, identifies a practice that everyone in college athletics knows is happening and that has been treated as either a legal gray area or simply unenforceable. Directing FTC enforcement gives it actual consequence.

These are real provisions. They deserve credit.

WHAT IT MISSES

Here is the operator’s perspective, after years working inside Olympic and endurance sports infrastructure, from my time as CCO at USA Cycling, where I watched the collegiate pipeline produce national team athletes every season, to my current work advising organizations navigating this transition.

No student-athletes were at the March roundtable. The White House convened commissioners, university regents, administrators, and legislators to design a system for student-athletes without a single student-athlete in the room. Building for a constituency without that constituency at the table is not a governance model; it is a tradition of the very system the EO claims to reform.

The August 1 deadline is a trap. The NCAA must write rules that are immediately compliant with both the EO’s directives and the House settlement, a court-approved agreement the executive branch cannot unilaterally override. Attorney Mit Winter’s assessment that this creates irreconcilable conflicts is not a fringe legal opinion. It is the obvious reading of the situation. Rules written under that pressure will be challenged before the ink dries. Schools cannot plan against rules in perpetual litigation.

State preemption is unresolved. The EO directs the Attorney General to invalidate state laws conflicting with NCAA rules. Several states have passed laws granting athletes rights that exceed those permitted by the NCAA, and those states will challenge federal preemption. The legal calendar for this conflict is measured in years, not months.

The pipeline problem is already past the intervention point assumed by the EO. In February, I wrote that the 2028 LA Olympics will be the last full harvest from the old system. The developmental bench, the 40- to 50-athlete swimming and track rosters that produced future Olympians in slots 25 through 45, is already gone. International athletes, who now represent more than 25% of Division I rosters in many non-revenue sports, will increasingly fill the reduced spots under new roster caps. The EO’s protections are prospective. The damage is already occurring.

The 75% of U.S. Olympians who came through the NCAA system did not get there because of their programs’ football revenue. They got there because of developmental depth; large rosters, multiple years of competition, and the kind of institutional investment in coaching and infrastructure that the settlement’s allocation formula is now systematically eliminating. This EO does not change that timeline.

WHAT WOULD ACTUALLY FIX THIS

The structural problems are structural. They require structural responses.

A Federal Office of Sport. The USOPC’s Passing the Torch Commission has recommended this, and it is long overdue. The U.S. is the only major Olympic nation without a cabinet-level or near-cabinet-level body to coordinate sports policy. The EO gestures at federal coordination but does not create the institutional infrastructure to sustain it. An office with actual authority, not a working group of the same commissioners who praised the current arrangement, would be a start.

Title IV conditioning tied to Olympic and women’s sports roster minimums. The EO uses federal funding as a threat. The better design is to use it as architecture. Tie federal student aid, not just grants and contracts, but the $4 billion in scholarship value the EO itself cites, to maintaining verified roster minimums in Olympic and women’s sports. Make the floor explicit, not implied.

A Varsity-Lite model for non-revenue sports. Not every non-revenue sport needs the full infrastructure of a Division I program. A parallel competition tier, lower scholarship minimums, regional competition structures, and lower travel costs keeps athletes competing and developing without forcing schools to choose between financial sustainability and cutting programs entirely. The alternative, which is already happening, is no competition at all.

A revenue-sharing floor for non-revenue sports, not just a football cap. The House settlement caps football at 105 roster spots. What it does not do is mandate a floor below which non-revenue sports cannot be cut. A negotiated minimum, perhaps tied to Title IX compliance benchmarks, would create the structural protection the EO calls for but does not actually establish.

#AddMoreAthletes. The most direct intervention available is to expand roster limits rather than contract them. The settlement reduced rosters to manage costs. An alternative framework, one that accepts slightly higher costs per program in exchange for substantially more competitive opportunities, would preserve the developmental pipeline without requiring a complete restructuring of the settlement. This is a more targeted fix than it might appear.

THE CLOSING QUESTION

The executive order will generate litigation, force the NCAA to write rules under impossible timelines, and give university administrators cover to say they are waiting for legal clarity before making any additional cuts. That is not saving college sports. That is managing the optics of its restructuring.

