Feature | January 20, 2026
If you spend any significant time in Canada around the track, you’ll inevitably start to see singlets and other gear representing the Bears, Spitfires, Huskies, and Arctics.
Track and field isn’t generally thought of as a team sport, outside of the relays, but the Canadian Track and Field League (CTFL) is challenging the traditional paradigm with its four-team format.
Their upcoming season, running from Mid-May to the end of June 2026, represents their fifth installment and will once again include many of the country’s top athletes, some of whom will go on to represent Canada at the Commonwealth Games or World Athletics Ultimate Championships later in the summer.
There have been a handful of upstart track and field leagues in recent years, with the most notable being Michael Johnson’s Grand Slam Track. The infamous league declared bankruptcy within nine months of its first competition and still owes nearly $10 million in unpaid debts, including more than $1.6 million unpaid to athletes.
As most of these types of start-ups have come and folded, the CTFL remains steady, continuing to see growth and increased engagement year over year.
What Is the Canadian Track and Field League?
Entrepreneur and athlete Quinn Lyness founded the CTFL in 2021, and the league launched its inaugural season in 2022. The structure of the league has shifted slightly since then, but it currently divides athletes into 4 teams (Bears, Spitfires, Huskies, and Arctics) and includes ten events:
- 100m
- 200m
- 400m
- 800m
- 1,500m
- 5,000m
- Sprint hurdles
- 400m hurdles
- Shot put
- Long jump
Many of the top athletes in the league have gone on to compete for Canada or their respective countries on the world stage.
Some of the athletes who have appeared in the past as core or utility athletes (a distinction done away with for the upcoming season) include Usheoritse Itsekiri (Nigeria, 2019 African Games 100-meter bronze medalist), Sarah Mitton (World shot put silver medalist), Marco Arop (World 800-meter champion), and Crystal Emmanuel-Ahye (14-time Canadian Champion in the 100- and 200-meter).
As the League has grown, the entry standards become increasingly competitive. For instance, the men’s long jump minimum standard currently sits at 7.00 meters for the 2026 season, which will run about seven weeks to fit around the national and international schedule.
A maximum of 64 athletes will appear on each team’s roster, and athletes gather points for their teams by combining their scores from:
- The CTFL Final held in Ottawa at the end of June
- One of their preliminary meets between mid-May and the final
- One score from any other sanctioned competition
Is a Team-Based Format What Track and Field Needs?
Track and field is in a unique position compared to most sports. It’s one of the most participated in sports in the world but struggles to capture viewership outside of the Olympic Games. When it is an Olympic year, it becomes one of the most-watched sports for two weeks, and a large portion of these are tuning in for 10 seconds to watch the 100-meter finals. Many of the field events are lucky to even get televised.
In the United States alone, over 1.1 million high school students compete in track and field each year, making it the number two most participated in high-school sport for boys and number one for girls.
Participating in a sport is one of the main ways that people become interested in it later in life, so with such high participation numbers, it seems like there’s a massive audience that no track league to date has really mentioned to tap into.
Maybe the CTFL’s team-based format is the way to hook in more fans, especially younger fans engaging with platforms like TikTok, to the sport regularly. At the very least, it’s worth a shot.
Creating a league from scratch isn’t an easy task, especially in a sport where funding is at a premium. “I always tell people that we had a budget [in 2022] of like $13,000, which is less than like your family car,” said Lyness, the CTFL founder, in our interview last week. “We tried to keep costs low, so we partnered with meets, and that was a saving grace, in terms of logistics as well. And then we just provided really good content… We got to like 25K views on one of our videos, and we thought that it was like the craziest thing ever, right? You’re like, oh my God, and now 25K for a video is pretty subpar.”
As the league’s social media presence has expanded to the point that the league has become known across the country by almost everybody involved in the sport, so has the funding and prize money, with the pool increasing to $45,000 for 2026.
CTFL and Future Growth
In some ways, the CTFL is setting out to disrupt the status quo of how we traditionally view track and field. While innovation can be a good thing, it can also ruffle the feathers of those used to doing things the same way for years.
“I had a phone call with the CEO of [Athletics Ontario], then one of the employees at Athletics Canada on the same day. And they were both not very happy with the creation of it,” says Lyness. “ So it probably took the first two years to have them more geared towards our side. I’m happy to say our relationships are much better. And [Athletics Ontario], which was one of the ones that actually pushed back harder on CTFL, they’ve actually stood up for us, in recent years.”
It’s fair to see why the governing bodies of the sport may feel trepidatious to accept any type of new league with open arms. World Athletics response to the launch of Grand Slam Track felt professional but cool. And once the stories of unpaid debts started to emerge, they felt very much like a parent saying, ‘We’re not mad, we’re disappointed’ with president Sebastian Coe’s response being “We have to police the calendar.”
While Grand Slam Track scrambles to pay its bills after over-promising, the CTFL continues to march forward, expand annually, and give high-caliber opportunities to athletes across the country, with the final meeting being a class D meet on the World Athletics calendar.
CTFL and Future Growth
In our interview, Lyness cited getting onto national television as one of the league’s biggest goals in the future, with targets on the two biggest sporting networks in Canada, Sportsnet (Rogers) and TSN (Bell). The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is also among their targets, although early discussions haven’t been fruitful.
When asked what their future goals might be in a best-case scenario, he said, “We would probably have all the Olympic team somehow involved in the CTFL at that point… A prize fund more than, if it really went well, probably a million dollars.”
As per their mission statement, the CTFL aims to bring more content to fans and help build the sport of track and field in Canada, as well as help athletes financially by providing them with a platform to build their own brand.
These humble goals contrast with those of the Enhanced Games or “Steroid Olympics,” which have emerged as a poison threatening the integrity of the sport. Meanwhile, social media grifter IShowSpeed is arguably the most famous sprinter in the world, profiteering off of ignorance and brainrot videos.
Track and field as a sport needs ideas on how to engage fans with the sport without compromising its integrity. Perhaps moving toward team-based leagues is what we need most right now. At the very least, building a platform to help athletes gain exposure to potential sponsors is moving the needle forward.
As the CTFL continues to grow, we should continue to see many of the top athletes in Canada compete in 2026 and beyond. You can find the league on Instagram and on their official website.
