World Marathon Majors SLASHES series prize money by 69% effective immediately, costing Eliud Kipchoge 200k and we aren't happy

This is for the series, not the individual races. Running is currently the only major sport other than swimming/triathlons that allow disabled divisions to compete at the same time as abled professional ones. That brings a huge audience and form of respect.

again, this is for the series, not the individual races that pay out based on division participation numbers.

Wheelchair athletes train hard, but there’s like 10 combined in mens and women's. No one watches for the wheelchair races so they don’t deserve equal pay. I’m looking at you womens soccer and basketball.

additionally I think this is also a wedge to start funding trans athletes.

The till has run dry, man. Elites need to do more to market the sport and make it interesting.

The problem with most of these posts is very few are stating the obvious in that the vast majority of the running community does not care about pros. If you're in charge of a race like NYC or London and can continue to sell out at max capacity year after year regardless of whether you pay out ANY money to pros why waste that money when there is no return. It makes no sense. Besides that running has become like cycling in that doping has pretty tainted everything that more money just feeds into more cheating...

I think some posters on here are missing that the prize purse change is for the WMM series competition ONLY not the individual race prize purses which are still heavily skewed toward the runners (ex: Boston 1st is 150,000$ for runners, 25,000$ for wheelchair athletes).

As for the change, I agree that the press release is suspect, but remember that many of the wheelchair athletes compete in essentially all of the WMM each year whereas the runners only complete two max generally due to the length of time to recover and peak between races.

The total prize money for everyone has been reduced from $820K to $400K.

Here's my guess. Higher interest rates. Somebody(s) at Abbott got crushed by overexposure to the bond markets. Abbott's stock is at $98. In December it was $142. That certainly doesn't help their discretionary spending. Abbott also has a large share of the Covid-19 testing market. I'll bet that's hurting also.

This sounds terrible

Reducing prize money for marathon runners is a penny ante decision.

Remember THESE are the people you are talking about:

Good Lord, marxist, how many lives have been saved or improved by biomedical innovations?

Romancik (sp) was 2nd at Berlin. Will do London this week and Chicago the following.

And they want equal pay?

I’d buy Greg’s screenplay before I can get behind this plan.

lmao they just used woke “equity and inclusion” to basically trim the fat and shore up corporate profits.

So they lowered the Monet Kipchoge is getting retroactively AFTER his Achievements? This is Wrong, They should at least say after This year is over we will be lowering the Prize Money Structure, Not having Kipchoge who met all his obligations expecting to get a certain amount and then change it after the race, I know nothing about Law much less International Law, but this seems so obviously unfair and wrong.

If they equalize pay across the majors the top wheelchair athletes will actually end up making more since they can compete in every race

I have severe plantar fasciitis and can't run, where do I sign up to race the wheelchair division for that easy money?

It is actually direct wealth transfer from white shareholders, board members, etc... to black athletes. I for one own stock in several of the WMM companies and why should my dividends be lowered to sponsor the charity of pro runners and doped athletes?

That’s crap. That’s like working a job making $40 an hour then before u get your paycheck they say your pay is $8 an hour. Embarrassing

Guys, this is not about the wheelchair athletes at all. It’s just their ridiculous excuse. I know you all know that, but then half the posts are about wheelchair athletes. They’re not taking Kipchoge’s $200k — the corporate fat cats are, and are using the wheelchair athletes as human shields. It is disgusting in so many ways.

And I want to add on to the racism angle. Rojo mentioned it almost as if it’s a loophole, like “haha, found a way to turn this around on them!” But we should own that argument. There’s no question that racism is behind this decision, second only to greed. It’s not a loophole or a gimmicky argument, it’s a massive problem in the sport that needs to be pointed out at every opportunity. The fact that Black Africans make up almost all of the best runners is behind decisions to neglect to cover running, to cover only certain runners (usually the White ones), to change prize money structures, and in this case, to transparently take advantage of the athletes.

In fact, this pattern we see in running is the essence of what people call structural racism. There aren’t separate competitions for people of different ethnicities. But there has been a shift away from prize money to appearance fees (“marketability”), from the elite side to mass participation (“equality”), and away from covering the sport seriously at its highest levels (“viewer interest”). The fact that none of these decisions were made for explicitly racist aims doesn’t change the fact that so much of this would have evolved differently if the best runners were White Americans. The structures of the sport are set up in a way that privileges some people (mostly White) and discriminates against others (mostly Black East Africans). That’s structural racism, and fortunately in the past decade or so we as a culture have gotten much better at rooting it out in some of the many insidious settings in which it lurks.

But somehow no one talks about structural racism in the sport of running. I think Letsrun should take this on unironically, as one of the few places that treats our sport’s top athletes with the respect they deserve, regardless of race or country of origin. Not as some gotcha like “wow, turns out the liberals are the real racists”, but as a real, good-faith effort to make our sport more just. Make hay out of the differential coverage and out of the prize money gimmicks. Let people know that there are two sides to this issue: one that stands up for our sport’s elites, regardless of race, and another that doesn’t.

Again, the racial angle here isn’t some trick, it’s one of the main reasons our sport suffers from lack of money, lack of exposure, etc. There injustice in our sport that’s so ingrained and accepted that the people instituting it can get away with pretending it’s not there. It’s up to us to call it out.

it's not racism, it's marketability.

Can you elaborate on that?

What am I missing?

I realize you made a typo but I still don't know the backstory?