I have spent my career working with organizations trying to build sustainable sports ecosystems, from mass-participation endurance events to national governing bodies. The consistent mistake is designing from the top of the funnel down. The commissioners, the revenue numbers, the television contracts. The assumption that if you get the big economics right, the infrastructure underneath will follow.

It doesn’t work that way. The swimmer at the end of the developmental roster becomes the Olympian. The wrestler in the program that just got cut doesn’t get a second chance at that development window. The rower whose scholarship was eliminated doesn’t find an alternative path to elite competition because club sports cost $10,000 to $30,000 a year.

The real question isn’t whether the President should be involved in college sports. It’s whether anyone at the table is building a system that works for the swimmer, the wrestler, the rower, or just the quarterback.

Global women’s elite sports revenue nearly doubled to about 1.9 billion dollars in 2024 and is on track to surpass 2.35 billion dollars in 2025, growing four to five times faster than men’s sports. The WNBA just landed an 11‑year, 2.2‑billion‑dollar media deal, and women’s college basketball has delivered the most‑watched basketball games in the country, men or women.

And yet, women’s sports still account for only an estimated 2–4% of global sports revenue and an even smaller share of media rights value.

That’s not a “natural ceiling.” That’s a design flaw.

The commercial flywheel is spinning: sponsorship in women’s sports is growing faster than in men’s, and the audience is younger, more diverse, and more values‑driven than almost any other segment in sports. But if we don’t fix the foundations, the science, the youth pipeline, and the collegiate floor, this boom will hit the same structural limits that held women’s sports back for decades.

This isn’t just a gender issue. It’s a governance and investment issue.

We Built the System Without the Right Science

Before you even get to access or media rights, start with this: only about 6% of sports science research has been conducted exclusively on women.

For decades, most of the training models, injury protocols, and performance assumptions used across sport were built on male bodies and then lightly adjusted for women. Female athletes were portrayed as “smaller versions of men” in the data.

The new Women’s Health, Sports & Performance Institute (WHSP) in Boston is one of the first serious attempts to close that gap. Backed by a major philanthropic commitment and tied into the 220‑million‑dollar Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, WHSP co‑locates clinical care, imaging, nutrition, mental health, and research specifically for female athletes.

Its mandate is simple: generate the data on women’s bodies that should have existed all along. Clara Wu Tsai’s line about the facility, “we basically need more WHSPs,” is the thesis.

If we are serious about elevating women’s sport, funding female‑specific sports science is not optional. It’s step one.

The Youth Pipeline Is Still Leaking

At the same time, girls are still falling out of sport at rates that would trigger crisis meetings if this were an elite pro league.

UNESCO reports that nearly half of girls worldwide drop out of sport during adolescence, at a rate far higher than boys. In many markets, girls’ participation lags despite interest; in the U.S., Aspen Institute Sports & Society Project Play shows structural barriers unrelated to talent or desire: fewer teams, higher costs, less free play, and fewer women on the sidelines.

Key pressure points:

• Cost: Youth sports have become a pay‑to‑play industry, with families spending thousands per year on club fees, travel, and equipment, pricing out low‑ and middle‑income girls.

• Role models: Girls are more likely than boys to say there aren’t enough role models in sport, and many say they would stay involved if they saw more women they could identify with.

• Coaching gap: Only about a quarter of youth coaches are women, and women coaches are underpaid relative to men, which reinforces the cycle.

• Burnout and overspecialization: Girls are pushed into year‑round, single‑sport pathways earlier, with less unstructured play and more overuse injuries; a perfect recipe for dropout.

On the ground, girls still practice at off‑hours, get the leftover fields and gyms, and too often get the message, implicitly and explicitly, that their sport is secondary.

You cannot build a billion‑dollar women’s sports economy on a participation base that is structurally leaking at 12, 13, 14 years old.

The Collegiate Floor Is Not Holding

Everyone likes to point to Title IX as a solved story. The growth in participation is real: since 1972, girls’ and women’s opportunities in school sports have exploded.

But the latest numbers tell a different story about where we actually are.

An updated analysis of long‑running NCAA gender equity data shows:

• Women now represent roughly 55% of undergraduates but only about 43% of varsity athletes.

• That participation share gap has been basically flat for a decade.

