Grand Slam Track continues to add to its roster.

Michael Johnson’s new track league announced Thursday that they have signed Olympic medalists Fred Kerley and Kenny Bednarek. Kerley, a two-time Olympic medalist, most recently won a bronze medal in the men’s 100 meters at the Paris Olympics. He also earned a world title in the 100 in 2022. Bednarek is a two-time Olympic silver medalists in the men’s 200.

“This is a great day for Grand Slam Track,” Johnson, the league’s founder and commissioner, said in a statement obtained by USA TODAY Sports. “We’ve been saying GST is for ‘only the fastest,’ and bringing Fred and Kenny into the fold is exemplary of that fact. These two electrify every time they step onto the track, and I can’t wait to see them entertain thousands of fans at each of our Slams, and millions more watching around the world. I’m delighted to add two more excellent sprinters to our roster of Racers, and am already anticipating their first appearances in Grand Slam Track next year.”

Kerley and Bednarek join Team USA Olympic medalists Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Cole Hocker and Yared Nuguse, plus Great Britian’s Josh Kerr as the first six athletes of 48 Grand Slam Track racers. Each year, 48 athletes will be named to the league as Grand Slam Track racers. The Grand Slam Track racers will compete in four slams a year. Grand Slam Track is also going to add 48 Grand Slam challengers who will compete at individual slams.

Racers and challengers will compete in one of the following categories, and will race in two events during each slam: short sprints (100/200), short hurdles (100 hurdles or 110 hurdles/100), long sprints (200/400), long hurdles (400 hurdles/400), short distance (800/1,500), or long distance (3,000/5,000).

Final placement scores will be determined by their combined finishing order between the two races. The quickest combined time across the two races will be instituted as the tiebreaker. The winner of each slam group will take home $100,000 in prize money. The top eight finishers in each slam group will earn prize money.

“When I first heard about Grand Slam Track, I knew it was something I wanted to be part of,’ Kerley said. “I love competing and think the fans will really enjoy this new Track format. The fans will get to see the best of the best race against each other regularly and we have a platform to showcase our talents and continue building our fanbase all around the world. I’m excited to be part of Grand Slam Track.”

Johnson announced the launch of Grand Slam Track in April. The league is slated to begin in 2025.

Caitlin Clark scored 16 points, but the favorite to win Rookie of the Year couldn’t lead her team to a win as the Indiana Fever dropped an 86-75 decision to the Las Vegas Aces Wednesday in Indianapolis.

The teams meet again Friday.

Clark also dished six assists and grabbed three rebounds, but shot just 6-of-22, including 1-of-10 from 3, one of her worst shooting performances of the season.

Kelsey Mitchell led Indiana with 24 points.

Clark and the Fever have been on a tear lately, with Clark averaging 25 points over the 10 previous games before Wednesday. The Fever have already secured a playoff spot, their first since 2016.

The Aces were led by MVP favorite A’ja Wilson, who finished with 27 points, 12 rebounds and three blocks.

Wilson broke the WNBA single-season scoring record late in the first half on a 15-footer. With five games left in the regular season Wilson has 956 points. Seattle’s Jewell Loyd scored 939 last season.

WASHINGTON – As Cavan Biggio fixated on the clubhouse TV Wednesday afternoon, it would be understandable if he was having a mild out-of-body experience.

Just a few minutes earlier, he’d landed in his third major league clubhouse in four months, clad in an Atlanta Braves uniform, this after wearing the togs of the Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers and Sacramento RiverCats – the Class AAA outfit for the San Francisco Giants – since summer began.

On the TV, the Blue Jays – the only franchise he knew since they drafted him in 2016 – were playing the New York Mets. And if Biggio checked the standings from the whirlwind few days since the Giants shipped him to Atlanta and the big club called him up, he’d know the Mets and Braves were tied for the National League’s final wild-card berth.

Weird spot: The only team he knew, releasing him in June after he batted .197 with 10 extra-base hits in 183 at-bats, now in position to help the team he’d known only a few minutes.

