I might suggest a thread title that is a bit less vague.

Yes, I 'hoped' it was about FTP or Laidlow's average power at Kona: as he said 'the numbers don't lie'.
It's a meritocracy, @lyla. The only people "choosing" are the athletes themselves, but ikwym.
And for those near the top, there was an 'accelerator': the Collins Cup fee and the end of year PTO bonus, the fee and the bonus both dependent on rankings.

Shows how big the PTO is for top athletes. Curious if there's a list of non-branded prize money races.

Some other impressive numbers:

• 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823
• 2.7182818284590452353602874713526624977572470936999595749669676277240766303535475945713821785251664274274663919320030
• 1/0
• 69

You forgot n+1

While earnings have increased, it's still a shame that the prize money for Ironman World Champion is 1/8th of what the Halo (video game) World Champion earns.

I wonder if it's reflective of real "growth" though. Like, let's say you go back in time to when both HyVee and LifeTime and AbuDhabi and a lot of the big money races from that era were still on going. I bet the numbers wouldn't be that different - though it'd be more skewed towards short course (remember that both Greg Bennett and Daniela Ryf have cleared $1M lump paydays as a result of one-off "streak" bonuses).

I think it's great to see these numbers - though I think it's the larger numbers lower down that are maybe more encouraging - but I don't know if they are really that much different than they were. And, in particular, I continue to have my concerns about whether or not the PTO has an actually viable business model or if this is just part of the historical boom-and-bust trend of big money races and/or sponsors *briefly* investing in triathlon.

Rewind to the Island House Triathlon - which purported (though with less real substance) to do a lot of the same things the PTO is doing now - and what happened with that once Mark Holowesko got bored with triathlon...

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"Non est ad astra mollis e terris via." - Seneca | rappstar.com | FB - Rappstar Racing | IG - @jordanrapp

Interesting point. According to random googling, 10 million people played HALO in 2022. I don't have good data on half/long course triathlon, but from what I've seen I'm guessing 100,000 in 2022 would be reasonable to generous? So that's means triathlon should have 1/100th the prize purse of Halo. Apparently it's harder to win the Halo championship than the triathlon championship. Slightly sarcastic!