It has been an uncomfortable week for the conversation around women in sport -- with athletics at the very heart of it.
Sydney Sweeney's controversial sports betting advert prompted criticism from female athletes over sexualisation, with plenty attempting to shift the conversation back towards those actually competing.
On Friday night in London, Alexis Ohanian will offer his own vision for doing just that.
Athlos, the women-only track and field competition launched by the Reddit co-founder in New York in 2024, is making its international debut at a sold-out StoneX Stadium, with Olympic champion Keely Hodgkinson and American sprint star Sha'Carri Richardson among the headline names. The action will be live on the BBC from 7 p.m.
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Ohanian's ambitions, however, stretch far beyond one night in the UK. He wants Athlos to become the "F1 of athletics" -- a global league visiting major cities, with the same athletes and storylines carrying from one event to the next.
"I would love for the Athlos league to have multiple races in major capitals all over the world, just like F1," Ohanian told ESPN.
"Not quite a travelling circus, but you have these destinations throughout the year where the same roster of athletes are competing, storylines are continuing.
"We need to have our own version of Drive to Survive. We need to have this content that is constantly giving fans more reasons to care."
It is a bold ambition for a competition staging only its third meeting, but Ohanian told ESPN there will "probably" be multiple Athlos events next year, with plans for as many as four, five or six in the Olympic year of 2028.
So what exactly is Athlos, why has it come to London and how does Ohanian plan to turn it into a global athletics league?
What is Athlos?
"Fastest women in the world," Ohanian tells ESPN when asked for his elevator pitch. And he's underselling it.
Athlos launched two years ago as a woman-only alternative to the traditional athletics meeting, with elite competition mixed with music and entertainment and a greater emphasis on the athletes themselves.
The format is deliberately simple. There are no heats, and 42 athletes compete across seven events -- the 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, mile, 100m hurdles and long jump -- with six competitors in each. Everything takes place on a single night.
The competition is sanctioned by World Athletics and performances count towards the world rankings, but Ohanian wants almost everything around the racing to feel different.
"It's a few hours to come out and see the fastest women in the world compete in a format that feels much more youthful, modern, digital native," he said. "Like a DJ spinning in between the races."
That means music between events, individual athlete walkouts and a Tiffany & Co. crown rather than a traditional trophy for each winner.
There is significant money on offer, too. Athlos London has a total prize purse of $1.057 million, with $65,000 for each event winner and prize money paid to every athlete who competes. A further $250,000 is available to anyone who breaks a world record.
Athlos has also gone a step further this year by offering eligible participating athletes equity in the competition, while Gabby Thomas, Sha'Carri Richardson and Tara Davis-Woodhall are athlete-owner advisers with a role in shaping the series.
For Ohanian, the opportunity comes from what he sees as a disconnect between the enormous popularity of athletics during an Olympic Games and its profile during the rest of the year.
"In the U.S., athletics barely registers outside of the Olympics," he said.
"The Olympics does these tremendous numbers in terms of broadcast rights, in terms of attention, and track and field is one of the most popular sports of the Olympics. And then it just goes to zero."
Athlos is his attempt to make sure interest in its biggest stars doesn't disappear with it.
Why does Ohanian want the 'F1 of athletics'?
As he says, Ohanian's vision is not simply to stage more individual meetings.
By the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, he hopes Athlos will be a global league, with meetings in major cities around the world and many of the same athletes competing against each other throughout the year.
"You shouldn't have to wait every four years to celebrate these athletes," he said.
Ohanian believes Athlos needs to keep those athletes in the public eye between meetings, telling their stories "every day, every week" through social media and other digital content.
It is a model that has worked elsewhere. Formula 1's growth has been fuelled in part by Netflix's Drive to Survive turning drivers, teams and rivalries into year-round storylines for an audience that did not necessarily begin as motorsport fans. His aim is for Athlos to create something similar around the world's leading female athletes.
"Ultimately, you know, I want us to be this brand, this sort of F1," he said. "The crème de la crème."
Why has Athlos come to London?
After staging its first two meetings in New York in 2024 and 2025, Athlos could have remained across the Atlantic for its next stage of growth. Instead, Ohanian wanted its first expansion to test a market where athletics already has a foothold.
"We could have picked another location in the U.S., but I really wanted to stretch," he said. "Europe already has such a much stronger culture around athletics."
London was the obvious entry point.
Ohanian is already a regular visitor to the UK through his minority investment in Chelsea Women, while the shared language and London's position as a global business and sporting hub made it what he described as the "easiest gateway" into Europe.
He said the response has justified that decision, with Friday's meeting selling out a week in advance.
"It definitely feels like we made the right choice," Ohanian said.
The London event also marks Athlos' first collaboration with the BBC, with the meeting being shown live and on demand in the UK.
Ohanian believes the existing appetite for athletics in Britain gives Athlos an opportunity to build beyond the hardcore track audience, while the accessibility of running itself provides another potential route into the sport.
"The beautiful thing about running is it's so accessible," he said.
Athlos has organised running clubs around its events which Ohanian says have attracted hundreds of participants, part of an attempt to create a connection between recreational runners and the athletes competing at the highest level.
How big could Athlos become?
London may be Athlos' first event outside the United States, but Ohanian is already planning a considerably larger international footprint.
He told us he expects the number of meetings to increase as early as next year, before a much bigger programme around the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
"We have probably multiple meets next year, with an eye towards having, like, four, five, maybe even six for the Olympic year," he said.
The ambition is eventually to create a recognisable Athlos season, rather than isolated one-off events, allowing the same athletes and rivalries to develop across several meetings.
But expansion creates an obvious challenge: finding room in an already crowded athletics calendar.
Athlos has worked with World Athletics since its launch and Ohanian said discussions are taking place over how future meetings can be positioned without creating unnecessary travel or workload for athletes.
"I can't announce anything yet," he said. "But there are discussions around fitting the calendar in a way that looks after the athletes and looks after the logistics."
He cited the hypothetical example of staging an event in Tokyo while most leading athletes were based in Europe as exactly the kind of scheduling Athlos wants to avoid.
"I think we're pretty close to having something that fits in," he added.
Ohanian believes Athlos' financial commitments, athlete ownership model, growing commercial partnerships and focus on building individual profiles will help persuade the world's leading athletes to make it part of their schedules.
Unlike a major championship, Athlos does not need huge fields or qualification rounds. Its model is built around a relatively small number of leading athletes.
"We can cherry-pick from top, top, top talent," he said.
And although launched as a women-only competition, Ohanian has also said that may not always be the case. He told PA this week that the series would eventually include male athletes, predicting it could become "the first league in history to have a women's league that then includes men."
Ohanian also hinted that Athlos could eventually have a role in developing the next generation of athletes.
"There's some other interesting stuff that we've been cooking up, especially for the U.S. market," he said, before stopping himself.
"God, I don't want to say too much."
On Friday, some of the world's best athletes will do the talking on the track. And after a week of debates like this one, maybe that's just what sport needs.
When is Athlos London and how can I watch?
Athlos London takes place at StoneX Stadium on Friday, Sept. 18, with the event beginning at 7 p.m. BST.
Olympic 800m champion Keely Hodgkinson leads the British contingent alongside Georgia Hunter Bell and Daryll Neita, while Sha'Carri Richardson, Gabby Thomas, Masai Russell and Rhasidat Adeleke are among the international stars competing.
The event will be shown live and on demand by the BBC -- on the red button and iPlayer -- in the UK, while it will also be streamed worldwide on YouTube and X.
