CanadianBiker32

Just good question on debate. Why are the prize money in pro cycling so low compared to other sports. Where athletes work way less.

Such as why do soccer players can make over 300 million a year by only playing a few games. Or NBA stars too .

Where pro cyclists have to devote most of their time and life to training and racing. Work and suffer the most and in the end get paid the less.

How come pay outs are so low?

Machka 

Which cash payouts are you talking about?

Caretaker

When did pay reflect work rate?

Comparing road cycling to soccer or any of the big N. American sports is ridiculous in terms of money.

Leinster

More eyeballs on an English Premier League or NFL game than on pretty much any cycling race, and tv money is what pays the piper.

Also, don't assume that pro cyclists are training any harder than pro soccer, American football, baseball etc players. NFL players are putting in 60-70 hour weeks between gym, practice field, video sessions et before they ever take the field Sunday.

brianmcg123

No pro athlete makes 300,000,000 a year.

colombo357

Good question, OP.

Let's see.... $300 million per soccer player or "NBA star". Cyclists could easily get the same pay.

So 180 TDF riders * 300 million = $54 BILLION.

Somebody's walking away with 53 billion dollars per year (rounded down) and screwing all the riders!!!! And that's just for the TDF!

We all know how popular the sport of cycling is. Everyone on my block spent about $5K this past month flying to France and buying front row TDF tickets. Those who couldn't attend paid $15 on pay-per-view per stage.

gregf83 

I work hard on the bike and nobody pays me anything. How is that fair??

merlinextraligh

You're off by more than a factor of 10. The NBA has a salary cap, which limits the amount you can pay anyone player to around $20 million a year.

Revenue streams in the NBA are totally different than cycling. An NBA team plays 82 games, and can sell tickets to those games. With an average ticket price of $123 for non premium seats, that's over $150 million for 15,000 seats for 82 games, and thats before you get to luxury boxes, concessions, parking, etc.

You can't really sell tickets to a bike race. (other than a small amount of VIP seating at the finish line, which don't sell for much). Only revenue is from sponsors, and TV rights.

dm83

The salaries paid by the teams are already pretty decent for such a niche sport. Endorsements, bonuses, prize money are only incentives to perform better.

Caretaker

The real question should be 'why are cash payouts for some sports so obscenely big?'

gpsblake

This is an interesting article about the subject

How Much Money Do PRO Cyclists Make? | CyclingTips

For most, they race out of love for the sport. And once they are done, nearly all of them have to get full-time jobs outside of cycling.

Keith99

Cuz 90% of the owners are in it for the trophy and are willing to spend to get it.

cafzali

The NBA has a team salary cap, but not really a player cap. Because of what's better known as the "Larry Bird exemption," an NBA team can re-sign its own player for as much money as they want, although it still counts against the overall team cap that figures into the luxury tax payment.

But to address the core issue, it's all about TV rights and which sport has the most lucrative ones. Cycling TV rights will never generate that much money and to boot all that money is disproportionately shared, making lots of money for ASO and other promoters and the UCI. If cycling were more popular and team owners had leverage, they'd sit out a year, force the UCI and promoters to change their business model and share TV revenue and then we'd have an equitable sport where teams who didn't have an owner that viewed their cycling team as a "vanity project" wouldn't be under threat of folding every 2-3 years

merlinextraligh

There's still a maximum that your allowed to pay any one player. The Bird rule allows you to exceed the team salary cap in order to resign your own player up to the maximum salary.

NBA Salary Cap FAQ

NBA salary cap - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

JameB

It has to do with the amount of money a league can make from a sport.

Sports like football (soccer), basketball, hockey have HUGE markets where public pays a lot of money to see the superstars play. I'm new to cycling but I'm a huge hockey fan, last year (2013-2014) the league had 3.7 billion dollars in revenue. Under a CBA, NHL divides this money and sets a cap limit.

3.7 billion / 30 teams = 123.3 million per team in revenues

That money is a result of investment of the owners and the players. Without the players, owners can't make money and without the owners, players don't have a place to play and make big $$! So this money is split (let's not go in these calculations, too boring). But in the end, the salary cap is set at 64 million which is divided amongst a team's players.

---

Now, I'm guessing cycling doesn't generate this much revenue for teams or events to payout. And even if they do make this much money, without a CBA, players don't really have much bargaining ground... they have to take w.e. they're given. (this used to be the case in many sports where owners made a shut ton of money and paid the players min wage until players got together and set up a players' union or something).

---

In short, the awards depend on the revenue/profits AND the bargaining power of the players.

never_recover

This is what really bothers me.

Of course people should never be payed based upon how hard they work! That would be a disaster.

But they should be payed based upon what would happen if they were gone. Sportsmen could be replaced by anybody, the overall level would be lower but nobody would see the difference. Look at the TDF this year, if we didn't know Contador, Froome and Quintana existed, nobody would say the level was too low.

Now politicians, journalists, lawyers, etc. Could we just replace them by anybody? And yet they are among the most hated professions today...

/rant

(and I'm a software engineer)