Warning! Reading this post while drowsy may be dangerous to your health – danger of whiplash or lost teeth when your head falls off your shoulders into a stupor of thought! If you are wide awake, we can begin.
As I said in an earlier post, there are many prizes and ways to win in the Tour de France. In fact, on the official website you can download the rules in a pdf file. It is 44 pages, half in French, half in English. The prize money section alone is 5 pages. (The following summary is based on the 2011 prizes – I have not yet found the 2012 file on-line.)
Most of the prizes are awarded to the individual riders, but it is likely that, in their contracts with their teams, they are required to pool the prize money and share it with the team. Few riders can win prize money without the help of their teammates. The rider awarded the prize may get a larger share, but there is very likely a sharing formula within each team. (Any reader with actual information on this issue is invited to share it by posting in the comments.)
Not all of the rewards are monetary. In every race sanctioned by the International Cycling Union (the UCI), the leading riders earn UCI points. For the 2011 Tour de France, descending numbers of UCI points were awarded for the top 20 riders overall, and for the top 5 riders in each stage. These are relevant in determining which riders and which teams earn season-long awards. They are also relevant when riders are negotiating contracts with teams. A rider with more UCI points from year to year commands a richer contract with his current team, or as he changes teams. Also, the cumulative UCI points total of all the riders on a given team has a bearing on the team’s UCI ranking, and its eligibility to participate in the most prestigious races. This year there is a lot of buzz about which team Alberto Contador will join when his suspension ends in August. One of the terms of his suspension is that he cannot earn UCI points for the next two years. Although he may help a team win races, a team needing UCI points would be penalized in ranking and eligibility by taking him. This illustrates the importance of UCI points.
Another non-monetary reward is prestige. On each team’s website, all the riders are listed, along with their racing accomplishments. Stage or race wins or high placements, or other awards are listed. A Tour de France stage win or day wearing the yellow jersey is like gold in that list of prizes. (A yellow jersey is most commonly used in other for the GC leader, but it is not universal. For example, the Giro d’Italia – Tour of Italy – uses a pink jersey.)
OK, enough beating around the bush! Here’s the money part! (Based on the 2011 TDF.) I will use U.S. dollars, but my conversions from Euros will be rounded, since the conversion rate changes all the time. The top 20 riders in each stage win cash, starting at $10,000 for first place and going down to $250 for 20th place. At the end of each stage five riders are awarded prize jerseys which they will wear for the next day’s race. They are for the best scores in 5 categories: (1) General classification (GC), meaning overall best time for all stages so far – yellow; (2) most sprint points so far – green; (3) most climbing points so far – polka-dot; (4) best young GC rider – white (born after Jan. 1, 1986), and (5) most aggressive – red number bib. There’s a daily prize for the jerseys ranging from $2,500 for red bib, $440 for yellow jersey to $250 for white. Certain mountain summits have special cash prizes of $6,300. At the end of the entire Tour de France, every rider that finishes wins prize money in the GC category, descending from $565,000 for first place to $500 for last place. In the other categories, the prize money goes to the top 8 (top 5 for youth), with top prizes of $31,000 or $25,000. Finally there are prizes for the fastest teams, by stage and overall, totaling $220,000. I may have missed a few. But, in the 2011 Tour de France, total prize money was $4,300,000. (In addition, each team received $64,000 towards expenses.)
Sure, the winner of the yellow Jersey gets about $600,000 of the $4.3 million, but there are lots of prizes for other riders and other teams. Plenty of incentive each day to do different things to win prizes. So, even though the most attention is on the competition for the yellow jersey (GC), there are lots of other prize sub-plots developing each day to add interest – not only to each day’s finish, but even to various interim locations along the way.
Wake up now! It’s time for a picture!
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Tour of Utah
Ashley and I have a similar arrangement with the "prize money" that I get every month from going to work. I think that our arrangement is also spelled out in my "contract".
ReplyDelete:) Problem is, Matt has never read the contract, so we loose a lot of the intrigue. Apparently our kids have never read it either, so at the end of the day I walk away with most of the prize money. It works out great for me, though!
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