Yet as the Braves aim for a seventh consecutive playoff berth, stories like Biggio’s abound in their clubhouse. Injuries have ravaged Atlanta’s roster, with All-Stars at third base (Austin Riley), second (Ozzie Albies) and a reigning MVP right fielder (Ronald Acuña Jr.) out for weeks to months, Acuña’s torn ACL ensuring his next at-bat will be in 2025.

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Center fielder Michael Harris Jr. only recently returned from a 52-game hamstring-related absence. The rotation has seen three starters succumb to the IL, with ace Spencer Strider lost until 2025 after one start.

Theoretically, the Braves – entering Thursday a game back of the Mets for the final wild card – could lean on their playoff chops and track record as they joust with the Mets while likely ceding their six-year reign atop the NL East to Philadelphia.

Instead, they’re still getting to know each other.

“If we were sitting here with our full contingent of guys,” says manager Brian Snitker, “it would be very beneficial. But this is kind of a different situation here now.”

How different?

Wednesday’s lineup featured four players who began the year elsewhere, three of them – Biggio, outfielder Ramón Laureano and third baseman Gio Urshela – grabbed off the waiver wire or in a middling September transaction.

Biggio won’t be eligible for postseason play. Maybe he won’t last on the roster past the weekend, when another scrap heap acquisition – utilityman Whit Merrifield, late of Philly – is activated. Maybe he’ll register crucial, memorable hits down the stretch.

For now though, this is reality for both the Braves – “you have to piece things together,” says Snitker – and the castoffs hoping to catch a hot streak.

Know your why

“This is what you play for,” says Biggio, son of the former Houston Astros Hall of Famer Craig Biggio, who spent six seasons in Toronto. “This is the most exciting time of the year for baseball. I’ve admired this organization for a long time, from watching my dad play against this team for so long and not having much success against these guys.

“It’s very exciting to be a part of such a respected organization at a time like this is more than I can ask for. I’m extremely grateful for every opportunity I’ve been given and I’m going to continue to work and try to help this team.”

It’s nice to be wanted, certainly. Biggio’s abrupt Toronto departure was softened by the fact the NL-best Los Angeles Dodgers acquired him after the Blue Jays designated him for assignment June 12. Laureano was dumped from a contender, Cleveland releasing him on May 25; Urshela was sent packing by Detroit after the veteran kept the seat sufficiently warm for third base prospect Jace Jung’s debut.

Yet the timing of it all was fortuitous.

Laureano was released May 25 by the Guardians; the next day, Acuña tore his ACL in a baserunning mishap in Pittsburgh. Three days later, Laureano was a Brave.

Similarly, Riley fractured his right hand Aug. 18, the same day the Tigers released Urshela.

Welcome to Atlanta, Gio.

“Everybody that’s come over has been great,” says first baseman Matt Olson, who has rebounded from a rough first half to launch 12 homers in his last 44 games. “Biggio and Laureano weren’t getting the kind of everyday looks that as a player you want and feel like you need. It’s crazy how opportunity comes up. Ramon’s done great for us. Biggio’s been around for a while.

“It’s a clubhouse full of guys who have been in postseason play, who have been in tighter races at the end, know how to navigate it, operate it, and have that ability to put the scoreboard-watching aside and go play a game every night. That’s kind of nice that we have that.”

Laureano has been perhaps the Braves’ best player of late, with 34 hits in his last 100 at-bats. With Harris back in center, the pair give Atlanta an elite defensive look in two of the three outfield slots, with Jorge Soler – acquired at the trade deadline – in right.

He knew the expectation level in Atlanta.

“Of course,” says Laureano, reunited with former Oakland teammates Olson and catcher Sean Murphy. “But obviously, we know what has happened with the rosters and injuries and everything. But it’s an attitude that we have good enough depth and team to go as far as we believe.

“This is why you play – play meaningful games in late September. You gotta showcase yourself, show who you are. It defines who you as a person, as a player, this type of month.”

