Grand Prix Final Sport’s Biggest Payday
Sean Wallace-Jones for the IAAF
7 September 2001 - Melbourne, Australia - With nearly three million dollars up for grabs in a competition lasting little more than three hours, Sunday’s IAAF Grand Prix Final surely qualifies as one of the biggest of all paydays in sport. In fact, outside of a World heavyweight title fight – or maybe the total income of the field in a Formula One grand prix, there can be few instances where so much money is paid out in so little time.

Of course, the number of recipients in the GP Final is a lot greater, around 140 athletes in total will share the spoils on Sunday, even if the lion’s share will go to the winners of the individual events and, above all, to the winners of the Overall Grand Prix.

But no-one will leave empty handed.

The most successful athletes could, hypothetically, leave Melbourne on Monday better off to the tune of $250,000 (US dollars!). With $100,000 each for the men and women winners of the Overall Grand Prix, an individual prize of $50,000 for winning their event in the Final and a $100,000 record bonus for a new World Record set during the GP Final, the numbers stack up very rapidly.

The least fortunate athletes – those finishing ninth and tenth in the distance races (all the other events are open to the eight leaders in the event in the year’s Grand Prix Standings) – will receive compensation for their efforts of a thousand dollars. Not a lot compared to the potential wealth of the winners perhaps, but better than nothing. And of course, all expenses are paid so the recipients have only to worry about their eventual income tax problems when they hit their home shores.

It looks as easy as one, two, three – but things are not, of course, quite that easy even if the earning possibilities of the athletics elite are light years away from the meagre sums paid just a couple of decades ago, or even in more recent years when the attitude of the sport towards professionalism has softened considerably.

This transition was recognised at the recent IAAF Congress in Edmonton on the eve of the IAAF World Championships in Athletics, when Congress voted overwhelmingly to change the name of the IAAF from International Amateur Athletic Federation to the International Association of Athletics Federations, conserving the acronym but recognising the changes in the sport away from the amateurism that had existed only in name for some years.

But back to the Grand Prix Final. The money at stake is earned in a day, but to earn their tickets to Melbourne the athletes have been through the mill of the annual Grand Prix circuit, a series of high level athletics meetings that involve travelling around the world, keeping up your gruelling training programme, staying fit and being successful in one’s selected Grand Prix events throughout the series. And this year the athletes have also, in the majority of cases, had to go through preparations for their own National Championships and/or selection trials for the World Championships and the various appearances at minor meetings that are for many of them a condition of their contracts with their respective shoe company sponsors.

Along the competition road, their successes have been rewarded with prize money and performance bonuses earned at the various meetings they have competed in; which enables a large number of them to earn a very reasonable living and devote their energies to acquiring and maintaining the high level of performance required in this new era of athletics. And the bigger “names” can add to that the “appearance money” that is still paid by many of the meetings to attract the better known stars who they consider to be crowd pullers.

A far cry indeed from the days when the majority of athletes were only able to compete during their school and university days before leaving the sport to get a “real” job, or were forced to work full time in normal employment and try to slot in training and competition in their time off.