• The average number of women’s teams per school has barely moved in 25+ years.

In other words: record totals, stagnant proportional equity.

Now layer in the House v. NCAA settlement and the looming revenue-sharing. The new money is flowing primarily to football and men’s basketball. Athletic departments are already signaling cuts, and early lawsuits have been filed alleging that women’s opportunities will be sacrificed in the process.

If women’s programs at the college level are weakened just as the pro side is finally scaling, you get a perfect mismatch: a booming top of the pyramid sitting on a brittle middle.

What It Will Take to Actually Elevate Girls’ and Women’s Sport

If you believe women’s sports are the most undervalued asset class in global sport, and the numbers say they are, then fixing this is not philanthropy. It’s value creation.

Five levers matter most:

1. Fund the science, at scale.

2. Guarantee equitable access at the youth level.

3. Defend and expand the collegiate floor.

4. Invest in women coaches and local role models.

5. Rebalance play vs. performance for girls.

The Arbitrage Is in the Girl Who Hasn’t Played Yet

Women’s sports fans are younger, more diverse, and more values‑driven than the traditional sports audience. Ninety‑plus percent of women in the C‑suite played sports; the leadership skills they cite, teamwork, resilience, and handling pressure, are exactly what every company says it wants.

The most powerful untapped asset in global sport is not a league or a media deal. It’s the girl who has the interest and the potential, but no team, no coach, no field time, no research‑backed support system designed for her.

If you’re serious about transformation, not slogans, this is where you prove it:

• With budgets, not just branding.

• With facilities and fellowships, not just hashtags.

• With research labs and roster spots, not just press releases.

The game at the top is already changing.

Now it’s on all of us: federations, schools, clubs, investors, brands, and media to change the game for girls.

The Participant Is the Market

For decades, the dominant logic of sports investment has pointed in one direction: find the spectators, capture their attention, monetize their eyeballs. Stadiums, media rights, franchise equity, the entire financial architecture of professional sports is built on the premise that value lives in the stands and on the screen. Private equity firms are now deploying tens of billions of dollars into that paradigm, with Apollo Global Management alone planning to deploy approximately $6 billion through its newly formed Apollo Sports Capital unit and estimating a $2.5 trillion financing gap across sports.

But there is a parallel economy, quieter, faster-growing, and largely overlooked by institutional capital, where the participant is the revenue source, the sponsor audience, the media subject, and the community anchor all at once. That economy is mass-participation endurance sports. And the purpose-built infrastructure designed to serve it may be the most compelling under-the-radar investment opportunity in all of sport.

A Market Running at Full Speed — Across Every Discipline

Endurance and mass-participation sports are not a single market. They are an ecosystem of overlapping disciplines, each with its own participant base, event calendar, governing body, gear economy, and infrastructure demands, and each growing simultaneously.

Running is the foundation. The 2024 Running USA Top Races Report celebrated what a “historic year” it was, with participation levels at or surpassing 2019 across all distances, with ten races drawing more than 25,000 finishers and the 25 largest events spread across 15 different states. Gen Z is driving the surge: the percentage of marathon finishers aged 20 to 29 rose from 16.4% to 24.5% between 2021 and 2024; in the half marathon, that figure climbed from 17.1% to 26.2% over the same period. The RaceTrends Report from RunSignup confirmed that average race participation grew by 8.2% in 2024, with race churn at its lowest rate since tracking began in 2018. Running is no longer recovering from the pandemic. It is thriving.

Cycling has crossed a threshold no one anticipated. A record 112 million Americans, 35% of the entire population aged three and older, rode a bicycle at least once in 2024, the highest participation rate since PeopleForBikes began tracking the metric in 2014. Youth ridership surged from 49% to 56% in the same measurement period, reversing a years-long decline. Competitive and gran fondo cycling events continue to grow their participant bases, with USA Cycling‘s national series and the UCI Gran Fondo World Championships drawing athletes aged 19 to 87 from dozens of qualifying events throughout the year.