Snitker appreciates that the stuntmen imported to do this job need little cajoling.

“To their credit, all those guys have done a really nice job of keeping us relevant,” says Snitker. “That’s the biggest thing – they’re really, really good makeup guys. They’re ballplayers. I think they appreciate the fact they have another opportunity and it’s an attractive situation to come here.

“Guys play against us over the years and a lot of them and want to be a part of this – because they see what they see from the other side of the diamond.”

‘Time to enjoy it’

Yet will it be enough? Albies is still struggling to swing a bat; Riley is projected to be out through the regular season. Starter Reynaldo Lopez went on the IL Wednesday to allow shoulder inflammation to calm.

The narrow margin makes nights like Wednesday galling, when the Washington Nationals cracked open a scoreless game with three third-inning hits off Max Fried that measured between 61 and 89 mph off the bat. The 5-1 loss sends Atlanta back home 79-67 and a game behind the Mets, with a four-game set against the loaded Dodgers on deck.

A six-game interlude against Cincinnati and Miami precedes the three-game showdown series at home against the Mets beginning Sept. 24.

The Braves haven’t missed the playoffs since 2017, Snitker’s second season; a year later, he won NL Manager of the Year honors and has known nothing but late Octobers since.

Now, he’s surrounded by newcomers, and perhaps the here-goes-nothing ethos will serve the Braves well down the stretch.

“The thing I’ve learned from being in this situation is just have fun with it,” says Biggio, whose Toronto teams made the playoffs the past two seasons and narrowly missed in another. “I played with George Springer the past couple years and he obviously had a lot of success in the postseason. That was his main message: You play to get to this time of year, this moment.

“And now it’s time to enjoy it and have fun with it.”

For however long it may last.

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Having more job security than almost any coach in college football has led Mike Gundy into a few unnecessary imbroglios over the years. But it has also freed him of the burden to talk the way most coaches think they are supposed to talk.

So when Gundy asked the Oklahoma State media on Monday whether they wanted the truth or coach-speak about how his staff ended up recruiting linebacker Obi Ezeigbo as a transfer from Division II Gannon University, there was only one answer. With Gundy, his version of the truth is always going to be worth the price of admission. 

“He was very inexpensive,” Gundy said after Ezeigbo was named Big 12 newcomer of the week. “The number of players we go after that were ready to play at this level, we can’t afford. So he was a good buy and a really quality young man that had had success, and has physical characteristics we can work with and develop. So that’s why he ended up here, in my opinion. We saw some things we felt like we could develop into a good player at this level, and it wasn’t going to cost us the money we didn’t have.”

Like many things in college football these days, from Baylor coaches wearing t-shirts that say “We Pay Players” at a practice last month to Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders appearing on a Nike billboard in Times Square, the shock value is now pretty much gone. While Gundy’s comments got attention because we just don’t hear coaches draw such an explicit line between their name, image and likeness budgets and recruiting, what he said about Ezeigbo drew almost no negative reaction. 

Because it was the truth. 

And that’s one of the biggest signs of progress we’ve seen since NIL became a reality three years ago. 

After decades of having to pretend that under-the-table money wasn’t a factor in recruiting, college sports have been liberated from the old fiction and placed into a new reality where player procurement is accepted as the commercial transaction it has always been. 

It may not be romantic, but at least it’s real. 

And it would benefit coaches, schools, players and fans to take a cue from Gundy and start talking about this stuff with more transparency.

Because even though we all now plainly understand that money is driving pretty much every decision in college sports, the actual machinations of how it works in recruiting are still pretty opaque — even to the people with the most skin in the game.

Coaches and administrators are experiencing this environment as people who, for the first time in their careers, are having to put a numerical value on a player while relying on hearsay and speculation to form a perception of what the marketplace really is.  

The athletes are experiencing it a different way, with many of them relying on unskilled agents charging exorbitant commissions to inform them what their options are and what to expect. 

And the fans are left relying on misinformation and rumor about an athlete’s value while being asked to fork over large sums of money to NIL collectives so that the player pipeline keeps flowing. 

