Michael Johnson: ‘My biggest challenge? Overcoming my stroke’

Michael Johnson is telling me about his ambitious plan to revolutionise athletics when I ask if this is the biggest challenge he has faced since retiring from the track. It will be hard, he says, but no, it won’t be his biggest challenge.
That came one day in 2018 when, aged 50, he felt numbness in his left arm and found his left foot wasn’t moving properly after finishing a workout in his home gym. Armine, his second wife (he has a grown-up son, Sebastian, with his first wife, Kerry D’Oyen), drove him to the emergency room at UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center and by the time the MRI scan was over he could not walk. He’d had a stroke.
“It seems these things can affect anyone, even the once fastest man in the world,” he tweeted shortly afterwards. He had always been clean-living and fit and was “afraid and scared and wondering what my future was going to be”, he said a few months later.
Recovering became a new mission that he approached with his customary steel. A physiotherapist helped him learn to walk using a walking frame. The first day it took him 10 minutes to cover 200m, a distance he had once glided over in under 20 seconds. But gradually, over a few months, he regained his strength and motor skills and fully recovered.
“I’ve been good in those last seven years. I’ve been great,” he says now, that Texan bass a little quieter than when we had been talking about sprinters and hurdlers. “But during that one period, it was not great at all. That was the biggest challenge — overcoming the stroke. But I’m good now.”
That is reassuring for those of us who regard him as, alongside John McEnroe, the most authoritative sports analyst on British television and perhaps the person with the most gravitas on television full stop. During the Olympics, people wondered idly on social media whether Johnson, with his silver beard and bright purple sweaters, was simply the coolest person who has ever lived.
When Michael Johnson was blazing around the Olympics track in his golden Nikes, it was easy to think his extraordinary, record-breaking, gold medal-winning performances were all about explosive power and stamina. But much of his success was down to what was going on in his head.
He once described it to me as making decisions — about adjusting his speed; whether or when to respond to a competitor’s move — in tenths of a second.
In the BBC box at the Paris Olympics, he might not have had to make such split-second decisions, but he still thought astonishingly fast, delivering a masterclass in athletics analysis.
Take the 100m final, an event that lasts less than ten seconds. It finished in a blur of bodies crossing the line so close together that even the runners and the commentators initially weren’t sure who had won.
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Johnson had the chance to watch a couple of replays and then, as it was shown in slow motion to viewers, he explained how Noah Lyles, his fellow American, had come from the back of the field to win by five thousandths of a second. How his start had not been as good as the others’, but that it had been better than his usual starts and that was crucial to his victory. His foot speed is such that once he is up and running his “frequency is unmatched”, Johnson explained. At 60m, Kishane Thompson of Jamaica was still in the lead and Lyles was third, but Thompson, who Johnson observed had lacked championship experience coming into the race, tightened up slightly in the closing stages and, “Lyles just starts to turn it on. He has really great speed endurance… he just has to hope he doesn’t run out of track. And he didn’t.”
Perhaps only Johnson has the deep knowledge of sprinting, the speed of eye that can process what is happening to those eight runners, and the eloquence and calmness of more than two decades of broadcasting, to provide that immediate insight. The BBC, which has this two-minute dissection of one of the greatest 100m races on its website, knows that long after hanging up his golden running shoes Johnson remains one of the biggest stars for British viewers of the Olympics — and we hang on his every word.
“It was a really good Games,” he says. “Definitely one of the best, if not the best. It had everything you could possibly want. Global championships are always amazing; those rare opportunities when you get the best of the best athletes competing against one another and it’s high stakes; they want that title. It’s the best of sport. There’s no doubt that people love this sport. But we don’t get enough of it. It only happens once every four years for the Olympics or every two years for the World Championships. Fans want more and athletes want more as well.”
Johnson, 56, has a plan for that. From next year his Grand Slam Track (GST) will provide a forum for the best runners in the world to race against each other four times a year. He hopes the events will become landmarks for athletics, like the tennis grand slams or the four golf majors. Los Angeles will host one of the four events plus another American city and two other “global cities”, which will be announced soon. London? “You will know soon,” he says enigmatically as he speaks by video call from back home in LA. The next Olympics will be held there and he is on the board of the Games. During the Paris closing ceremony he was shown in a pre-recorded film running with the Olympic flag through LA after it had been delivered by Tom Cruise to mountain biker Kate Courtney, who passed it to him.
Johnson, as you might expect of someone who was once one of the world’s most ferocious competitors and as a broadcaster delivers pronouncements on other superhumans with the self-assurance of an Old Testament prophet, can be a slightly intimidating interviewee. When I met him a few years ago he was a little cool and put any poorly thought-through questions out of their misery with alarming speed. Today, however, as he talks about his baby, he is warm and enthusiastic.
