Alexis Ohanian backs sell-out all-female Athlos meeting in London with $1m prize fund

Alexis Ohanian is the promoter behind a sell-out, all-female Athlos meeting taking place at the StoneX Stadium in Hendon on Friday, featuring Britain’s Keely Hodgkinson alongside Americans Gabby Thomas and Tara Davis-Woodhall and offering a $1m (£750,000) prize fund.

The event will include a red-carpet parade and a celebrity-filled programme aimed at celebrating female sport, staged at a moment when coverage of women’s sport has been dominated this week by controversy surrounding the actor Sydney Sweeney posing naked. Ohanian, the US entrepreneur who cofounded Reddit and helped launch Angel City FC, says he sees opportunity in track and field because of a running boom and the Los Angeles Olympics. "You can’t go anywhere without seeing joggers, runners and run clubs," he says. "London is a hotbed for it; the US, too. It is such an accessible sport. So why can’t it be a hundred times more popular? Or even a thousand times more popular?"

Ohanian addressed the fallout from Sweeney’s advert for the US sports prediction company Novig and the response from hundreds of female athletes worldwide, as well as Sweeney’s subsequent sharing of semi-nude ESPN Body Issue covers including one of Serena Williams. "I’m not even mad," Ohanian says. "If she wants to be naked for a commercial, that’s great, fine. It’s the false equivalence that I really support our athletes calling out about. The irony is my feed, at least, has been full of women athletes showing off, doing great women athlete stuff, which is awesome."

He argued there is a distinction when athletes pose for publications such as ESPN or Sports Illustrated. "You don’t have to look very hard to find reasons to celebrate actual women athletes. There’s a ton of them. They have massive followings. They have incredible stories. And, you know, them deciding to do an ESPN Body Issue is very obviously different from an actress just being naked for a commercial." He added: "These are professional athletes who have devoted decades of their life towards a physical goal and their body is their résumé. So I have no problem understanding why it is totally OK for an athlete, man or woman, to pose naked tastefully. They are physically fit and showing it off because they grinded in the gym every morning to play football, ski, or whatever the hell they do."

Ohanian set out wider commercial ambitions for women’s sport, forecasting growth in revenue and standards. "Ten years from now, there will be multiple billion-dollar women’s teams in basketball and soccer, and they will be doing at least a hundred million in revenue easily," he says. "And Chelsea will be the first in England. The quality of play is also going to go up, because now there’s a business behind women’s sport," he adds, pointing to improved coaching and support. "Women’s tennis is an example of this because you can see the impact Serena and Venus made, where a decade later, the entire nature of women’s tennis looks very different. Consciousness is warped by, or moulded by, excellence."

Ohanian traces his investment in women’s sport back to March 2019, when a Twitter "rant" about the undervaluation of women’s football ended with: "I’m going to either start a team, or buy one, and who can help?" The USA soccer star Alex Morgan replied and Ohanian subsequently helped launch Angel City FC, having invested $7m; "the club are now worth £$350m," the article states. He reflects on that decision: "It was one of the first things I did after leaving Reddit. And I feel so blessed that it went on to be so successful so quickly, and had such a ripple effect of investment around women’s sports. For me, the lens after leaving Reddit is everything I build going forward is going to be something I’m really proud to tell my kids."

Explaining why he chose to back track and field, Ohanian links the sport’s Olympic visibility to its commercial potential: "OK, what’s another sport where you have this massive popularity every four years and then it goes to zero?" He adds, "We have 300 million-plus people in America who love sport, who love cheering our athletes during the Olympics, but have no clue outside of that what’s going on. And that’s what I want to break. "I love the fact it’s the oldest sport. It’s immediately understandable – my eight‑year‑old can understand who wins. You can tell the entire story of an event in a short-form video. It’s perfect for the digital age. There’s a beauty to it. And it is high stakes. As soon as that gun goes off, you know you can’t blink."

Ohanian differentiated Athlos from the Michael Johnson-led Grand Slam Track venture, which filed for bankruptcy after three events last year, and pointed to early metrics from his own series. "We held our first race five months after our announcement in 2024 and 3.25 million people tuned in," he says. "We had brands like Tiffany, who are not from this world, to be a part of this. And most importantly the athletes had a great time, got paid, and it was great."

He describes the London meeting as the beginning of a larger plan for the series and sets a concrete target for expansion. "But this is just the start. By 2036 I want us to have at least half a dozen races in the cities that are important stops in the calendar for these athletes."