Track stars racing for $150K at Ultimate Championship is sign of progress and work yet to be done

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — Yes, there will be track and field stars — Sha’Carri Richardson, Gabby Thomas, Mondo Duplantis and more — vying for those $150,000 top prizes this week at a new event called the Ultimate Championships. There will also be runners like Jacory Patterson. 

The 26-year-old, 400-meter sprinter from South Carolina might not be the most recognizable face at the three-day meet featuring 28 events that kicks off Friday. In some ways, though, he’s the reason this event exists. 

Last year, Patterson was working a night job loading trucks at a UPS facility. His story went viral when he won a race on the much-maligned and debated Grand Slam Track circuit — another effort, albeit a failed one, that was designed to raise the profile of the sport in non-Olympic years and, ultimately, put more money in runners’ pockets. 

Thanks to the win, Patterson has a sponsorship deal with Nike. That allows him to train near home, which has helped his performances. That, in turn, landed him a spot on the starting line in Ultimate. 

Patterson has the fourth-fastest 400-meter time of the year (43.76), good enough to put him in a field featuring the most recent Olympic and world champions and the rest of this year’s top-ranked athletes.

“That’s one thing about Ultimate, it’s the prize money. It’s a different opportunity,” he said. “We don’t have NFL, NBA, MLB money. So, when we see things like that, you kind of just want to go there, perform your best and, hey, see if you can get that 150.”

$150,000 is big money for track, but not for most sports

The Ultimate Championship is a work more than two years in the making. The meet, planned for every two years — including at the end of the 2028 season after the Summer Olympics — is designed as a fast-paced, high-stakes burst of races (and throws and jumps) that won’t look like the sport’s nine and 10-day major championships that are heavy on unknown athletes competing in endless qualifying rounds. 

The hope is it will address a handful of track’s most noticeable flaws, namely money.

Though these are the best runners, jumpers and throwers in the world, they travel the globe competing for relatively scant prize pools. A top reward on the headliner Diamond League — the 15-stop global circuit that keeps this sport humming at its highest level in non-Olympic years — is either $10,000 or $20,000.

By comparison, the players who tied for 54th at the Wyndham Championship — the last stop before the playoffs on golf’s PGA Tour — won $19.654. Players who lost in the first round of the U.S. Open tennis still won $140,000.

Two years ago, World Athletics made a splash when it decided to award all those who won Olympic events in Paris a $50,000 bonus to go with their gold medals. There will be trophies, not medals, awarded in Budapest. Buoyed by a 15% increase in revenue in 2025, World Athletics plans to award a total of $50 million in prize money between 2024 and 2028.

“When other sports pay like this, it’s no big deal,” said Lonnie Greene, the track coach at Kentucky who also mentors new 100-meter hurdles world-record holder Masai Russell. “When track and field pays like this, people say, ‘Oh, they’re not supposed to do this.’ But football, basketball, baseball, they pay great. These are professional athletes and this is how they eat. Why not get paid commensurate to what they’re doing?”

New event with dollar signs gives athletes a reason to race each other

Some of track’s problems are self-inflicted.

While the NBA instituted a “Player Participation Policy” to make sure marquee players are on the court more often, track and field athletes are essentially independent contractors who set their own schedules. The best are rarely synced up to race against each other. Exceptions are the Olympics, world championships and, now, the Ultimate with its $10 million prize pool.

Thomas, the Olympic champion at 200 meters, skipped U.S. nationals in this, considered an “off year” in track, as she tailored a schedule designed to peak in Budapest and next week at Athlos, a three-year-old track circuit for women founded by Alexis Ohanian that is finding success where Grand Slam Track could not. 

It means this will be the first meeting between Thomas and world champion Melissa Jefferson-Wooden since last year’s nationals, and maybe the first meeting ever at full health for both. (Thomas missed last year’s worlds with an injury.) The 2023 world champion, Shericka Jackson, has ended her season due to injury. 

“We’re seeing progress, and I’m not going to complain about progress,” said Josh Kerr, who broke the 27-year-old world record in the mile this year and will race in the always-combative 1500 meters on Sunday. “Obviously, $150,000 is a lot of money. It’s not as much as other big sports, but they’ve earned that with years and years of continuing to push into marketing.”

Lyles won’t be on track but will be selling hype, trading cards

Noah Lyles, the 100-meter Olympic champion who might be track’s most-recognizable name on the global stage, said advancing the cause of the athletes goes beyond prize money.

Lyles has spent years using his platform to push track out of its comfort zone and into the world of red carpets, fashion, collectibles and anime. He is not racing in Budapest due to injury, but will play a large role on the content and entertainment side, trying to make it feel different and give the athletes a chance to be influencers.

He’ll also be selling track and field trading cards with athlete pictures and profiles. He mentioned his business — along with a coffee brand developed by 1500-meter champion Jake Wightman of 2022  that’s being distributed by World Athletics this week — as the sort of athlete-focused marketing deals he’d like to see become a more consistent presence in his sport.

“Hopefully, we see a lot more of that for the future and get other track meets to say, ‘This is a way we can support athletes without having to (rely on) prize money and appearance fees’,” Lyles said. “I think that, right there, is going to speak volumes. If anything good is going to come out of this, that would be it.”

___

AP Sports Writer Pat Graham contributed to this story.

___

https://apnews.com/sports