With an initial investment of $30 million (partly from his own pocket), he is claiming that the $12.6 million prize pool for GST will be the biggest across a season in athletics. Each season 48 runners will be under contract and a further 48 “challengers” will be invited and paid to attend each meeting.
He has discarded field events to focus purely on running. “It is the most important sport inside every other sport. It’s speed. Tell any athlete in any sport, ‘I can give you one athletic superpower,’ overwhelmingly it’s going to be speed. And that’s what Grand Slam Track is all about. We want only the fastest athletes.”
Runners will compete in two races each over a weekend in one of six categories: short sprints (100m, 200m); short hurdles (100 or 110m hurdles, plus 100m flat); long sprints (200m, 400m); long hurdles (400m hurdles and 400m flat); short distance (800m, 1,500m); and long distance (3,000m, 5,000m). The winner of each category will win $100,000 and the eighth-placed runner will get $10,000.
“It’s a narrative that people can rally around and it’s easy for us, relatively speaking, to market and get viewers excited about that. These are the fastest athletes in the world and fans are obsessed with speed. When the running events came on in Paris, the audience were on their feet watching the end of these races to see who was going to be crowned the winner. It’s easy to follow. It’s the oldest sport in the world.”
Aside from the 100m there were some great rivalries in Paris, including Britain’s Josh Kerr and Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen in the 1,500m (they were both ultimately beaten by Team USA’s Cole Hocker) and the US’s Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Femke Bol of the Netherlands in the 400m hurdles.
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Kerr and McLaughlin-Levrone were signed as ambassadors for GST before the Olympics. The way McLaughlin-Levrone tore away from Bol and broke the world record in the 400m hurdles to retain her title was so astonishing that Johnson said in his column in The Times that it was the greatest athletic performance he had seen, beating David Rudisha’s 800m world record at London 2012 and Usain Bolt’s 100m world record at the World Championships in 2009. “She ran faster than some of the people in the semi-final of the flat 400m. She’s just that good,” he says. “Sydney is a generational talent. She is that prototypical Grand Slam Track racer. She wants to race when there are high stakes and jeopardy against the best.”
Keely Hodgkinson is also on his target list after the British runner dominated the 800m to win gold in Paris. “We’d love to have her. She has proven to be a great racer. She loves to race.”
Could Hodgkinson also become a generational talent? Johnson has her statistics at his fingertips: a race she did earlier this year put her sixth on the all-time fastest list. “Just an unbelievable time, the fastest since Caster Semenya [in 2018]. I think that it’s possible.” But he cautions that there is still a long way to go. “To be that sort of generational talent within the sport, you have to do something unique.”
He cites an example: himself. He started out as a 200m runner. “But that was not going to put me in the stratosphere of Carl Lewis and folks like that.” Lewis won 17 Olympic and World Championship golds across 100m, 200m, the 4x100m relay and the long jump. “I decided to try to do something unique, which was becoming a 200m and 400m combination sprinter and be the first to be world record holder, first to be world champion and Olympic champion in both those events.”
With his unusual, almost cartoonish running style — straight-backed, short strides — Johnson won 13 Olympic and World golds (he handed back one Olympic medal after a relay team-mate at Sydney 2000 admitted taking a performance-enhancing drug) competing in the 200m, 400m and 4x400m relay.
The pinnacle of his achievements was the 1996 Atlanta Olympics when he won gold in the 200m and 400m, the only man to do that at a major championships. Earlier that year he had broken the 200m world record, which had been set way back in 1979. He smashed his own record in the Olympic final and it would take Usain Bolt in 2008 to break it again.
He took the 400m record, which had stood for 11 years, in 1999. Remarkably, no one eclipsed that until Wayde van Niekerk in 2016. And the South African is the only person who has done that in the quarter of a century since Johnson set the benchmark. Some records are simply incredibly hard to break. In our previous interview I had mentioned modern sports science and nutrition and earned a dismissive response. “It takes great athletes,” he scoffed.
When Johnson was on the way up, Lewis was nearing the end of his career and there were some terse public words exchanged between them. Today, though, Lewis, now head track and field coach at the University of Houston, has backed Grand Slam Track and Johnson is full of praise, including for the work Lewis has done with the British sprinter Louie Hinchliffe. “He’s done a great job coaching. He came out in support [of GST] from the very beginning.”
The problem with other meetings in the racing calendar, he suggests, is that athletes often use them as part of their preparation for big championships and don’t seem worried if they don’t win. “So the fan is like, ‘Why did I spend my time watching?’ ”
Or meeting organisers pay a large appearance fee to one star, such as Usain Bolt a few years ago, but then can’t afford other major runners and so the focus becomes on fast times rather than races. “That’s not entertaining to fans. And it’s also not entertaining and fun for the athletes.”