Triathlon is the sport in which all three disciplines converge, and its trajectory is among the strongest in sport. The global triathlon market was valued at $8.7 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $16.1 billion by 2033 at a compound annual growth rate of 8.5%. USA Triathlon counts more than 302,000 active members, with annual multisport spending per member rising 12% in 2023. Gen Z triathlon participation grew 33% year over year, average registration revenue climbed 36%, and athletes are registering earlier, giving event organizers stronger forward revenue visibility than at any point in the sport’s history.

Obstacle Course Racing has evolved from novelty into a category with institutional scale. Spartan, the global leader in OCR, recorded 1.45 million finishers across 658 races in 25 countries in 2025 alone, across its Spartan, Tough Mudder, Spartan Trail, and DEKA brands. The global OCR market was valued at $2.1 billion in 2024 and is forecast to reach $4.7 billion by 2033, growing at a 9.2% CAGR. OCR’s inclusion in the 2028 Olympic Games within the modern pentathlon will drive additional credibility and media attention to the category.

Open-water swimming continues its quiet but sustained expansion. Once the province of elite long-course specialists and IRONMAN triathletes, the sport has broadened dramatically through masters competitors, age-group triathletes, and standalone event formats. USA Swimming‘s 376,320 registered members represent only competitive club programs; the open-water recreational participant base, fueled by triathlon growth, wellness trends, and post-pandemic demand for outdoor activity, is orders of magnitude larger. The sport is expanding geographically, with new events and governing body investment in standalone open-water formats that draw participants who never intend to compete in a triathlon.

In aggregate, this is not a niche. The global sports market reached approximately $515 billion in 2024, with the participatory sports segment, the largest, accounting for 63%, or roughly $324 billion, of the total market value. The outdoor recreation participation rate in the United States reached 51.9% in 2023, its highest level on record, with 7.7 million Americans trying an outdoor recreation activity for the first time that year. The endurance sports participant, runner, cyclist, triathlete, OCR finisher, and open-water swimmer is not a marginal consumer. They are the mainstream.

The Fundamental Problem: The Street Can No Longer Host the Race

Producing a triathlon, gran fondo, open-water swim, OCR, or road race in 2026 requires threading a needle that grows narrower every year. Organizers must secure bodies of water, long stretches of traffic-free roads, natural terrain for obstacles, and run courses free of vehicles, all of which are increasingly difficult to find as urban and suburban sprawl consumes previously viable locations. Municipal permitting has become a protracted, expensive, and politically sensitive undertaking. Local residents resist race-day disruptions. Law enforcement resources are strained. The cost of venue rental, traffic control, permitting, temporary infrastructure, and equipment logistics compounds annually.

The result is an industry in which demand is growing across every discipline, while supply is contracting. Event organizers face compressed margins. Participants endure degraded experiences on courses designed for cars rather than athletes. Governing bodies struggle to find facilities that meet national championship standards. OCR operators need natural terrain, elevation changes, and water features that simply do not exist in most urban markets. Open-water swim events require access to lakes or oceans, which is increasingly contested by recreational and residential development and environmental restrictions. The race calendar itself is under structural pressure, and every cancelled or degraded event is a lost revenue cycle, a lost participant, and a lost community touchpoint.

The Purpose-Built Solution: From Borrowed Space to Owned Venue

The vision for purpose-built endurance sports parks directly addresses this structural failure. Rather than borrowing public infrastructure never designed for athletic events, the model inverts the logic entirely: build a private, permanent venue designed from the ground up for the specific demands of multi-discipline endurance sport.

That means a custom-engineered lake for open-water swimming and triathlon transitions. A closed-loop cycling circuit that works for gran fondo training, criterium racing, and triathlon bike legs without road closures. Marked trail and run course systems calibrated to race distances. Natural terrain features: hills, berms, water crossings, and walls that serve OCR programming. Permanent aid stations, athlete facilities, spectator infrastructure, and medical staging that bring fans inside the experience rather than corralling them on a sidewalk.

A dedicated venue eliminates permitting costs, reduces law enforcement requirements, and removes the risk of cancellation due to road access issues. Lighted courses enable nighttime events, dramatically expanding the programming calendar. Permanent safety infrastructure: lifeguard stands, course marshals, and medical stations reduce liability and improve outcomes. Production costs per event drop significantly when the facility itself is the asset rather than an assembly of rented equipment, borrowed roads, and temporary structures. And critically, the facility can host events across every endurance discipline from a single footprint: running races, cycling events, triathlons, open-water swims, OCR, duathlons, and aquabike with minimal incremental setup cost per event.

