Bumping this thread after a few bits and pieces I’ve heard in podcasts recently. Looking for others/media to confirm to the best of their knowledge @JackKelly-TTH@Kyleglass91@E_DUB.
1: End of year ranking bonuses from 2024 have not been paid.
2: Non-contract athletes have a cap on their prize money earnings when they race as a wildcard in T100 races.
3: Athletes have not been paid prize money from T100 Singapore 2025.
Am I totally off base here? Not to be doom-and-gloom but this sounds a lot like the International Swimming League and would be totally unacceptable by the PTO. Grounds for athletes to sue for unpaid wages?
Now this is interesting. Is it only for women? Because Simmonds was 7th, but my assumption is she would forfeit her bonus money once declared guilty. Which I expect to happen in August because I don’t see a decision anytime soon. Either because she’s cooked or because she’s fighting a delay action.
But here’s a different question, let’s say it’s correct and the entire bonus pool hasn’t been paid. How much is that? 1.5M? Why are athletes who are owed money still racing?
Please step into the StroBro lounge and light up a cigar, pour a nice bourbon, and let’s have a chat about how PTO is a joke and how it’s not what people think it is!
The PTO ‘End-of-Year’ Rankings bonus has always been on a ‘promise’ rather than a contractural basis.
You may recall when 2020 went down the tubes the PTO super-generously ante-ed up ?$2M divvied up between the top 100+100 Pros. To generate goodwill capital.
And then paid it on Rankings, initially 100+100 and then dropping to 50+50: in '21 through '23.
In the main tranche of T100 contracts (December 2023) for the first year (2024) the potential earnings included the EoY Bonus payout in an athlete’s illustrative total.
That is all.
I do not know whether some or any of the expected EoY 2024 Bonus (pool was advertised as $2M) has been paid out/received but clearly some athletes have not received. When the squeeze comes on . . .
Given Knibb was expecting $100k from that source, surrendering a bit of that as a penalty for breaking her T100 contract and not attending at Singapore (without valid reason), means she is still well in surplus.
And if Singapore has not yet paid out, unsurprising to see MvR and Smith travelling to grab a last minute Marbella slot (at 70.3 Nice). Of the top women, Duffy is injured, Spivey has WTCS and supertri, Waugh has WTCS (and surely an ‘in’ on supertri if she wants) and, bar two, all the rest have Marbella slots.
Odd ones out are Gentle and Derron, who have nothing outside T100.
I guess you could add Lawrence (NB 2014 70.3WC), but she has motherhood.
To be eligible for the Bonus you had to be a PTO Member. I would say that’s a contract of some kind. There is definitely inducement there. Don’t think she “surrendered” any of the bonus so much as she “surrendered” a guaranteed portion of her 2025 contract. That would be a really bad contract to sign if so, but Triathletes seem to chase money even when it’s fake…get a lawyer and possibly better agent.
This media release makes it seem like it was 100% a real thing for 2024
Between the athlete contracts, T100 race prize fund and T100 Triathlon World Tour pool, the series provides more than $7,000,000 in athlete compensation, and is distributed in a way that not only rewards the winners, but also recognises the significant achievement of racing at this level
Whoa… Cart before horse. She’s under no obligation to race Singapore if they hadn’t paid the ranking bonus.
If I’m in her shoes, there’s NO chance in hell I’m structuring my season and risking damage to my training when they haven’t paid out what was owed.
She didn’t take a penalty in that view, but didn’t show up to work next week because they hadn’t paid her bonus for last year.
There’s no reason she should expect to get paid in Singapore if they have paid EOY yet. Once she heard through the grapevine, she likely felt more comfortable racing subsequently. Now, obviously she never wanted to race Singapore for a variety of reasons. But I think at this point anytime someone talks about athletes not living up to their contracts The EOY payments needs to be discussed first.
Yes, we can say the athletes have themselves to blame, as most didn’t prioritize PTO/T100. But T100 is the group claiming to want to build the best pro race series in the world. If they don’t honor payments they can’t expect athletes to prioritize them.
You can say there’s no contract that was signed, but they publicized the payments didn’t they? There are legal cases where advertising was seen to create a legally binding contract despite no contract being signed.
If PTO advertised their payouts, that’s an agreement.
I think the tough thing with the PTO is that they are still basically a “start up” but they are trying to basically go beyond their means. Like most start up companies, everyone gives you a break, they appreciate you trying to make it etc. But your generally not too far out in front of your skis so to speak. PTO has imo done that too often. My 2 biggest issues I see is that they expanded way too fast with the number of races to chase this “season long narrative” that they are trying to chase like this if F1 or whatever, and secondly they’ve mishandled the money aspect of it within a professional sport setting too often. They talk up the money side when they want to get a pat on the back about how much they are supporting the pros, but then they go radio silent if any finances on the contracts are brought up. I really don’t know why they went with a ~10 race season if they are only going to pay the athletes for basically a ~5 race salary. Make it a 6+1 race series and then I think a lot of the issues would be solved. So I think generally lots of people appreciate what they have done, but it certainly seems like at times a lot of self inflicted issues as well.
1.) Yes, PTO end of year bonuses were promised.
2.) It is not uncommon for race prize money to not be paid out until the end of the following quarter.