Johnson is talking to television networks and his vision is for two-hour primetime slots, hopefully on three consecutive evenings over a weekend. His instinct — and then his research — tell him that people like to focus on one event at a time. The Olympics coverage shows how hard it is to cover track races and field events that are going on simultaneously. “You have to keep jumping in and out of the story.”
Jessica Ennis-Hill, his fellow BBC analyst and gold medal winner in the London 2012 heptathlon, was among those disappointed that field events did not feature in his new venture. “Jess and I had a very productive conversation about that and, look, I get the disappointment.” Field event athletes ask, “ ‘Who’s going to help us?’ ” he says. “I would love to be able to fix all the issues with this sport. But in business you have to make the difficult decisions and fight the battles you think you can win.”
Even before he launched Grand Slam Track, Johnson, who has always called things as he sees them, was critical of the lack of innovation and direction in athletics. Not everyone liked him doing so. “What I saw was people pushing back and hunkering down and saying, ‘How dare you criticise our sport. You’re a traitor.’ ”
His plan before each of the four meetings is to build the narratives of the athletes and their rivalries. “All that stuff you get for a Champions League final, for a Super Bowl final, for Wimbledon or the Masters. That’s what we did get in Paris. And we need more of it.” He is talking to more big names he hopes to sign as contracted racers.
The competition for “challenger” slots in each category will, he hopes, provide another area for fresh engagement. He notes how Formula 1: Drive to Survive, the Netflix series that brought many new fans to the sport, built drama around who was going to earn a seat in each of the teams’ two cars.
“It’s getting the casual fan interested,” he says. At the moment, athletics does not do this outside the major championships. “There is no narrative around competition, and that is largely because there isn’t enough of that head-to-head competition. And that has been because it’s not worth it for the athletes to compete head to head, because no one has created a platform where they are compensated and rewarded for doing so.”
He insists that the prize money is not the biggest pull for the athletes he has spoken to. “Yes, the $100,000 is important. But that’s not the most important thing for them. The athletes love to race and show they are faster.”
There is room, he says, for his event alongside a new global championships run by World Athletics. Scheduled to take place every two years from 2026, it will offer $10 million in prize money.
JOHNSON GREW UP IN DALLAS, TEXAS, the son of a truck driver father and teacher mother. He had an older brother and three older sisters. His parents were strict, with a strong moral code, and encouraged his love of racing, which the shy boy started at the age of ten. He studied for a business degree at Baylor University, a Christian college in Waco, while training as an athlete. Since retiring from athletics he has started a number of businesses including Michael Johnson Performance, which runs training programmes.
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He has been commentating on the BBC since 2001 and credits the “great” Sue Barker with helping him learn how to explain to viewers what they were seeing. These days, the combination of his clear insights and the timbre of his voice lend him unmatched authority.
I have a concern about Grand Slam Track. Will it end his career as an analyst? “I enjoy commentating, so I don’t see why I wouldn’t continue,” he says. But he will see what happens over the next few months. Could he still be his usual punchy self about athletes he has hired? “That’s a good question. Something that I need to think about.”
You often get mentioned in the same breath as McEnroe, I say. The two great American sporting institutions on TV. “I’m a big casual tennis fan. And I feel like I learn a lot from him.”
I wonder how he finds it, as an American, having to focus on the British angle at athletics events. “I recognise that I’m on a British network and that my audience is largely a British audience that is pro-British. I think we do a good job of making sure that we respect the winner of the race and I think our audience wants to understand how they won.” After that they will switch to any British interest. “And I think that’s fair.”
From his father he inherited a love of planning and immerses himself in athletics throughout the season so he is on top of all the stories. “In the days leading up to and during events there’s a lot of prep.”
Johnson may strive for perfection but he never, he told me in our previous interview, ran the perfect race. His restless eye for detail is already focused on Grand Slam Track, including the way athletes at the Olympics and elsewhere still have to attach numbers to themselves with safety pins. “We will not have safety pins, I can guarantee you. It’s not happening.
“What is the indication that we are sending to people if we take the fastest people in the world in these sleek uniforms and carbon-fibre shoes and fastest tracks and then we make them use safety pins to put a piece of tacky paper on them? I would question whether you even need any numbers.”
Another curious tradition at many meetings will also be scrapped. “After every race, someone runs out with a bouquet of flowers in see-through cellophane wrapping and still with the price tag on it in many cases. I don’t think anyone ever stopped in this sport to think, ‘Is this something that we still should do?’ ”
Well, someone has now. So, no safety pins, no flowers, but lots of new races and, if he’s judged this right, millions of new fans. Let’s face it, his analysis is usually correct. And if it is this time too, then changing athletics could be his greatest legacy.grandslamtrack.com