Global Proof Points: The Model Already Works

The purpose-built endurance and multi-sport park is not a speculative concept. Four facilities on three continents, at vastly different scales, funding structures, and market contexts, have each proven a critical dimension of the thesis. Together they form a global proof-of-concept portfolio that should silence skepticism about whether dedicated endurance infrastructure can generate sustained community engagement, institutional partnerships, and durable operating revenue.

Craftsbury Outdoor Center — Craftsbury Common, Vermont (Est. 1976)

The oldest and most instructive example sits on the shores of Big Hosmer Pond in northern Vermont. Founded in 1976 and built entirely around water, trails, and athletic programming, the Craftsbury Outdoor Center has spent nearly five decades proving that a single, carefully stewarded piece of land organized around endurance sport can generate year-round revenue, develop athletes from youth to Olympic level, and serve a multigenerational community without public subsidy. Its programming stack: sculling camps, running camps, Nordic skiing, biathlon, and community rowing for ages 12 to 85, is not assembled from borrowed venues or municipal permits. It is delivered from the infrastructure the facility owns outright.

What Craftsbury proves above all is durability. Its trail network spans over 85 kilometers of groomed terrain and 40 kilometers of single-track running trails. Its elite development program has produced athletes competing at the Olympic level in Nordic skiing, biathlon, rowing, and running. Its sculling camps, staffed by world-class coaches offering video analysis, rigging, and progressive skill development, produce deeply loyal, returning participants who function as a recurring revenue flywheel. Craftsbury has never needed a major event on public roads to validate its existence. The facility is the event — and has been for fifty years.

Lee Valley VeloPark — London, United Kingdom (Est. 2011)

Built for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the Lee Valley VeloPark is definitive proof of what happens when Olympic-grade cycling infrastructure is handed over to the community after the Games end. In the decade following London 2012, over 750,000 people have cycled at the VeloPark, contributing to more than 13 million total visits across Lee Valley’s three Olympic legacy venues. The facility, hosting a 250-meter indoor velodrome and a UCI-standard outdoor BMX and road circuit, devotes approximately 90% of its programming to community use: school groups, club riders, beginner adult cyclists, over-40s sessions, female track cycling programs, and toddlers on balance bikes.

That balance, Olympic infrastructure, and community soul is the precise mandate the endurance park model requires. The VeloPark generates revenue from elite competition and televised events while simultaneously serving as a neighborhood sports hub for East London. More than 5,000 school pupils and 11,000 club riders use the facility annually, and demand for access has consistently outpaced capacity in the decade since the Games. Lee Valley Regional Park Authority CEO shaun dawson framed the mission directly: “We’ve kept the promise of the Olympic legacy.” The lesson for endurance park investors is clear: community programming at the base is not charity. It is the occupancy engine that fills the facility calendar and sustains the operating model between marquee events.

Coronation Park Sports and Recreation Centre — Edmonton, Canada (Est. 2026)

The most recently opened facility on this list, and the one closest in concept to what a purpose-built endurance park represents, opened in January 2026 as North America’s first purpose-built indoor triathlon training facility. The Coronation Park Sports and Recreation Centre integrates a 50-meter competition pool, a 333-meter running track, and a 250-meter Category A velodrome under a single roof, co-locating all three triathlon disciplines for year-round, weather-independent training and competition. The Canadian federal government invested $1.025 million to support equipment and operations, developed through a partnership between the City of Edmonton, the Alberta Velodrome Association, and World Triathlon Series Edmonton.

The Edmonton model is significant not only for what it is, the first integrated triathlon training facility in North America, but for what it signals about where the market is headed. Communities are now commissioning facilities designed from first principles around multi-discipline endurance athletes rather than retrofitting existing single-sport venues. Critically, it is designed as a dual-use space: national team preparation by day, open to public recreation by evening and on weekends. That “high performance by day, recreation by night” philosophy is the operating template American endurance park developers should study.