There are also sometimes fun things where people don’t get paid; e.g., they don’t provide the appropriate tax documents to the race organizer in order for them to be paid promptly. (Speaking from experience on this.)
Ten (9+1) not needed (I agree, and note this year the tour is 8+1, if it still goes to Qatar).
A race every ~5 weeks (average) starting in late March (eg Gold Coast) and 8+1 maintains a season-long drumbeat. I note that now we have the 70.3WC and the IMWC(joint) dates fixed (September and October) so T100 scheduling should be more straightforward in 2026.
I suspect that if the PTO makes the Gold Coast a mandatory attend in March, they’ll get a rather more positive response cf specifying Singapore in April.
If PTO specified a 6+1 contract, several more of the top 10 would not sign and the core field would degenerate into SC graduates and athletes ranked in the 30s. More of the top names would join Ditlev, Lange, Laidlow, RvB, Philipp, Matthews, Haug, Sodaro, Pierre and say ‘thanks but no thanks’: a dilution of the quality the PTO absolutely need for the T100. For example: Knibb, LCB and Findlay were on the knife edge.
". . a lot of the issues would be solved. . . " this is a balance: solve some but create others.
So you can kinda debate whether it’s 6 or 7 or 5, I think the current what 9, is way too many. I’ve always been a fan and I’ve said this since AB complained about the WTCS series over a decade ago. Create a race series that races 1 time a month over essentially the “summer months” (sorry Southern Hemisphere I know, I know the world is a big world, but triathlon is mostly a NH sport). I think it would sorta create a flow to the season and the athlete’s training, and I think it would give yourself consistency. And the WTCS is running into this now, they have such randomness to their schedule, as does T100. Start/stop/start stop, and then a pocket of races here, a pocket of races there months later. There is no real “consistency” to the schedule, so I think that likely needs more addressing than anything.
Obviously the smaller the race numbers, the higer percentage of races you’d require/need. If you went to 6 races, and you count 4+1 (so you get 1 miss), that’s imo not really that much of an ask. I mean if your simply having to bend to every pro athlete, at some point your race series is going to have an issue with any decision. So I’m not really against at some point sorta puttting the fire to the feet of pros and saying either your in or your out. Especially if the current line of top pros is only going to race 60% of your events anyways under the current format.
If it was explicitly stated and the year-end bonus hasn’t been paid out, it really doesn’t reflect well on PTO. There is not other way of spinning it. Credibility will be severely dented
I give them the benefit of the doubt that prize money from Singapore will be paid at some point. If not, I think many will start fleeing and not bother to fulfil contracts .
Again – sometimes those payments are delayed or not paid on time for reasons that are within the control of the athlete (e.g., not appropriately submitting tax documents). Speaking from experience at my time at a race series – some athletes were almost a year behind just because they couldn’t be bothered to wrap up a 1090 (or other document, if they were set up as an S-Corp).
But from a surface perspective, yes, it doesn’t look great.
Only if they continue being cheap. If they make their contracts actually worth something, like 300k base. Then they would get whoever they wanted. The problem is the aren’t doing that. So you could do it two ways…big base salary or huge prize money. Huge prize money is currently how the PGA Tour works.
Except that if the PTO was professional all of these tax documents would be submitted months in advance by anyone who was in the pool. Do we really think they don’t have Knibb’s wiring info?
I totally understand that. It’s surprising how much people just fall apart when it comes to asking them to do some paperwork.
But the T100 situation certainly seems more than that, because they did (I assume) pay out previous years and events without such an issue and now it seems like there are issues.
I also noticed in the Real Tri podcast that randomly played on my run this morning that the wild card athletes weren’t aware of how the payments got paid out for finishing the race. They showed up to race assuming they’d make a certain amount if they finished, and the fine print felt like a bait and switch to them.
Now, pro athletes have never struck me as the most financially savvy group in general, notable exceptions notwithstanding, but the conclusions that have to be made is the belts are being tightened ever tighter. I wonder how much the PTO leadership is still paying themselves?
This PTO thing really just seems like a cash grab from some people selling a dream to easily deluded investors. Well, at least we get a little show and some competition pushing Ironman along.
And all that being said, at some point it’s nice to see wealthy uber investors actually sink money into real world projects rather than just keep it locked up in financial markets. But it’s a shame when capital goes to waste on investments with no hope of generating a return.
So I’m currently not HR for my company, but several years ago I was responsible for paying over 500 professional athletes every two weeks. I have a lot of stories. But the PTO not having payroll and tax documents as part of their onboarding wild card athletes shows severe incompetence. We don’t let players touch the field without payroll and tax documents.
So how much does IM pull back from their pro series when PTO/T100 dies off?
It seems like the IMPS has held it’s own very well vs the “professional” race series, but without that competition, you just wonder how much incentive IM will have to keep paying the financial numbers they are paying. Especially when you just helped squash the pro competition.
Very little if at all. They seem to have a leader that understands the marketing benefit of the Pro Series. Their registrations seemly have sky rocketed with many sellouts this year and even into next year. I’m sure someone on their marketing team or finance team is saying that’s due to other factors, but I doubt Scott D would risk making that blunder and stunting their resurgence. Maybe a few years down the road if they are able to suss out attribution to growth but that wouldn’t be possible yet. They need more years of data to make that kind of decision.