BELL LAP #40

ELIMINATING PRIZE MONEY (May 30, 2001)

Twenty years ago, in June of 1981, the sport of distance running was in an all-out war. On one side, top runners. On the other, a variety of sport governing bodies--the Athletics Congress, the IAAF, the International Olympic Committee. The issue, simply, was whether distance runners had a right to earn money through their athletic skill, above board and without interference. There was money in the sport in under-the-table payments, but the only way to earn it was to remain an "amateur." Admit your professionalism and you'd find it impossible to get into races where money was paid. We call this irony. Or hypocrisy.

In any case, top runners were tired of it. by June of 1981, many had agreed to risk their athletic futures by accepting prize money at the Cascade Run Off in Portland, Oregon. There had been a handful of prize money races in the preceding years, but none well attended. At the Cascade Run Off, most of the top stars were on hand, and the gauntlet they threw down didn't go unnoticed. Suspensions followed, and for many runners a future with vanishing competitive opportunities loomed.

Over the next few years, though, the governing bodies finally reacted with something other than intimidation. Rules changed, athletes were reinstated. And today, runners are free to accept prize money, sign endorsement contracts, and receive any and all payments for athletic services. Provided, that is, they can get any.

I mention this in response to a recent column by Mike Tymn in "National Masters News," in which he suggests that races would be better off eliminating prize money. Redirect funds, he urges, to race administration, and provide just expense money to elite runners--open and masters. Tymn suggests that while this might result in slower races, it doesn't matter because elite runners are largely unknown to the public, and "no one except the elite runners themselves and a few media representatives cares whether the winning time is 2:11, 2:21, or 2:31."

Call this, if you will, the dark side of the everyone's-a-winner philosophy. It's not just that we should respect everyone's effort, no matter how fast or slow they run, but--and here you're losing me--that the special achievement and distinction of making it across the line first, and the hard-earned difference between 2:21 and 2:11, doesn't matter.

Tymn rightly points out that prize money hasn't seemed to help the overall level of competition, especially among Americans. Still, the best years American runners had, the early 1980s, were a time when shoe companies provided support to hundreds of post-collegians, and prize money added some additional dollars to the mix. Performances eroded after that mostly because shoe companies shifted dollars from developing runners to advertising and a few mega-stars. Widespread post-collegiate support largely disappeared.

At a time when we're finally reversing this trend and making some progress with support programs, training camps, and so on, it's hard to imagine that less prize money is going to help. According to information supplied by the Road Running Information Center, U.S. runners--male and female--won $1,746,681 in prize money last year. Spread across an entire nation, that may not be a fortune. But it's something.

We didn't fight for prize money twenty years ago, though, to create a U.S. development system. We did it to restore integrity to competition and allow excellence to be rewarded. The fastest runner earns the biggest check.

Plenty of events do, of course, draw throngs of happy participants with no prize money and little special recognition for the race winner. There are lots of events in the world, and different scenarios for success. But to assert as a general principle that prize money can be eliminated because fast times don't matter? Is this the brave new sport runners twenty years ago fought to create?