Hudayriyat Island — Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Est. 2020)

At sovereign scale, and in the most resource-rich context, Hudayriyat Island represents what committed capital can build when it fully embraces the endurance sports park concept. Developed by Modon Properties across 3,000 hectares, designed for sport, lifestyle, and community, Hudayriyat is the closest existing equivalent to the purpose-built endurance park vision realized at full scale. The island features dedicated cycling tracks, calibrated running paths, mountain biking trails (15 kilometers across four difficulty levels at Trail X), open-water swimming access, beaches, splash parks, skate facilities, and BMX courses, all alongside a rapidly expanding dining and residential district.

Critically, Hudayriyat is not a passive amenity. It is an active programming venue. It hosts the World Triathlon Championship Series Abu Dhabi, one of the premier stops on the global triathlon calendar, billed by World Triathlon as “Abu Dhabi’s purpose-built home of sport, endurance and community participation.” TrainYAS at the adjacent Yas Marina Circuit opens the Formula 1 racing surface to cyclists, runners, and walkers on regular evenings, creating consistent community engagement outside of event weekends. The Gulf region’s investment in endurance infrastructure is coordinated and accelerating: Saudi Arabia’s SURJ Sports Investment has led major funding into the Professional Triathletes Organisation, Qatar has secured a five-year agreement to host the T100 World Championship Final, and sovereign wealth funds now lead 24% of global sports investments. These are not vanity plays. They are coordinated investments in tourism infrastructure, community wellness, and global positioning, each of which an American endurance park platform is equally positioned to capture.

What the Four Facilities Prove Together

These four venues span five decades, four countries, and investment scales from a Vermont non-profit to a sovereign development authority. What they share is more important than what separates them: each demonstrates that purpose-built infrastructure for endurance and multi-sport participation generates something that borrowed municipal venues never can, a permanent relationship between athletes, community, and place.

The Collegiate Triathlon Surge: A Built-In Institutional Customer

One of the most underappreciated demand drivers for purpose-built endurance infrastructure is happening on college campuses across the country, and it is accelerating. Women’s triathlon is one of the NCAA’s fastest-growing Emerging Sports for Women, with programs now spanning all three divisions across 25 states. Approximately 39 to 40 schools sponsor women’s triathlon at the varsity level, with Barton College announcing its addition in February 2026 and Kentucky State University, the third HBCU to sponsor the sport, announcing its program in March 2026. USA Triathlon has invested more than $3.5 million in grants to help NCAA member institutions launch and sustain varsity programs, and the sport is advancing toward full NCAA championship status.

The participation numbers are significant: approximately 320 to 360 collegiate women currently compete in varsity NCAA triathlon, and programs are actively growing their rosters. When full championship status is granted, a determination likely within the current approval cycle, the number of programs and athletes will grow rapidly, along with institutional demand for dedicated training venues.

The Training Trip Market: An Immediate Revenue Opportunity

Here is where the endurance park investment thesis gains a dimension that is consistently overlooked: collegiate triathlon teams are not just local event participants. Like college swim teams, which have traveled to purpose-built aquatic destinations for training camps since 1933, they are institutional travel customers who need turnkey environments for pre-season and mid-season training.

The college swimming model is instructive. The College Swimming and Diving Coaches Association (CSCAA) organizes formal winter training trips to facilities across Florida, Arizona, California, and North Carolina, where programs offer long-course competition pools, dry-land training areas, lodging, and dining as part of a single destination package. Teams arrive, train at purpose-built aquatic facilities, stay in adjacent accommodations, and leave having spent institutional budget dollars in the host community.

Collegiate triathlon programs need the exact same model, and it does not yet exist at scale in the United States. A training trip for a collegiate triathlon team requires open-water access with coaching support, closed cycling circuits for interval work, marked run courses, video analysis capability, transition practice areas, and proximity to lodging and dining. These requirements precisely describe a purpose-built endurance park. No municipal venue, no state park, and no urban racetrack built on public roads can offer this package in a single location with the reliability that a collegiate athletic program demands.

Beyond triathlon specifically, the adjacent institutional training travel market is substantial: collegiate cycling clubs, open-water swim programs, masters triathlon groups, duathlon competitors, DEKA fitness programs, and USA Triathlon’s own High Performance Training Camps. A purpose-built endurance park with on-site or adjacent lodging and dining can market directly to athletic directors, national governing body program directors, and coaches, generating multi-night institutional revenue during the shoulder weeks between consumer events.

