Sebastian Coe can call the Enhanced Games “bollocks” all day. The bigger issue is that World Athletics threatens long bans in a sport where most athletes are not salaried and don’t have guaranteed income. If the governing body can block an earning option, it owes a clear, credible replacement plan for how athletes actually make a living outside Olympic years.

TikTok didn’t change because adults showed up. It changed because adult behavior outcompeted youth behavior once the platform became monetizable. When money, status, and performance become the incentive, “play” gets replaced by shock, oversharing, and engineered relatability, and the original culture becomes unrecognizable.

Track looks like it has a season because the Diamond League has a logo and a schedule, but the week-to-week reality is still driven by three forces that don’t care about branding: the calendar, the money, and negotiated participation. Until track has league-level control over those inputs, it will keep producing circuit-level outcomes, no matter how polished the wrapper looks.

The Diamond League isn’t a broken league. It’s a “league” that can’t enforce anything, because the deal that created it protected meet autonomy over centralized control. Part 2 breaks down how a global rebrand and a big sponsorship check made the product look more unified without changing the structure that keeps it behaving like a circuit.

Every few years, someone looks at track’s chaos and says, “Easy. Build a league.” Then the sport does what it always does: prioritize championships, outsource risk to promoters, and let the pro season run like a freelance marketplace. That isn’t a glitch. It’s the design. Athletics is two overlapping systems with two different goals, and calling everything a “league” just hides the real structural conflict.

World Athletics tightly governs eligibility, rankings, and competition access across Track & Field. What it does not clearly define is where its responsibility to athletes begins or ends. This article examines how that boundary is implied through system design rather than stated outright, and what happens to athletes when support quietly disappears while regulation remains.

Track money talk usually focuses on the visible checks: shoe contracts, meet invites, prize money, federations. The missing player is often World Athletics, even though it controls the rules, calendar, and eligibility standards that decide what “counts” and who gets access to opportunity. When WA can delay transfers with a waiting period or set reimbursement and accommodation standards, it’s shaping athlete cash flow and leverage without ever signing a paycheck.

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