Nitro Athletics Melbourne and the Australian Summer Athletics Season

Good afternoon,

The Australian Summer Athletics Season is upon us, featuring the game-changing Nitro Athletics Melbourne, and you will have noticed a number of exciting changes to the offering for the months ahead.

These changes have been made after extensive consideration, and I wanted to take this opportunity to issue a note to explain the background and support athletes and coaches in making informed decisions about their support and participation.

For a number of years, the Australian Athletics Tour (AAT) has been a feature of the summer athletics season. Many of you will have attended these events and will know that the AAT presented some great competition opportunities. You will also be aware that the same events generally attracted only very limited public and spectator interest.

Audiences were small, there was no broadcast interest and commercial sponsors at any significant level were difficult to attract. As a result, the AAT was being heavily subsidised by Athletics Australia with the support of the AIS. This was not sustainable, nor was it promoting the sport in the way that I’m sure we would all wish to see.

During the 2016/17 season, Athletics Australia and our Member Associations came to the decision that it was simply not possible to build enough value into the AAT in its current form for it to continue. Recognising that maintaining quality conventional competition opportunities was essential, we elevated the importance of the State and Territory Championships. We also set about developing a complementary sport entertainment product, with athletics at its heart, which would showcase our sport and our outstanding athletes in a way that would engage a live and remote TV audience and attract new commercial partners to athletics.

Nitro Athletics was born. A fast-paced, team-based competition, taking place over three evenings in early 2017, designed for the in-stadium and TV broadcast audience, attracting some of the best athletes in Australia and from overseas. There were a number of iterations that were tested with broadcasters and the public through market research. The current format, featuring six national teams, was the preferred model.

You will have seen more of the details recently. Teams include England, Australia, China, Japan and the Bolt All Stars, with one further team to be announced very soon. Athletes will participate in a series of events, some familiar, some less so.

Athletes are the performers in this show. It has been a core principle from the outset that the athletes in Team Australia will be paid appearance fees. Despite the very tight budgets that we are working to in this initial year of Nitro Athletics, this is a principle that we are determined to see maintained. Offers will be made upon confirmation of entry to compete.

I am grateful to all those that have worked so hard to make Nitro Athletics a reality and especially to those providing financial support. Visit Victoria have actively supported the initiative since our first meeting with them. Channel 7 will be broadcasting Nitro Athletics live on all three nights. We have two investors without whom we could not have gone ahead. Discussions with a range of sponsors are continuing and we hope to make announcements soon. All this is ‘new money’ for athletics and is an investment in our future.

Nitro Athletics has been described as a game changer and with your support, it will be. This is a new product and whilst some elements have been tried before, it will be the first time that all these have been brought together in this way. We certainly do not have a monopoly on good ideas and we don’t have all the answers. We are very open to your feedback and suggestions.

Athletes competing in Nitro Athletics will be asked to do things that they don’t conventionally do, like sitting in teams during the competition; providing comments during rounds of field event; or wearing technology that provides live performance data to the audience.

Our aim here is simple. We want to see athletics and our athletes gain the profile and recognition that the sport and they deserve. We want to bring more money into the ecosystem of athletics, providing athletes with greater commercial opportunities to fund their campaigns. Not everybody will be selected to compete. The 24 athletes that do will have the responsibility of showing the Australian public just what our sport can deliver, building a following for our future.

As outlined above, the changes to the 2016/17 calendar have been made not because of the introduction of Nitro but because there had to be change. Obviously the most significant shift is in combining the Junior and Open Australian Championships. This major event now has an economic impact that has caught the interest of state tourism bodies. We are grateful to the New South Wales Government for their commitment to the 2017 Australian Athletics Championships.

The State Championships have taken on greater significance in providing conventional competition opportunities. This year it has been difficult to avoid some clashes between these State Championships. We hope, with the on-going cooperation of our Member Associations, we will be able address this in the future. We have circulated a Competition Opportunity Guide that outlines other competition opportunities across various events.

The fact is, that doing nothing was not an option. We have a responsibility to secure the future of the sport.

We seek your support in making it happen.

Regards,

PHIL JONES
Chief Executive Officer
Athletics Australia