“Cain one of the highest paid female athletes in America”

She is going to med school at Fordham so she'll make even more $$ being a doctor.

Anonymous ex OP affiliate wrote:

Nike is fucking brutal to women ( and men) when they stop performing. A lot of their contracts are performance based. And if you stop winning races WITHIN A YEAR, odds are your income is more than halved, even quartered the next two years. Perks are the new apartments across the street from HQ and the free physio/healthcare/shoes/justin whittaker Active Release miracle workery. There was one year Alberto had everyone drinking Beet Juice because it “increased your performance by 3%”. I doubt Mary cain made very much money at all based on her performances. Did nike maybe pay some tuition at Up? Maybe.

(Please dont give my IP address to Alberto/nike you ****heads)

Sometimes I wonder if athletes read their contracts or just assume they getting a lifetime endorsement deal.

how much money lost wrote:

How much money do you think Mary lost for Nike based on actual salary paid, opportunity to support existing successful athletes and those in the future and extremely bad PR for the company that could further cut Nike budget for track. Was this the worst Nike track investment of all-time?

It all depends on the how bad the fallout. The cost of the contract is minimal. . The unique part of this situation is that it isn't the athlete doing bad things (see Ray Rice, Oscar Pistorius, Michael Vick, Marion Jones, Lance, Adrian Peterson, Kobe, Pacquiao, Suzy Favor....) but more the company directly (i.e. is the NOP actually different than nike. I don't think so). I sort of expect it to be a nonIssue (i.e. nobody will remember in 2 weeks) but occasionally these things keep escalating.

From a strictly contract point of view and using just the numbers in the article, wheating might have been a worse investment:)

If in 2013, you told me I could lock up a Mary Cains for 4 years/ 1 million each (maybe with an out to reduce the cost to 600k if performance isn't up to snuff) , I think that would be a pretty reasonable gamble to take. I would say the same thing about offering Webb (i.e. just about the only distance talent close to her in the past 20 years) a contract straight out of HS. Obviously this gamble didn't pan out and blew up far more than what any reasonable person could have assumed.

You could also make an argument that all of these runners are overpaid. Does anyone buy stuff because of them? Is the general brand exposure worth it?

you guys are way out of your element in trying to opine on what women earn in other sports. 150 women earned more than $250K in tennis prize money alone in 2019:

http://wtafiles.wtatennis.com/pdf/rankings/All_YTD_Prize_Money.pdf

tennis is a very sponsor driven sport so it's safe to assume that many of the women below the $250K level easily surpassed that in endorsement and speaking fees. i get it that many of the women on this list aren't american but many are and when someone like bethanie mattek-sands, who i am sure 99.99% of the world never has heard of, made $565K just in prize money, it's ridiculous for you to claim that "very few female athletes in America make a quarter million dollars a year." they do -- you just aren't aware of it.

even gold had 69 women above $250K in prize money alone:

https://www.lpga.com/statistics/money/official-money

top female athletes on team usa gymnastics, in ice skating, danica patrick and beach volleyball all earn over $1 million as well.

+1

Poor reporting, actually just speculation from Rojo.

Fordham does not have a medical school.

jecht wrote:

She is going to med school at Fordham so she'll make even more $$ being a doctor.

ken goof wrote:

my guess is that she made 150k/year. at the end of the day, her appeal was so limited (this is a niche sport and few track athletes are really capable of driving sales for any product) and the way nike pays its track athletes is still heavily performance-based that i doubt she was making mid six figures.

The thing is- the niche is world wide. Most sports are just the USA. Even a sport like tennis isn't popular in many of the poorer countries and the popular athletes are from a limited number of countries.

Only 20 out of the top 150 women tennis players are American, and probably only 5 of them have any endorsement deals of significance.

Only a fraction of the 69 women golfers are Americans. And they have to pay their caddies.

I think the point stands. There just aren’t very many US women who make more than $250k per year

Serena wipes her ass with more then what Cain has made in her lifetime

All these higly paid women Athlete in tennis are professionnal and are winning prizes. What is surprising is that Mary Cain did nothing for her whole career.

She was a junior champion with very high potential and has been able to earn whhat seem to be good money without accomplishing anything. Nike was quite generous with her and isn't to blame.

Nike can be attacked for giving way too much confidence to Salazar and his shady practices, but can't be blamed for giving Mary Cain a good contract on potential alone. They were very generous.