The Golf Course Conversion: America’s Greatest Stranded Land Asset

While developers hunting for endurance park sites typically face significant land acquisition costs, there is a massive and largely overlooked inventory of shovel-ready land sitting idle across the country: former golf courses. Since 2006, more golf courses have closed than opened in the United States every single year. Approximately 1,500 golf courses have closed since 2014 alone, and more than 2,360 have shuttered since the market began its self-correction in 2006. At an average of 150 acres per course, that represents an extraordinary inventory of green, open, often water-adjacent land; much of it already equipped with parking, grading, cart paths, water features, and utilities.

Huddle Up Group, LLC, a sports tourism consultancy trusted by over 450 sports organizations nationally, identified getting golf courses off municipal books as one of the top parks and facility trends in its 2025 industry report, alongside decommissioning public pools and converting tennis courts to pickleball. The common thread in all three: communities are actively asking, “what is the highest and best use of the real estate and facilities we have?” For endurance sports, that question has a compelling answer: a purpose-built park that serves athletes, community members, event organizers, and non-sports programming simultaneously.

The conversion opportunity is already unfolding across the country:

• In Cape Coral, Florida, the city purchased a 175-acre abandoned golf course in August 2024 and commissioned environmental surveys and a community-driven master plan for recreation and programming.

• In Geauga County, Ohio, a former course became Veterans Legacy Woods, a 180-acre public park with hiking trails, native forest restoration, cold-water streams, and lodge spaces less than 40 miles from Cleveland.

• In Chester Township, Ohio, the 237-acre Orchard Hills Park was transformed from a golf course into a multi-use destination where residents hike, run, and cross-country ski, with cart paths repurposed as trails.

In each case, the infrastructure left behind by a defunct course proved purpose-made: parking lots, path networks that convert directly to cycling and run circuits, water features large enough for open-water training, and rolling terrain originally selected for its aesthetic and functional qualities.

The 42% of closed courses carrying no clear plans for future use represent a standing invitation for visionary developers to propose exactly the kind of multi-use endurance and community park that serves every stakeholder. The land is there. The community need is there. The investor framework is being assembled.

Community Validation: The Youth Sports Infrastructure Movement

The financial and civic case for community sports investment no longer requires advocates to make a speculative argument. Communities across the country are committing between $7 million and $120 million for individual youth sports facility projects, with the investment rationale grounded in documented economic returns. A single 174,000-square-foot indoor facility in Hillsborough County, Florida, was projected to generate 44,000 hotel room nights annually and $24.5 million in direct economic impact by its third year of operation. The Round Rock Sports Center in Texas generated more than $16 million in economic impact in a single year. Youth and amateur sport-specific venues have spurred more than $9 billion in direct spending since 2017.

Local park and recreation agencies across the United States generated more than $201 billion in economic activity and supported nearly 1.1 million jobs in 2021. The youth sports industry generated $52.2 billion in direct spending in 2024 and is projected to approach $77.5 billion globally by 2026. Families traveling for youth sports tournaments spend an average of $700 to $1,000 per month, much of which flows directly into the host community through hotels, restaurants, retail, and local services.

Huddle Up Group, founded by Jon Schmieder and trusted by over 450 sports organizations nationally, has built its consultancy around quantifying and acting on this dynamic. Their services include strategic planning for CVBs, DMOs, and sports commissions; facility feasibility studies; and regional venue inventories that identify infrastructure gaps. Their explicit finding: communities adopting creative, non-traditional funding mechanisms are delivering tourism-driving facilities “faster and more effectively” than those waiting for voter-approved bonds. Their Sports Tourism Index maps thousands of facilities and events nationwide, making it a natural tool for identifying where a purpose-built endurance park network has the least competition and the greatest unmet demand. The public-private partnership models that endurance parks will rely on are already well-validated across all market sizes, from Myrtle Beach to Las Vegas, with smaller markets securing over 60% of public funding for sports facilities, while major metros rely more heavily on private investment.

