USA Swimming has announced more details about the plan, leaked last month, to offer significantly-upgraded prize pools for the Grand Prix Series with Arena now on as the title sponsor. Specifically, each of the remaining 5 meets in this year’s series will combine to give away $150,000 in prize money: over 7-times the previous $20,000 prize pool given away.
More specifically, and this is the biggest improvement, is that winners of each Olympic-distance event will be rewarded.
- $500 for winners
- $300 for runners-up
- $100 for third-place finishers
“Since its inception, the Grand Prix Series was designed to showcase the best swimming talent in the country,” said Frank Busch, USA Swimming’s National Team Director. “We’ve always envisioned having this type of prize money to strengthen the level of competition at these meets, and with Arena’s support, it’s become a reality and will help take swimming in the U.S. to the next level.”
Money will be awarded retroactively to winners of the Minneapolis Grand Prix events as well.
This prize pool is smaller than the $1,500/$1,000/$500 given at the world’s other major pool swimming circuit, the FINA World Cup. Given a much lower cost of participation for most athletes, however, and the relatively deep pool of elite professionals training in the United States, the dollar amounts given should be more-than-enough to entice lots of names to the meet and really ramp-up the competitiveness.
The next stop of the series will be the Austin Grand Prix that will run from January 18th-20th with the new prize money in effect. The Saturday and Sunday finals sessions will be broadcast live on Universal Sports from 7-8:30 PM Eastern Time, with Missy Franklin, Tyler Clary, and Ricky Berens already committed to participate. Clary and Berens are both back at their former collegiate training grounds this season after both moved to California for Olympic preparation.
Remaining Meets on the 2012-2013 Grand Prix Schedule:
January 18-20, 2013 USA Swimming Grand Prix, Austin, TX – LC
February 15-17, 2013 USA Swimming Grand Prix, Orlando, FL– LC
April 18-20, 2013 USA Swimming Grand Prix, Mesa, AZ – LC
May 9-12, 2013 USA Swimming Grand Prix, Charlotte, NC – LC
May 30-June 2, 2013 USA Swimming Grand Prix, Santa Clara, CA – LC
For more discussion on what this new prize money could mean for the series, see the original article here.
Awesome! The Grand Prix series just got a bit more interesting and attractive for the athletes!
Those amounts are less than the Oklahoma meet in December?
thats a lot of work for only 500 for a first…..
1K is a bit better money, if you swim 1 event, is 500 a real motivator? I dunno…
I am glad to see this incentive and huge increase in prize cash. Has swimming arrived?
Whoknows-
There was no $ for winning meet to meet, event to event with the exception of the prize at the end. This is WAY better than where its been and is a step in the right direction, lets not get to upset that the money is bigger just yet. Have to see how it all works out before more money and bigger sponsorship involvement happens.
RJCID-
Win an event, pay for a plane ticket. Win two events, pay for plane ticket and hotel. If you don’t command money from sponsors, I would venture a guess this is a big motivator.
Actually the prize money is about the same as in the Chesapeake Pro-Am.
And for the 50 Free shootout in Oklahoma, the prize money is doubled so the 50 at the Grand Prix would actually pay out significantly less.
There are also incentive prizes there, for example if you break an American Record (maybe even a meet record but not 100% on that one).
Pro’s in the Chesapeake meet however are only allowed a 4 event max. so that maybe where elite pro’s will be able to make up ground at a Grand Prix by swimming a lot of events and placing in all of them.
And the Pro-Am pays some pro’s for travel expenses in, hotel and food to attend — so a Grand Prix is a little less desirable if a swimmer is paying their prize money out in hotel and airline costs (if they only win or place in 1 or 2 events). Hopefully their agents will cover all that.
As I said in an earlier post for bang for the buck, the Chesapeake Pro-Am is still the best pro money meet in the U.S. – sadly now FINA has put SC Worlds right on top of it, so getting to see some of the huge names in the sport attend the meet like Oklahoma used to get is getting harder because of the scheduling.
Maybe there will be some extra cameras at some of these Grand Prix meets…the latest…swimming getting more and more coverage by the minute…
http://www.deadline.com/2013/01/swimmer-ryan-lochte-gets-e-reality-series/
I think you have some of the dates wrong
http://www.usaswimming.org/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabId=1420&Alias=Rainbow&Lang=en