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Ironman triathlon champions are often considered the superheroes of modern sports, oddly shaped specimens who swim, cycle, and run a total of 140.6 miles in about eight hours.
Yet professional triathletes have long been poorly paid as an afterthought in a sport that has always prioritized everyday amateur participants. who train before and after work and pay close to $ 1,000 to participate in a race.
That may be about to change, starting this weekend in Daytona Beach, Fla. Where many of the best pros in the sport will kick off a championship circuit that he hopes will become as lucrative as golf and tennis championships are for their pros. In the process, they try to topple Ironman, the company that has dominated triathlon for decades, as the competition of choice for elite triathletes.
“It’s actually more difficult to make a living as a professional triathlete now than when I started in 2008,” said Tim O’Donnell, 40, who has won more than 20 major triathlon events. “Most athletes are just trying to pay their bills.”
The new series of events, supported by the Professional Triathletes Organization, a budding alliance of 350 top triathletes and many deep-pocketed investors, is the latest attempt by top athletes to become highly paid partners with the control over their careers and the sports they play instead. that independent contractors undervalued.
While the history of the sport is filled with leagues and tours that seemed theoretically perfect but collapsed after failing to gain an audience, once successful the change can be dramatic. In the 1960s, the Wimbledon semi-finalists received two pairs of shorts from Lillywhites, London’s sports empire. Then the Grand Slam started to empower professionals, and from the 1970s tennis players took control of their tours. Last year, a Wimbledon semi-finalist won $ 750,000 and the singles champions won nearly $ 3 million each.
For comparison, in 2019, the total prize for the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii, the Super Bowl triathlon, was $ 650,000. The winners took home $ 120,000. Earlier this year, Advance Publications, the media company, bought Ironman for $ 730 million.
“These athletes should be highly paid co-owners,” said Charles Adamo, executive president of the Professional Triathletes Organization.
An Ironman spokesperson declined to comment.
Adamo, the world’s top triathletes and investors like Michael Moritz, the billionaire venture capitalist, have planned a series of races with four major individual competitions and an annual team event, similar to the calendar of tennis and golf championships.
Each event will feature 60 top professional men and 60 top professional women. The events will offer over $ 1 million in cash prizes that the top 20 athletes will share – much more than at a typical triathlon competition.
Instead of the 140.6-mile Ironman distance, or the 70.3-mile half-Ironman, the new competitions will be 100 kilometers, approximately 62 miles, and will include a 1.2 mile swim, a bike ride. 48 miles and a half marathon (13.1 miles). This weekend’s race will take place in the Daytona International Speedway, with competitors swimming in the big lake in the infield.
The shorter distance ensures that competitions can end in a more TV-friendly window of around three and a half hours. It will also allow elite athletes to compete at more high level than they otherwise would in a year. O’Donnell predicted the top triathletes would compete in the new group’s five events, plus a regular Ironman event to qualify for Kona and, if they do, the World Championship.
The increase in cash prizes should encourage triathletes to compete head-to-head more often.
Rachel Joyce, a retired champion and co-chair of the triathlete organization, said she and other high performance triathletes routinely choose races in which they know a weak field will give them the best chance of get winner’s paycheck and sponsor bonuses to place first.
“It makes it a bit boring when your closest competitor is 20 minutes away from you,” Joyce said in an interview last month.
This is only part of the downsides of professional triathlon, a sport that started out like a lark in the 1970s in California and Hawaii. The dirty secret of elite triathletes, with their chiseled physique, $ 8,000 bikes, and workout schedules that allow for unlimited chocolate creme pie, is that for most pros, the pay is relatively poor.
Kevin Durant of the Nets will be approaching $ 40 million this season, not to mention the millions more he earns from sponsorship. In 2019, German Jan Frodeno, the reigning Ironman world champion and sort of deity for triathletes, was paid like a decent accountant for his victories, taking home $ 158,000 in prizes. Katie Zaferes of the United States, who led the 2019 men’s and women’s cash prize list, won $ 347,500. Only $ 80,000 in winnings was enough for a place in the top 10 of the money list. For the best of the best, endorsement deals can boost revenue – within the grasp of the average bad backup pitcher – but with triathlon barely on TV, these lucrative endorsement deals are growing. hard to find for everyone except superstars.
“The best triathletes do pretty well, but those in the middle and bottom hurt,” said Rocky Harris, general manager of USA Triathlon, the sport’s national governing body.
Alissa Doehla, was a professional marathoner until 2016, when she decided to pursue the triathlon. She estimates that the change required an investment of about $ 20,000 in equipment. She finished five top 10 in Half Ironman events in 2017. Then she was hit by a truck while training in 2018. She returned to competitions and said it was possible that she beat even that first year, she certainly hasn’t done so since.
“It’s so expensive up front,” Doehla, 34, said from her home in Indiana last month, where she was training for this weekend’s race at Daytona Beach. “My husband has a good job. For people who are not fortunate enough to have a spouse to support them during the lean years, it is a tough sport.
The new series will only work if fans actually watch it. This would increase media rights fees and induce potential sponsors to try and reach a highly desirable audience.
USA Triathlon has found that the average income of all triathletes is over $ 125,000. Sports boosters like to portray triathlon as the 21st century version of golf – a favorite activity of white-collar executives obsessed with data from their Garmin watches with an intensity their predecessors bestowed on golf handicaps. But participatory endurance sports have always been about maximizing entry fees rather than creating stars who compete for million dollar purses and create gripping television sports drama.
About 100 media outlets around the world, including NBC’s Peacock streaming service, will feature the Daytona Beach race this weekend. To move forward, organizers need long term rights and sponsorship agreements.
The new effort plans to allow Weekend Warriors to compete in its competitions, but their entry fee will not be enough to support the organization and the prizes it wants to offer.
Chris Kermode, who led the ATP Tour of tennis and is now vice president of organizing professional triathletes, said that if televised championships
snooker and darts could create famous champions, triathletes, who are generally more attractive physical specimens than dart throwers or pool players, should be able to find their way.
“The principles of all sports are basically the same,” Kermode said. “It’s about making people care that one person wins over someone else. Everyone has a story and if you tell it you can make people worry. “
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