Prize Money & Performance Contracts Provide Huge Opportunities at 2024 World Championships

2024 WORLD AQUATICS CHAMPIONSHIPS

• February 11th – February 18th (pool swimming)
• Doha, Qatar
• LCM (50m)
• Meet Central
• SwimSwam Preview Index

For a long time, swimming has ignored the financial realities of sport, which at its core moves from a “fitness” business to an “entertainment” business at a certain level of competition.

While there has been a wave of enthusiasm to shift those priorities in swimming, creating a more fan-friendly atmosphere for college, professional, and international competition, the overwhelming majority of financial and professional incentives push athletes, coaches, and federations toward focusing on a single meet, the Olympics, at the expense of three-and-a-half years of opportunities.

Take as an example this week’s World Championship meet in Doha, Qatar. Each of the 42 swimming events offer a total of $65,000 in prize money, with $20,000 going to event winners and $2,000 going to 8th place finishers.

While top-tier names like Katie Ledecky make way more than that in endorsements, there are a lot of athletes who have eschewed the meet to focus on the Olympic dream – even when they likely could have earned 5-figure rewards in prize money without spending a full taper on the competition.

• See all of the prize money available here.

While much of the narrative around this meet has been focused on World Aquatics not prioritizing the needs of athletes, in a way, that’s exactly what they’ve done. They’ve found a way to force $5.6 million in sponsor and host money back to athletes for a meet that, frankly, won’t have the luster of most World Championships.

But that’s not all that they’ve done.

They’ve given a number of mid-tier athletes an opportunity to cash in big on performance incentives that are often built in to sponsorship agreements or athlete funding programs.

Swimmers will win World Championships that they probably would have never won otherwise. A group of swimmers will win medals, and earn finals swims, that wouldn’t have in any other year, and because those agreements were probably written with someone assuming those things never would come, the rewards can be significant. The meet is a World Aquatics Championships, and many of those contracts won’t have contemplated the possibility of an incomplete championship offering the same rewards and slots in the history book as the meets in 2023, 2022, and 2019.

And the next tier of athletes, those outside of the superstars like the Ledeckys and Dressels, are the ones most-heavily ladened with these kinds of incentives.

That is not to say the meet is perfect, or perfectly-situated. The interruption of clean swimming history is frustrating. Lord knows that adding a World Championship the week before NCAA conference championship season begins is not making our lives, nor does it make the lives of collegiate programs that are responsible for a huge percentage of World Championship participants, or coaches around the world trying to prepare their athletes for upcoming Olympic Trials meets.

But on the eve of the meet, we can’t ignore the opportunities in play. The opportunities for athletes to earn enough money to continue their careers, the opportunities for publicity, to increase the visibility of more swimmers, which is what we need if a pro league will ever be sustainable, are there.

With racing about to begin, there’s nothing that will stop or reschedule the meet. And I would never propose that we ignored another opportunity – one for lessons learned – which administrators have ignored time-and-time again in the chaotic schedule that has resulted from the International Swimming League schedule and been exacerbated in the post-COVID catchup (see also: June’s European Championships).

But racing is about to begin. The pool belongs to those who show up. The meet will churn the economy of swimming, and that’s something that benefits everyone in the sport.