Plucked of its charm Johnson's Grand Slam Track misses vital village-fete feel at heart of athletics

You don't hear much about the featherless chicken any more, which on reflection is probably for the best.

- Jonathan Liew

The idea was simple enough: for poultry-rearing purposes feathers are a nuisance, bearing significant costs in labour and industrial plant, so by breeding genetically modified feather-free chickens you could save the industry billions. Just imagine if you could also convince the chicken to eat sage and onion stuffing.

Alas, when it was unveiled in 2002 by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the featherless chicken failed to take flight for one simple reason: it looked freaky as hell. The feather layer, while gastronomically extrinsic, provided vastly underrated context. Above all, people did not want to see their Sunday dinner walking around in front of them. "It's a normal chicken," pleaded the geneticist Avigdor Cahaner, "except for the fact it has no feathers."

Right now, Michael Johnson has more pressing matters on his agenda than the history of genetically modified poultry. But as he fights to save his cherished Grand Slam Track project, the parable of the featherless chicken offers a salutary lesson in the dangers of injudicious plucking.

Grand Slam Track made perfect sense in PDF format. Take a well-liked but struggling sport. Shear off all the extraneous matter: the discus, the triple jumps, the relays. Repackage and resell it to a new audience. Johnson reckoned he could unlock the fresh revenue streams and casual fans that would turn his enterprise into, in his words, "the Formula One of athlete racing".