HEJNOVÁ: "I am irritated that football and tennis players earn so much money in comparison with us!"

Avery Brundage's Butler wrote:

Precious Roy wrote:Before that, it was the world v. Hitler's German super athletes.

That's a bit of an exaggeration.

Ok grandpa, tell us all about how things otherwise were in the 1930s--give us the REAL scoop!

runn wrote:

Don't forget that in a tennis tournament you're only paying winners of, at most, singles and doubles. Not multiple events.

Add together all the prize and appearance money for all the events and then have a track meet with 4 events. More money.

Yes, like tennis and golf, track would be a lot more straightforward if everyone were doing the same thing.

runn wrote:

Don't forget that in a tennis tournament you're only paying winners of, at most, singles and doubles. Not multiple events.

Add together all the prize and appearance money for all the events and then have a track meet with 4 events. More money.

You will get more than 20 000 USD, only if you get to the 1st round of any Grand Slam tennis tournament! That's 128 players in each gender.

At a Diamond League Meeting, you will get 1000 USD for the 8th place in the event. There are 16 main events (128 people in each gender). This is almost surreal...

No wonder that for people from the industrialized world, it is mainly a beloved hobby. And apparently, for some of them, it is not worthy of the effort even as a hobby, because performances in some events (like the pole vault, high jump, hammer throw, javelin throw) have been declining for about 15 years. (Don't be fooled. The decline in the pole vault and high jump stopped only 2 years ago.)

Thus, Diack et al. have, what they inevitably must have: A second rate Third World sport rife with drugs.

How much do swimming and cycling pay?

And gymnastics which virtually has no participants from the "third world"? Is that cute, little Gaby Giffords girl rolling in dough?

a granslam is not the diamond league, its more like the world championships. Screw the amateur stuff. The WC should payout what the athletes truly deserve.

the 800 is a fun race wrote:

a granslam is not the diamond league, its more like the world championships. Screw the amateur stuff. The WC should payout what the athletes truly deserve.

1. Let us know where that money is going to come from.

2. If the IAAF somehow tripled their prize money to the level of the US Open, Bolt would still walk away with "only" $180,000 for winning the 100m, compared to the $1.9million Andy Murray won lost year winning the singles title. That's less than half he gets to run a normal meet.

The only "Olympic athletes" who made more than Usain Bolt (reportedly $20 million) last year were NBA players and Federer and Sharapova. By TFAA stats, hardly anybody in the US except sprinters/hurdlers make over $150,000-$200,000 (~25% of sprinters/hurdlers make that)--a couple distance runners, one or two jumpers, and that's it. Many of the rest are "professional athletes" in name only: What they make from their sport puts them below the poverty line.

If they were in a team sport, many of the non-sprint/hurdlers would be minor leaguers and are paid accordingly.

Allyson Felix isn't complaining, Sanya Richards-Ross isn't complaining, Tyson Gay wasn't complaining before the drug bust, I don't think Rupp and Centro are complaining.

Jeff Wigand wrote:

1. Let us know where that money is going to come from.

Easy. Ban shoe and equipment contracts.

The amount of money equipment manufacturers have is immense, but as long as they can each keep a stable of athletes on cheap contracts, they will spend next to nothing, get great advertising, and events will have almost no prize money.

If they're no longer allowed to pay athletes to wear their product, companies will have to find alternative ways to advertise. If they can't put their logo on the athlete, they'll have to put it on the event, with enough prize money for the athletes to make a living at it.

Well Miss Hejnova, perhaps because soccer players play competively twice a week or more, every week for 8-9 months per year for 90mins each time (with TV audiences of hundreds of millions), whilst you run for under a minute a dozen times per year (no-one cares or pays for training time, not football or track fans or TV execs).

Bad Wigins wrote:

Easy. Ban shoe and equipment contracts.

The amount of money equipment manufacturers have is immense, but as long as they can each keep a stable of athletes on cheap contracts, they will spend next to nothing, get great advertising, and events will have almost no prize money.

If they're no longer allowed to pay athletes to wear their product, companies will have to find alternative ways to advertise. If they can't put their logo on the athlete, they'll have to put it on the event, with enough prize money for the athletes to make a living at it.

How is that not restraint of trade?

And even if that were an option, how do you think you could convince Nike or adidas (since they're the only two that spend on this level) that instead of using hundreds of professional athletes that compete in thousands of events across the globe as their advertising, that they instead put their entire budget into a single nine day event?

It must have something to do with the fact people generally enjoy watching other sports more. Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

I have moved to the trails with my running (where I started as a kid and where I hope to be buried), and I must say that I miss the "traditions" of T&F about as much as my last hemorrhoid. Not that trail running is fun to watch either...I digress.

Who LOVES Track & Field? The Brits? Eastern Europeans? People who enjoy marching in formation (which, incidentally, has about the same entertainment value as T&F to the populace)? Every race, by nature, is the same distance (within events). There are no obvious surprises. Underdogs don't seem to win (99% of the time) -- I mean, how often does Dave Wottle really happen? Strategy is mostly pointless (despite the fact that most Lets Run folks, myself usually included, think there's a huuuuuuuge difference between a time trial and a "championship race" -- that brings up a whole different conversation about the value of a 1,500 that is jogged for 3 laps). Which one will Mo Farah NOT win every time? Records are totally corrupt and uninteresting. folks, aren't they?

I could go on, and I say this as a person who logs-in in the middle of the night, still, to watch T&F and XC races (Far superior as a TV spectator experience when properly covered, especially when the weather is bad -- e.g. Bobby Mack; Ben True).