A Venue for Everyone: Programming Beyond the Podium

A purpose-built endurance park is not a niche sports facility. It is a public gathering place with green space, water access, parking, restrooms, food-and-beverage infrastructure, and a natural amphitheater formed by the terrain. The same footprint that hosts a triathlon on Saturday morning can host a farmers market on Sunday, a food truck festival on Friday evening, a classic car show in the fall, a summer concert series, and a holiday 5K in December. The 175.8 million Americans who participated in outdoor activities in 2023, 57.3% of the entire U.S. population, are not all endurance athletes. They are families, casual walkers, music fans, food enthusiasts, and neighbors looking for a reason to gather outdoors.

The economics of non-sports programming are not peripheral. A single arts and crafts festival in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, drawing 100,000 people to a community of 18,000, generated $13 million in local economic impact. The Cincinnati Flying Pig Marathon / Pig Works brought $22 million in economic impact to Cincinnati in a single year. Diverse programming also solves one of the most common failure modes of single-use sports facilities: seasonality and idle time. A venue that programs 52 weekends a year with races, collegiate training camps, community markets, concerts, outdoor festivals, and private gatherings compresses the payback period for fixed costs and builds the community identity that sustains the brand over the long term. Research consistently shows that sustained, diverse programming in parks reduces vandalism, lowers crime, and increases community stewardship.

The Investment Architecture: Multiple Revenue Streams on a Single Asset

The Macro Tailwind: Institutional Capital Is Turning This Direction

Private equity investment in sports infrastructure is accelerating globally. The global sports market is projected to reach $680 billion by 2029, and institutional capital is converging on the realization that the participatory sports segment, already representing 63% of the total market, has been chronically under-infrastructured relative to the spectator side. Apollo’s thesis makes the point directly: venue and ancillary development economics are essential to generating the cash flows required to service institutional leverage on sports investments.

Youth sports facilities are already described as the “hottest mixed-use anchor” in real estate development, with private equity, sovereign wealth funds, and real estate developers converging on the asset class. Sovereign wealth funds now lead 24% of global sports investments. Youth and amateur sports generated $52.2 billion in direct spending in 2024. What is missing from this landscape is the community-scaled, purpose-built endurance park: not a sovereign wealth fund mega-event venue, not a general-purpose youth rec complex, but a dedicated facility designed for the 112 million American cyclists, the tens of millions of runners, the 1.45 million annual Spartan finishers, and the growing millions of triathletes, and for the collegiate programs, community events, and families that orbit their world.

Where the Athlete Meets the Investor, and the Neighbor

The endurance sports park sits at the intersection of converging forces: an ecosystem of participation sports: running, cycling, triathlon, OCR, open-water swimming each in sustained, demographically broad growth; a new generation of collegiate programs urgently seeking the purpose-built training infrastructure that swimming has enjoyed for nearly a century; a structural failure in the current event production model that creates demand for dedicated solutions; and an investment environment increasingly receptive to sports infrastructure as an institutional asset class. Add one more force: tens of millions of square feet of abandoned golf course land sitting in communities that want green space back and are looking for a development vision worthy of the opportunity.

The concept has been validated on the shores of Big Hosmer Pond in Vermont, where Craftsbury Outdoor Center has spent nearly five decades proving that water, trails, coaching, and community are the foundation of something athletes return to year after year. It has been validated in East London, where Lee Valley VeloPark turned an Olympic cycling venue into a community institution serving 5,000 school children and 11,000 club riders annually, while still hosting world-class competition. It has been validated in Edmonton, where North America’s first purpose-built indoor triathlon facility opened in January 2026 to serve both national team preparation and neighborhood recreation on the same footprint. It has been validated at sovereign scale in Abu Dhabi, where Hudayriyat Island demonstrates what a fully committed, purpose-designed endurance destination looks like when it hosts World Championship events in the morning and community cyclists, runners, and families in the afternoon.

The endurance sports park is not a niche bet. It is a community infrastructure play, an experiential real estate asset, a multi-discipline participation sports platform, a collegiate training destination, and a civic gathering space, all anchored by the simple, durable proposition that people will invest time, money, and loyalty in the places built specifically for them.

If you are interested in Trihabitat, please reach out to me.