Pro tennis players play up to 100 three hour matches a year. Yet pro runners struggle to race >10 times a year

The training to be a runner is VERY hard on the body.

And races are all-out efforts which makes a fragile body (from all the training) more vulnerable.

I’ve played tennis tournaments and soccer tournaments where I didn’t go to the well/ red zone, but generally gave it my all in running races and felt totally trashed after.

Athletics competition is stuck in the dark ages.

Pay runners $3m a race or even $3m a year to be an also-ran and you'd see them running every weekend

Or twice a year if you're Charles Hicks.

Unless you've been courtside to watch a match, people have no idea how immensely athletic today's tennis players are. They are quick, strong, and have endurance. And Federer was a genetic freak. With that said, the sport is so demanding that injuries are fairly common.

Tennis players play on several continents. They have to travel for every tournament. Baseball players have 81 home games and they never travel more than 2 times zones. Oh, and if you can chew tobacco while you're playing, it's a game and not a sport.

There is an incredible amount of prize money in pro tennis when compared to pro running.

As an example, if a person is one of the 128 men's or women's singles players that is invited to compete in the first round of the Australian Open, they take home $100,000.00 even if they lose. That $100k is sort of like an appearance fee.

Win the first round match and get over $150.000.00. Win it all and take home $2.7 million.

In addition, many pro tennis players are able to pick up sponsorship deals with all sorts of other products that are both directly and indirectly related to actually playing tennis.

There is nothing even remotely close to that in running.

I doubt a race director could find 128 men that have made over $100k in their entire running careers in their event to show up at a race in that event. It certainly would be hard to find 128 active pro runners that have made that much to show up. You might be able to get a combination of 128 active and former pros to show up, but there would be many out of shape/old /retired participants, and you would have to offer a substantial appearance fee to get them to come.

These are all all actual sports.

Technically speaking (and somewhat ironically), T&F is "Athletics"

Tennis, NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB and Football (soccer) are multi-billion dollar sports with even its "average" athletes making 10s of millions per year. ...You can combine Lyles, SML, Mondo, Crouser and Ingy's total lifetime earnings and together that amount doesn't equal a single annual salary of any of the top 10 from either of these sports. Not to mention only these very few T&F stars actually make a decent living. The rest of the "pro" running community makes less than an average American plumber does. Way less in fact.

And tennis players are light years beyond distance runners in athleticism!

Nice ai, loser

Late to this party, but what's the point in comparing two sports that aren't similar. In tennis you never train at say 50-80% max power. Even in training you're hitting your normal shots & playing matches or simulated matches. I'm not saying runners can't race more, but tennis players can play a match a day. Runners run pretty much every day, & very good runners double. You just can't race to your max & peak in the same way a tennis player just carries good form throughout a season.

Federer is an outlier. He pretty much went to the finals in every tournament he played that year. A top 20 player will play 40-50 matches a year and about half of those will be 3+ hours.

The racket technology allows tennis players to get a lot more speed off the racket with a lot less effort. Tennis players from the 80s and 90s would break down physically by the time they were 30 due to the physical demands required to hit the ball hard with the old rackets.

Tennis is also a rankings sport. You have to play to keep your ranking up. You have to keep your ranking up to get into major tournaments and have a good seed.

Distance running is all about the big events. WCs and the Olympics matter 1000x more than any other event. All the other events are just there for the purpose of building up to the big championships. If you made distance running into a rankings sport, you would have runners racing every weekend.

I remember seeing a photograph of federer at the 2005 us open and he had quite a large hairy gut. He also always had very thin arms. Tennis players are not supreme athletes. Nadal was an exception but he might have been on the juice like the 2010 spanish world cup team.