First off, full disclosure: I have never received an appearance fee. I had equipment given to me, plane tickets covered, race fees waived, but I never was in the triathlonic stratosphere with Dave Scott or Mark Allen or the very few rest of them who may, on occasion, have received an appearance fee of some sort.
Yet this week's announcement by a large investment company, that just so happens to own the rights to many of the top marathons (Rock & Roll, etc.), to stop granting appearance money to running's fastest and fittest, warrants examination.
First off, no one is making any real money in endurance sports. No one. Some of the best marathoners and triathletes might make six figures in a good year, but Tiger made that yesterday, in a few hours, so the amount of money this company is talking about is relatively small in overall sports economy terms.
Second, the company isn't even talking about how much they're talking about. They won't mention how much they had been allocating to elite athletes' appearance fees, nor conversely are they willing to mention how much of this they'll be then ploughing back into the sport. Sounds a bit like robbing Peter to pay Peter's investors, not Paul.
My first concern is that many of the top endurance events are now owned by investment groups and not necessarily any one or any group directly tied to the sport. Ironman, for example, is owned by an investment fund and not by a group of triathletes who might well know, or care particularly deeply, about this iconic longer version of the sport of triathlon. This concerns me.
What also concerns are the reasons given, at least publicly, for this change. Apparently the investors polled athletes competing in their events and say they discovered that most athletes could give a rip about the top athletes in the race. Many didn't even know who they were, where they were from, or what times they'd recently posted. In other words, many athletes are in it for themselves. The sport doesn't transcend them; they, regardless their talent, transcend the sport.
Let's examine this a bit by looking no further than Ironman. For years now Ironman has layered in more global events for triathletes and would be triathletes, at the same time working carefully to make each of those fields bigger. The ballooning of events and event size has allowed many more folks to get involved with the sport of Ironman, but it has certainly come at a cost (some of which I talk about in other blog entries..). While it is apparent to this author that the upper end of the age group fields is more competitive than it was ever before, this Darwinian reality is a function of quantity not quality. A bit like cats playing around on a typewriter long enough and coming up with a bit of Shakespeare, throw enough folks into a sport and surely a few of them will be good, some exceptionally so, no matter their age.
But what about the rest? Which is to say, if you just look at the Port Elizabeth 50-54 men's field of 2011, what about the 99+% who didn't make it to Kona, 95% of whom never have a chance of making it to our putative World Championship, even under the best of conditions? This is the group the investors are talking about. Indeed, this is the group actually underwriting the sport, the one leading top investment firms to buy out leading endurance races and markets, the same group of non-elite folks the investment house feels it understands.
So, because it says a lot about society today, let's talk about why a majority would care so little about those at the head of the class in their sport as to deny them fairly paltry appearance fees.
Like Ironman, marathon fields keep getting bigger. The 2013 Berlin Marathon took place last weekend. A colleague participated, finishing in 4:25. It was her first marathon, but no sooner had she done it then she had to decide if she was going to do it again, 51.5 weeks early, if she had any hope of gaining entry into the October 2014 field of 40,000+.
Today, even second or third tier events fill up quickly. Want to do a major race in 2014? Chances are you've already signed up. The investment portfolios purchasing major endurance events know this fact. Apparently, the majority swift are now of the keyboard variety, the ones who gain access to websites just after midnight, when entries often open up, and who fill up the fields to the cliche events of their choice.
And while the top times remain fast and may even on occasion get faster (2013 Berlin was a world record for the men, IMSA 2011 was a world Ironman record for the women, Kona 2011 was a World Championship record for the men - to cite the races mentioned here), in general times aren't getting faster as fields balloon. Average marathon times keep creeping upward (my colleague was hardly alone at the finish in Berlin), which means that the lion's share of folks in the legions of endurance races now out there for consumption are finishing farther and farther behind folks they never knew and can't become.
