Mo Farah may have signed up as the face of RunGP, but it was an encounter with another legend of long distance, Eliud Kipchoge, which helped entrepreneur Marcel Muenster formulate the new athletics series.
After selling the healthcare business he founded, Doctor In Your Pocket, Muenster indulged his passion for road running by training like an elite athlete, even going as far as travelling to Kenya to train in the cradle of the world’s greatest endurance competitors.
“It was my personal passion. After selling my company everything was focused on running for me. I lived it,” Muenster tells City AM.
“I lived in all the high altitude training locations – Iten in Kenya, which is known to be the place where the fastest ones in the world are from. Eliud Kipchoge, I actually trained with them, I had that privilege. I built a small team around me: a coach, a nutritionist, etcetera.
“Instead of myself buying something fancy, I wanted to see what’s possible with my body. How much can I push? How far can I go, with all the natural limitations that I have? That opened my eyes to the business of sport.”
So it was that last month in Qatar Muenster and Farah announced Run GP, an innovative race series that takes place on Formula 1 racetracks and begins in May in Doha. It is, he says, a combination of two of the big growth stories of the Covid-19 and post-pandemic era.
“Running is the most accessible and inclusive sport in the world, and I also consider it to be the most active – meaning we know from external data there are about 620m runners in the world who run anywhere between one to three times per week,” Muenster adds.
“It’s a significant number, and what running has experienced post-pandemic – becoming extremely popular among younger generations, millennials and Gen Z – was a real inspiration.
“F1 is so hot and has really skyrocketed as a result of Liberty Media acquiring and then rejuvenating the sport. It has become a lot more attractive for younger audiences, a lot of user generated content, Drive to Survive on Netflix.
“We are riding this wave or connecting the two dots between a sport that has experienced its revival from a long-term existence prior and running also having its moment. We are just bringing together these two major forces.”
Marcel Muenster: RunGP can be like Ironman
Central to Muenster’s belief in RunGP is the conviction that running has never been commercialised effectively.
Borrowing from other recent additions to the sports landscape like Kings League and SailGP, it will be a team competition featuring influencers as well as athletes, with scope for celebrity ownership down the line. In year one, however, the calendar will comprise four races – each a relay over seven 1km laps – and two teams.
“Running has become incredibly unsexy for TV audiences. It has disappeared from a lot of the mainstream but we are bringing it back because we have reinvented the running experience,” he says.
“I feel like the running industry of mass participation on the streets, anything from a half-marathon to marathon, has done a good job but it has never been truly commercialised. There has never really been one brand that has been developed.
“I always speak about the Ironman of running. Ironman has become synonymous with triathlons, even people who have never participated in an Ironman have heard about the name somehow.”
RunGP has agreed a broadcast deal with Dazn, which will show the first race in Doha on the weekend of 9-10 May. The competitors and other three race venues are yet to be announced but are understood to be close to being finalised.
‘Athletics needs new formats to attract money’
Mass participation races will take place alongside the elite contests, while the advantage of using F1 circuits is that all the infrastructure is already in place, making it cheaper and easier to arrange than city-centre events.
“These Formula 1 tracks basically provide everything at once. From a sustainability perspective, it’s a revolution,” says Muenster.
“There would be tremendous upfront expenses in other sports. Running has this incredible opportunity because it is so untapped. You can really make a huge impact with, relatively speaking, less money.”
Muenster has big ambitions, among them the possible acquisition of World Athletics’ commercial and media rights. The cash-strapped world governing body is reported to have also held talks with Saudi Arabia’s Surj Sports Investment.
With RunGP, he and a small group of private investors who have helped to fund the league believe they can attract more capital to the sport and make being an athlete a more viable proposition for more people.
“There needs to be more money in the sport and this means we need to grow more heroes or personalities,” he says.
“I’ve seen athletes that are literally struggling and sacrificing everything they have to maybe at one point make it. We need to support the system and it requires new race formats like this in order to make it happen.
“I think there’s an unprecedented opportunity to not just reinvent but rejuvenate the sport, which is so necessary, in a more structured, professional and not just passion-driven way.
“It’s a fine balance between overcommercialised and underorganised. We need a much better balance in order to move the sport forward.”