It can all be a little hard to understand. How much money do various schools have to spend? How is it getting allocated within a team? What do the bidding wars for recruits actually look like?  

But with one almost off-hand comment by Gundy, we start to get a better sense of the college sports economy in action. 

There’s no pretending that Oklahoma State has the ability to be a major player in the financial wars for top recruits or transfers. Gundy isn’t patting himself on the back about finding a diamond in the rough that nobody else in college football was smart enough to identify. 

Instead, it was all very simple and straightforward: Gundy’s defense needed another capable body, Ezeigbo was on the transfer market looking for an opportunity to play at the highest level, and because he was coming from a Division II school there was no bidding frenzy that would price out a lower-budget school like Oklahoma State. 

Why would that be offensive to anyone? Instead of spreading some flowery (and made-up) story about how much Ezeigbo loved the campus in Stillwater, laying out the reality of the situation here was plenty good enough for Gundy while also giving Oklahoma State fans a sense of how he and his staff are having to go about their jobs now in this complicated ecosystem. 

While we can debate whether salary caps in professional sports have been good for the product or the athletes, what they’ve undeniably done is make fans more informed about roster-building and the difficult short- and long-term decisions that go into how players end up on certain teams. 

When a player signs a contract, we know exactly how much salary cap space a player is going to take up, how many years their contract is guaranteed and the contingencies that will allow either side to change the terms of the deal. This information doesn’t just help people understand why a player chose one situation over another, or why a team signed one player over another, it allows people to see how the pieces all fit together and make better judgements about whether coaches and front offices are making the right decisions. 

Over the long haul, that should be a goal for college sports as well. At some point, once we get past the various lawsuit settlements and NCAA rule changes and possible legislative solutions that will create a new pay-for-play model, schools are most likely going to have to work within some kind of framework where their resources are being allocated like a salary cap. 

And, yes, that means certain athletes are going to have a higher monetary value than others, which is going to directly impact which schools they end up playing for. To acknowledge that publicly like Gundy did is a step in the right direction. It’s the way things have always worked to some degree, but it’s definitely the way it works now for everyone in college sports. 

Three years into NIL, we can now handle the truth. Gundy deserves the highest praise for having the self-confidence to bring it into the discourse. 

Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes brushed off former President Donald Trump’s political comments about his wife, Brittany, on Fox News.

While speaking to reporters on Wednesday, the Chiefs’ star quarterback said he isn’t fazed by Trump calling Brittany a supporter of his.

“No, I mean I think at the end of the day, it’s about me and my family and how we treat other people. And I think you see is that Brittany does a lot in the community,” Mahomes said. “I do a lot in the community to help bring people up and give people other opportunities to use their voice. And so it’s in the political times, people are going to use stuff here and there. But I can’t let that affect how I go about my business every single day and live my life and try to live it to the best of my ability.”

Mahomes’ response stems from a Fox News interview with Trump in which the former president was asked about Taylor Swift’s endorsement of vice president and current presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Patrick and Brittany Mahomes are connected to Swift through her relationship with Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.

“I actually like Mrs. Mahomes much better, if you want to know the truth. She’s a big Trump fan,” Trump said on Fox News. “I like Brittany. I think Brittany is great.”

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Brittany hasn’t publicly endorsed Trump. But she did receive backlash when she seemingly liked an Instagram post by Trump last month and allegedly unliked the post at a later date after criticism. Brittany later doubled down on her opinion on Instagram by calling her critics haters. She’s also liked several comments that were pro-Trump on her Instagram.

Patrick, who played a large role in making GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium a polling location by splitting the cost with the Chiefs in 2020 and is active in voter registration, said Wednesday that he won’t use his platform to endorse a presidential candidate.

“I’ve always said I don’t want my place and my platform to be used to endorse a candidate or do whatever, either way,” Patrick said. “I think my place is to inform people to get registered to vote, to inform people to do their own research and then make their best decision for them and their family.”