Flashes of Panic

There’s a long-standing theory that athletics (aka “track and field”) would be more popular as a spectator sport if its athletes earned the same sort of staggering sums common among international football players (for nearly all varieties of “football”,) basketball players, baseball players, etc.

It’s a theory with some contradictions, particularly given the fascinated disgust with which fans sometimes view the top end of the salary scale for the team-sport pros. The undeniable upside is that we associate high monetary values with importance; if we value these athletes highly, along with their training and performance, people will pay more attention to them.

So why don’t we? I’ve talked about how professional runners get paid here before, and even how small our bonuses are. The problem is in supply and demand.

Let’s assume the supply of athletes is pretty much constant across sports. (It is: you can always go down the talent scale and find enough to meet demand. It’s only when you set specific standards for performance that supply fluctuates, and as the Boston Marathon experience proves, setting minimum standards will create an incentive for many athletes to raise their performance level to meet that standard.) In running, we always talk about supply, though: how many men ran marathons under 2:08 or 2:10 in a given year, how many women ran under 2:30, etc.

That’s because running goes all weird on the other side of the scale: demand. The reason professional team-sports athletes get paid as much as they do is because there is competition between teams for their services. Johnny Damon isn’t getting paid as much as he is because the Yankees are seeing that kind of value from his playing; he’s getting paid as much as he is because the Yankees were willing to offer more than the Red Sox.

There’s no analog to this in athletics. It is true that some top marathoners (Olympic gold medalists, world record setters, previous Majors winners) can benefit from competition among the major marathons, but if anything this situation where demand exceeds limited supply and produces monetary reward for some athletes highlights the problem; if there were more athletes running at that level, demand would not necessarily increase, and the same pot of money would be spread between more athletes.

How do we solve that problem? I can think of two other sports with rich athletes and no teams: golf and tennis. We can probably drop golf, because golf is awash in sponsorship cash from advertisers who want to reach the (presumably affluent) spectators for that sport. (Golf is live on television more consistently than athletics, and yet athletics gets better ratings when it is televised. Golf is on more frequently because there are more advertising dollars to make it profitable for the networks.)

I’m not sure how tennis pays its stars. Sponsorships, sure, but we’re doing that, too. Do tennis players get appearance fees for the big tournaments? Is the prize money comparable to marathons or GP track meets? How many pro tennis players are full-time and how many are juggling part-time jobs to subsidize their pro tennis “career”? I don’t know the answers to that, but finance models from outside athletics are likely to be useful when we’re talking about improving the situations of our professional runners.

Now Playing: Wilderness from Angels of Destruction! by Marah

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