Yes, T&F is dying, and yes, it's a natural death. The question is: Will anyone innovate running-based spectator sports out of the current death spiral before the time is up? Is there a way to create team running (team XC?), or to mix distances/genders, or to surprise contestants with the distance or difficulty of the course? How about taking multi-day/mixed-distance races into the mainstream? Can running be like MMA or tennis (with interesting 1 on 1 matches, champions and ranked contenders?) Yes, these may seem like absurd thoughts, but they are the seeds of a bigger conversation.

Hill Stomper wrote:

There are no obvious surprises. Underdogs don't seem to win (99% of the time) -- I mean, how often does Dave Wottle really happen?

How are the underdogs doing in the Grand Slam?

Australian Open

2004 Roger Federer

2005 Marat Safin

2006 Roger Federer

2007 Roger Federer

2008 Novak Djokovic

2009 Rafael Nadal

2010 Roger Federer

2011 Novak Djokovic

2012 Novak Djokovic

2013 Novak Djokovic

French Open

2004 Gastón Gaudio

2005 Rafael Nadal

2006 Rafael Nadal

2007 Rafael Nadal

2008 Rafael Nadal

2009 Roger Federer

2010 Rafael Nadal

2011 Rafael Nadal

2012 Rafael Nadal

2013 Rafael Nadal

Wimbledon

2004 Roger Federer

2005 Roger Federer

2006 Roger Federer

2007 Roger Federer

2008 Rafael Nadal

2009 Roger Federer

2010 Rafael Nadal

2011 Novak Djokovic

2012 Roger Federer

2013 Andy Murray

US Open

2004 Roger Federer

2005 Roger Federer

2006 Roger Federer

2007 Roger Federer

2008 Roger Federer

2009 Juan Martín del Porto

2010 Rafael Nadal

2011 Novak Djokovic

2012 Andy Murray

Wow -- you chose one small point in isolation and decided to refute it with a razor-thin argument. Hopefully you had fun on Google but the time would have been better-spent actually thinking.

OK, here is my refutation:

Tennis, apparently, is more fun to watch than T&F based on viewership numbers. Not every match is the championship match and there are lots of underdogs who win along the way in tournaments. What equals a "point" in a track race? Does Ritz get a point when he leads for 50m on the second-to-last lap (actually, that may explain why he does it!)? Tennis spectators get to see each player win a number of points along the way using their unique skills, so the favorite is "bettered" several time along the way. Tennis players are far less anonymous than runners (i.e. there is more personality on display) and tennis styles, within the same match, can vary wildly. Ok, that's enough for now.

Not refuting your overall argument. I don't think you're far off for the most part, but I don't think the underdog is a key component. It certainly hasn't hurt Bolt. From 1949 to 1962, maybe baseball's most popular era, teams from New York won the World Series on all but four occasions. Michael Jordan's dominance is credited as a major reason for the growth of the NBA as a global brand.

The money in the world championships isn't terrible, but when it's split among almost 400 entrants and the first place in the Women's Discus pays as much as first place in the Men's 100m, the end result isn't great relative to the world status and certainly the amount of work put into getting to the start line.

I'm trying to get at the core issue: Too many events. Too much anonymity. Not enough intrigue. Not enough action, etc... If you follow the money backwards you'll get to those observations and if you follow those observations (maybe starting with "why don't Americans watch T&F?" as a guiding question) you'll get to the money.

I'll illustrate my earlier point. Take a deep breath, embrace alternative scenarios...now imagine runners on a dirt track in a stadium with lots of hills (yes, a MotoX track, basically). We can see them the whole way, just like on a track, but there is undulating terrain. What are the possibilities? Would Rupp beat True on that terrain? How about a mountain bike/runner relay? Ultra-trail guys vs. road/track guys? Team relays? Multi-event racing with total scores? Any of that I would prefer to watch over the standard fare. It's essentially getting running into the X-Games era (aka the present day).

That's just a brainstorm. I came up with it on the moment.

Do you guys think that at least part of the reason for the declining popularity of professional track and field can be linked to the emergence of the east Africans? The popularity of the sport seems to be linked to how successful people are from certain countries: track was very popular in the US when Jim Ryun was on top of the world, track was very popular in the UK when Coe/Cram/Ovett dominated the middle distances, etc. Now the most successful distance athletes come from Ethiopia and Kenya which, even combined, are nowhere near the US in terms of population. Loosing first world countries like the US and the UK, both known for having sports-mad populations, was likely incredibly damaging to the sport. Both Ethiopia and Kenya are third world countries so any money to be gained from those fan bases is almost nothing.

Perhaps the emergence of East Africans wouldn\'t have been so damaging if they didn\'t seem so faceless. Tennis and golf may have foreign athletes at the top of the world but those foreigners are still somewhat relatable. Federer and other stars have decent fan followings in the US and other large first world countries. Compare that to track where the east Africans are quiet as corpses and seem to lack personality. New east Africans spring up so often that it\'s impossible for an average fan to keep up. Think of how many Kenyan runners have the last name \"Kiplagat\" yet aren\'t related. I\'m not advocating for the banishment of east Africans or anything racist like that, but it\'s hard to deny that they haven\'t played a part in the decline of the sport.

How is it hard to deny that they've played a part in the decline? I see no evidence of that. Were there any Africans at the US nationals meet? The one with the empty stadium. And Europe doesn't seem to have a problem with appreciating Africans and filling seats.

The U.S. national meet is meaningless if we can't compete at the world level. That was his/her point.