At the expense of being a bit unpopular, it is this author's view that technology is possibly also leading to changes in people's opinions. Could there be a connection between dropping appearance fees and the rise of the "A is for Apple Products" generation? If at least some conscious time is spent connecting virtually with sites that parrot my opinion, chatting with folks I have already "friended", and basically having routine thoughts and feelings confirmed but not challenged, how can I be asked to reach out to someone I don't know? Many live in a world that reflects back to self, a world in which we live with and work near people like us and rarely mix with others. This is a world in which partisans are reality, are sole basis for judgement, damn the others, even if it means making Congress dysfunctional and bringing the US government to a halt.
Given that sports are the ultimate metaphor for life, is that the way our races are becoming, polarized, disconnected? At Kona, the pros are now a separate race from the amateurs. If many age-groupers paid little heed to them in the past, chances are they are doing less so now, when even the fastest among the non-pros have no chance of catching those who largely struggle do it for a living, most of whom won't win any money that day. And why were the pros separated from the rest of the field? Because the owners of Ironman at the time caved to pressure from TV, which had a difficult time disentangling the pros, and particularly the pro women, from the top ranks of the rest of the field. Ironman presented the change to the pros as a bonus... while at the same time cutting back on the size of the pro field and keeping the overall prize money steady. Message: we really only need the very best of you, and then only on our terms.
No wonder many of the world's best stay away from Kona now. Kona already forces the world's best to qualify year after year for the race. That means at least two ironman races need to be devoted to Kona each year. I was a pro once, and the two ironman races I did in '84 led to a breakout Kona performance - and a stress fracture in my right tibia for good measure. A pro essentially needs to dedicate his or herself to the Kona assault (just like the rest of us), and then know that on average he or she has a 1 in 5 chance of winning money, and about a 1 in 20 chance of winning real money, of the variety that might pay barely year's expenses.
My prediction is that private investment funds owning endurance events, while lucrative potentially to the fund's investors, will ultimately do little for sport. Much like private health insurance, privately held ownership of races solely for the investment opportunity will swell fields and highlight mass brand appeal while selling the soul of the race or family of races. Terminating appearance fees will lead some pros to leave the sport, and for a guy who used to gain no small amount of inspiration from the top pros (and still does), leaving these guys off the starting line is a sad day for sport. It begs the question: Who should be making the big decisions about any sport's iconic events?
Yet this week's announcement by a large investment company, that just so happens to own the rights to many of the top marathons (Rock & Roll, etc.), to stop granting appearance money to running's fastest and fittest, warrants examination.
First off, no one is making any real money in endurance sports. No one. Some of the best marathoners and triathletes might make six figures in a good year, but Tiger made that yesterday, in a few hours, so the amount of money this company is talking about is relatively small in overall sports economy terms.
Second, the company isn't even talking about how much they're talking about. They won't mention how much they had been allocating to elite athletes' appearance fees, nor conversely are they willing to mention how much of this they'll be then ploughing back into the sport. Sounds a bit like robbing Peter to pay Peter's investors, not Paul.
My first concern is that many of the top endurance events are now owned by investment groups and not necessarily any one or any group directly tied to the sport. Ironman, for example, is owned by an investment fund and not by a group of triathletes who might well know, or care particularly deeply, about this iconic longer version of the sport of triathlon. This concerns me.
What also concerns are the reasons given, at least publicly, for this change. Apparently the investors polled athletes competing in their events and say they discovered that most athletes could give a rip about the top athletes in the race. Many didn't even know who they were, where they were from, or what times they'd recently posted. In other words, many athletes are in it for themselves. The sport doesn't transcend them; they, regardless their talent, transcend the sport.
Let's examine this a bit by looking no further than Ironman. For years now Ironman has layered in more global events for triathletes and would be triathletes, at the same time working carefully to make each of those fields bigger. The ballooning of events and event size has allowed many more folks to get involved with the sport of Ironman, but it has certainly come at a cost (some of which I talk about in other blog entries..). While it is apparent to this author that the upper end of the age group fields is more competitive than it was ever before, this Darwinian reality is a function of quantity not quality. A bit like cats playing around on a typewriter long enough and coming up with a bit of Shakespeare, throw enough folks into a sport and surely a few of them will be good, some exceptionally so, no matter their age.
