Wrestling With ESPN

How The Brothers Behind The Scrappy Startup Flosports Are Going Big By Going Small For Now, At Least

- Tom Foster

At least, that’s the look in his eyes, a barely contained animal ferocity. It’s not clear whether he combed his hair this morning, he certainly didn’t shave, and he has the kind of fixed stare and clenched jaw that you see on boxers when they meet in the middle of the ring before the opening bell. This, it turns out, is his default expression.

What has Martin so fired up began in May 2006, when he burst into his little brother Mark’s apartment in Austin at 2 A.M.., after driving 1,100 miles, brandishing a prototype of a website that would cover wrestling and running—the brothers’ respective collegiate sports—with the same obsessive detail and drama that ESPN bestows on the NFL and NBA. Eight months later, they had their first glimmer of success, when Mark captured on video, in early-morning fog from the back of a noisy pickup truck, the record-breaking half-marathon in Houston by a runner named Ryan Hall, who became a star that day thanks to that video. Despite the decidedly lo-fi footage—big blocks of digital fuzz, overwhelming engine noise— within an hour of publishing, the Floreanis had to scramble to add more bandwidth to handle all the traffic. Die-hard track geeks, says Mark, “never had anything like that.”