Tuesdays Mean Off-Days. My Love/Hate Relationship with Triathlon (Part 1).

Not all the time, I guess, but it seems like the past couple weeks, my off-day has fallen on Tuesday.  Here's a novel idea:  

"Zach, maybe you should do a post every off-day!"

"Hmm...I don't know, it sounds pretty ambitious."

"Oh, come on.  What else is this blog for?"

"Entertaining me while I drink coffee and wait for work to start.  It makes me feel productive when I am, in fact, doing absolutely nothing at all."

"That was bleak."

"Do you think we should end this before people stop reading?"

"You mean they started?" 

Okay, but seriously, from now on, off-day is now national blog post day.  Hopefully you won't see more than one per week.

There have been many issues regarding the sport of triathlon (that I love so much) that have been bothering me to no end.  They unfortunately permeate the entire culture of the sport it seems, so I decided to have a bit of rant.  Bear with me.   I think a lot of these comments have value (although some may not, aside from me getting it off of my chest) regarding the current state of the sport.  Surely there are things inherent in the sport that prevent its popularity from growing to such a level that it becomes a household sport or even to the level of cycling.  Then there are the myriad things that some of the governing bodies are doing to shoot the sport in the foot.  But I'll start with the things we can't change.

1.)  There is not much money in the sport because:

Triathlon is like cycling and distance running in respect to its viewership.  How much does it cost to stand on the side of L'alpe d'huez and watch the Tour de France roll by?  How much does it cost to stand on the side of the road and watch the best runners in the world fight it out down the finishing stretch of the Boston Marathon?  How much does it cost to stand on the Queen K in Hawaii and see Normann Stadler or Craig Alexander fly past?  The answer to all of these questions is, of course, nothing at all save for the personal expense of getting yourself to these locations.

How much is the average ticket to a game at Yankee Stadium?  There are 162 games a year in baseball; how many of those are at home?  You don't have to do the math to realize that an unspeakable amount of money is being spent on tickets and the merchandise sold at the game.  Also, how much is spent by companies to air a commercial during one of these games?  A lot.  Compare that to the price of airing a commercial on the versus network during the Tour.  Surely it costs a lot of money to be a major sponsor or host an departure/arrival at the Tour or the Giro, but the advertising opportunities during the three weeks of Tour de France pales in comparison to the 162 games of baseball per year for a team.  And these pro teams have to support riders for a full season; a living salary for the year, not just for three weeks during its most well-known event.  

It sure is odd though, how a sport like cycling struggles to even get a foothold in America.  Lance Armstrong won 7 Tours de France.  It took a few of them for people to start to take notice.  In Spain or Italy, if a rider wins a stage of the Tour even, they go home as national heroes.  At the turn of the 20th century, cycling dominated even here in the U.S. with riders earning far more than baseball players ever dreamed.  Every year, there are over 2 billion viewers of the Tour!  That's over a quarter of everyone on earth.  45.85 million people watched the Super Bowl, arguably the biggest sporting event in America, this past year.  That means the Tour had over 40 times more viewers than the Super Bowl!  Interesting when you consider that the average Football player makes about that many times more than the average cyclist.  I realize I've been using cycling here in an article about triathlon, but it serves a point because cycling even is far more lucrative than triathlon.

To me, these are staggering numbers.  But, as I said before, they are inherent qualities in the sport that won't begin to change unless the sport gets a considerably larger slice of the popularity pie here than it currently does.  Sure Armstrong has come back to cycling this year and that is great for the sport.  However, there is currently no American cyclist waiting in the wings to take over his reign and if winning 7 Tours in a row doesn't make this sport more popular here than it has, good luck finding something that will.  Again, I use cycling because I feel like cycling and triathlon are attached at the hip in a way.  The more popular cycling gets, the more popular triathlon will get just because of the involvement of a bike.

Now for the stuff that we can change:

1.)  This sport makes no money because:

If I tell someone I am a triathlete, the first question they ask usually is, "oh, so you do that Ironman thing?"  This illustrates the point that Ironman is basically what puts the sport on the map in America so the popularity of triathlon here lives and dies by the popularity of Ironman.  It does not matter that Olympic distance triathletes make much much more than Ironman triathletes because people here do not pay attention to Olympic distance triathlons.  I'd be willing to wager most people don't know that there is more than one distance to the sport.  This would be fine if it weren't for the company that puts on nearly every Ironman race in the world and has rights to the Ironman name and brand.  That company would be the World Triathlon Corporation (WTC).  

They are responsible for setting up the prize purse structure at these events, which are laughable.  It was recently announced that the award for the winner of Ironman Florida would get $8,500.  Believe it or not, that is a decrease since last year despite the fact that the costs for entering the event have gone up, as well as the number of entrants.  This money is going somewhere and it isn't to the pros.  The prize purses for these events, save for the Ironman Championships in Kona, have not gone up in fifteen or twenty years.

Typically, a top professional triathlete will either get an appearance fee from the race director or at least a free entry.  This allows the promotor to use this person's name in the advertisements to get more people out to the event.  WTC has now limited the amount of free entries to just a handful.  That means if you're a pro and you finish in 6th place in an Ironman (which is an incredible feat in itself), you would not only get nothing, you would be out the money that you paid to enter plus the travel and lodging for the event assuming you are not one of the lucky few (and I mean few) to get a free entry.

Throw in the fact that even the most veteran, hardened pros can only handle doing maybe three Ironman races in a year, where do they get their money?  Even if they win all three, they get maybe $25,000.  Good luck with that.

WTC, allow me to look into the crystal ball to tell you what this will do to the future of Ironman, and subsequently, the sport.

1.)  Professionals will stop racing your events because they cannot make any money in them.  They will either move away from the sport entirely, or switch to Olympic distance if they are fast enough.  

2.)  Young, up and coming triathletes will not even entertain the idea of becoming an Ironman-focused triathlete while they still have a chance to develop a lot of speed and race Olympic distance where they can actually make money.

3.)  People who are racing Ironman as amateurs with hopes of becoming a pro will stop because, once again, they will not be able to make any money.

4.)  And now to the demographic that makes up 95% of people racing Ironman, the age-groupers.  I'm willing to bet that there is a very large percentage of those people who will race one Ironman and be out of the sport.  An Ironman is an insane challenge for the everyday person, just like climbing Everest or running an Ultramarathon.  People do it so they have a goal and can say that they did it.

So after your pros, serious amateurs and most of your age-group base has left, not to mention preventing people from getting into the distance in the first place, who is left racing your races?

You have a good business model for making a good profit over some time.  Maybe a decade, maybe longer.  But your model for supporting a sport and its athletes is a joke.

Well, that's all for the money and popularity aspects of the sport and I think this post has grown to be quite long enough.  Next post I will tackle the rest of my love/hate relationship with triathlon.

Thanks for reading.  Hope it's getting warmer wherever you are like it is in Pittsburgh!

Cheers.