I'd be shocked if Cain didn't make at least 250k per year during her prime. Remember, the agents estimated to us that she made $275k per year.

The highest official maximum WNBA salary for veteran players in 2018 was $113,500. Only 21 women on the LPGA have made over $250k this year. Only 20 US women have made over $250k this year in pro tennis.

That pretty much leaves soccer right? Whole teams in the women's soccer league only are paid $650,000, most making less than $50k. Yes the women's world cup team members made more than $250k this year but that's what 20 women?

^ rojo counts sponsorship for track (Mary Cain), but not for tennis/golf, etc.

For 275K they could call me whatever they wanted to.

Maybe the highest paid distance runner. Not even close to highest paid female athletes considering tennis, and golf.

Maybe but not likely wrote:

Maybe the highest paid distance runner. Not even close to highest paid female athletes considering tennis, and golf.

That would have been a much more accurate description.

I think Rojo went out on a limb, not a big deal, but he missed the mark a bit.

Not top 100 wrote:

I'd be shocked if Cain didn't make at least 250k per year during her prime. Remember, the agents estimated to us that she made $275k per year.

The highest official maximum WNBA salary for veteran players in 2018 was $113,500. Only 21 women on the LPGA have made over $250k this year. Only 20 US women have made over $250k this year in pro tennis.

That pretty much leaves soccer right? Whole teams in the women's soccer league only are paid $650,000, most making less than $50k. Yes the women's world cup team members made more than $250k this year but that's what 20 women?

^ rojo counts sponsorship for track (Mary Cain), but not for tennis/golf, etc.

Agree. If we're including sponsorship dollars Cain almost certainly wasn't in the top 100 highest-paid female athletes nationally. The USWNT players all have sponsorships (worth far more than Cain's), same with top golfers, top tennis players, top surfers, top skiers (Lindsey Vonn et al.), top snowboarders, top MMA fighters (Ronda Rousey, et al.), top WNBA players (with endorsements Candice Parker's annual income was estimated over $2 million), you could count Danica Patrick et al., and you would definitely need to count the folks in sports scraping for dollars like T&F (swimmers like Missy Franklin, gymnasts like Aly Raisman, Simone Biles; skaters like Michelle Kwan), and it'd be crazy to suggest Cain was making more than the top female sprinters in her own sport (Allison Felix, Lolo Jones, et al.). I think it was an unintentional misfire, but I think that these comments by rojo/wejo do a disservice to the financial challenges T&F athletes face. Usually I appreciate how this site focuses on those hardships. I think it's not a good idea to sensationalize Mary Cain's income when there's a flash of national news via articles in SI and NYT - i.e. the rare occasion folks outside the sport pay attention to T&F. More people need to realize the financial challenges athletes in T&F face - it makes their accomplishments that much more impressive.

I think your post actually just proved that Mary likely WAS in the top 100 paid female US athletes. You name 7-8 sports and then after tennis & soccer having probably 20-30 players each above Mary, there are only a few women at the very top in all the other sports likely also above her. Some of you might not remember this somehow but she was the BIGGEST PHENOM in distance running in US history on the female side. Of course she had a big time contract of $250,000 or more a year to have signed straight from HS. May have only lasted 3-4 years but those were some high paid years for her for sure.

Did Cain ever appear in a Nike Ad? She seemed completely absent from the endorsement world.

Anonymous ex OP affiliate wrote:

Nike is fucking brutal to women ( and men) when they stop performing. A lot of their contracts are performance based. And if you stop winning races WITHIN A YEAR, odds are your income is more than halved, even quartered the next two years. Perks are the new apartments across the street from HQ and the free physio/healthcare/shoes/justin whittaker Active Release miracle workery. There was one year Alberto had everyone drinking Beet Juice because it “increased your performance by 3%”. I doubt Mary cain made very much money at all based on her performances. Did nike maybe pay some tuition at Up? Maybe.

(Please dont give my IP address to Alberto/nike you ****heads)

We all know it's you Ciaran. And you're complicit. You always drank the Salazar/Nike koolaid.

she did. look for "choose your winter" campaign from a couple years back or an ad for shoes from that same year that features her and galen.

she only appears in "choose your winter" for half a second, but no track athletes have ever received much love in nike commercials beside pre maybe.