But what about the rest? Which is to say, if you just look at the Port Elizabeth 50-54 men's field of 2011, what about the 99+% who didn't make it to Kona, 95% of whom never have a chance of making it to our putative World Championship, even under the best of conditions? This is the group the investors are talking about. Indeed, this is the group actually underwriting the sport, the one leading top investment firms to buy out leading endurance races and markets, the same group of non-elite folks the investment house feels it understands.
So, because it says a lot about society today, let's talk about why a majority would care so little about those at the head of the class in their sport as to deny them fairly paltry appearance fees.
Like Ironman, marathon fields keep getting bigger. The 2013 Berlin Marathon took place last weekend. A colleague participated, finishing in 4:25. It was her first marathon, but no sooner had she done it then she had to decide if she was going to do it again, 51.5 weeks early, if she had any hope of gaining entry into the October 2014 field of 40,000+.
Today, even second or third tier events fill up quickly. Want to do a major race in 2014? Chances are you've already signed up. The investment portfolios purchasing major endurance events know this fact. Apparently, the majority swift are now of the keyboard variety, the ones who gain access to websites just after midnight, when entries often open up, and who fill up the fields to the cliche events of their choice.
And while the top times remain fast and may even on occasion get faster (2013 Berlin was a world record for the men, IMSA 2011 was a world Ironman record for the women, Kona 2011 was a World Championship record for the men - to cite the races mentioned here), in general times aren't getting faster as fields balloon. Average marathon times keep creeping upward (my colleague was hardly alone at the finish in Berlin), which means that the lion's share of folks in the legions of endurance races now out there for consumption are finishing farther and farther behind folks they never knew and can't become.
At the expense of being a bit unpopular, it is this author's view that technology is possibly also leading to changes in people's opinions. Could there be a connection between dropping appearance fees and the rise of the "A is for Apple Products" generation? If at least some conscious time is spent connecting virtually with sites that parrot my opinion, chatting with folks I have already "friended", and basically having routine thoughts and feelings confirmed but not challenged, how can I be asked to reach out to someone I don't know? Many live in a world that reflects back to self, a world in which we live with and work near people like us and rarely mix with others. This is a world in which partisans are reality, are sole basis for judgement, damn the others, even if it means making Congress dysfunctional and bringing the US government to a halt.
Given that sports are the ultimate metaphor for life, is that the way our races are becoming, polarized, disconnected? At Kona, the pros are now a separate race from the amateurs. If many age-groupers paid little heed to them in the past, chances are they are doing less so now, when even the fastest among the non-pros have no chance of catching those who largely struggle do it for a living, most of whom won't win any money that day. And why were the pros separated from the rest of the field? Because the owners of Ironman at the time caved to pressure from TV, which had a difficult time disentangling the pros, and particularly the pro women, from the top ranks of the rest of the field. Ironman presented the change to the pros as a bonus... while at the same time cutting back on the size of the pro field and keeping the overall prize money steady. Message: we really only need the very best of you, and then only on our terms.
No wonder many of the world's best stay away from Kona now. Kona already forces the world's best to qualify year after year for the race. That means at least two ironman races need to be devoted to Kona each year. I was a pro once, and the two ironman races I did in '84 led to a breakout Kona performance - and a stress fracture in my right tibia for good measure. A pro essentially needs to dedicate his or herself to the Kona assault (just like the rest of us), and then know that on average he or she has a 1 in 5 chance of winning money, and about a 1 in 20 chance of winning real money, of the variety that might pay barely year's expenses.
My prediction is that private investment funds owning endurance events, while lucrative potentially to the fund's investors, will ultimately do little for sport. Much like private health insurance, privately held ownership of races solely for the investment opportunity will swell fields and highlight mass brand appeal while selling the soul of the race or family of races. Terminating appearance fees will lead some pros to leave the sport, and for a guy who used to gain no small amount of inspiration from the top pros (and still does), leaving these guys off the starting line is a sad day for sport. It begs the question: Who should be making the big decisions about any sport's iconic events?
