Nitro Athletics
Current season, competition or edition: 2017 Nitro Athletics
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| Sport | Athletics |
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| Founded | 2017 |
| Official website | Nitro Athletics.com.au |
Nitro Athletics is an annual track and field series featuring multi-day meetings between teams of twelve athletes. The teams contain both men and women and also para-athletics competitors. There are both national and international teams. The events contested are a mix of Olympic-standard events and variations on common athletics events.
The series was created by former athlete John Steffensen and Athletics Australia (AA). The president of the AA, Mark Arbib, stated his interest in creating a novel competition was the result of his seeing dwindling interest in traditional one-day track and field meetings, citing in particular low crowds he saw at the 2015 Sydney Track Classic. The sport's leading star, Usain Bolt, was recruited as a co-investor and performer of the series. Despite breaking from the standard setup of athletics competitions, the series was supported by Sebastian Coe, head of the International Association of Athletics Federations.
The inaugural event was hosted at Lakeside Stadium in Melbourne on three separate days (4, 9, 11 February). The six teams to feature were New Zealand, Australia, England, China, Japan and the Bolt All-Stars (a mix of international athletes). The events attracted near-capacity crowds of the 8,000 seat arena and was broadcast on live television across many of the competing nations. Generally media gave a positive response to the event, with the Herald Sun describing it as a "raging success". The reaction from specialist media was more mixed, however, with Athletics Weekly saying the ideas "have been tried before. Nitro Athletics has merely thrown them all into one meeting".
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