Budapest pays $150,000 per athletics title. Will the money bring a world record?
The World Athletics Ultimate Championship opens in Budapest on Friday. It has 3 days, 28 finals and a $10m prize fund, the biggest in the sport.
What happened
World Athletics opened its inaugural Ultimate Championship in Budapest with a red-carpet media day on attended by about 200 athletes and 220 accredited media, replacing the traditional pre-event press conference, before three days of competition for a $10m prize fund at the Gyula Zsivotzky National Athletics Centre.
The Ultimate Championship opens in Budapest on Friday . It has three days of competition, 28 finals and a prize fund of $10m. Each individual winner gets $150,000, and eighth place gets $10,000. The money is the argument. World Athletics is paying from its own funds for an event that had no place in the Olympic or world championship calendar.
The championship will be held every two years. It is for the reigning Olympic, world and Diamond League champions, plus the highest-ranked qualifiers and a few invited athletes. The winner’s prize is more than double the $70,000 paid at last year’s World Championships.
It comes a year after Michael Johnson’s Grand Slam Track promised athletes similar money and then collapsed into debt. Shot put, discus, the steeplechase and the 10,000m were cut from the programme because of viewing figures. Matthew Denny, the Olympic discus champion, criticised that in public.
Sebastian Coe has called the event a place to try new ideas, and he wants those ideas inside the World Championships and the Olympics. Before the event, the promise was that records could fall on any of the three nights.
Five world records are named as under threat in Budapest, from Armand Duplantis in the pole vault to Emmanuel Wanyonyi in the 800m and Alison dos Santos in the 400m hurdles. That promise can be tested, because the sport already has a season-ending meeting built on the same idea.
Sources: World Athletics, Guardian, BBC, BBC, Al Jazeera
The Pattern
One of the last six Diamond League finals saw a world record. The Diamond League final is the season-ending meeting where the best athletes face each other, and World Athletics already runs it. We looked at the last six finals in the federation’s own reports, and asked whether a senior world record was set at each.
Show the other 4 cases
The Read
The market starts above history because Budapest packs more record chances into three nights than a Diamond League final usually does. Dos Santos took the 400m hurdles record to 45.80 and Masai Russell the 100m hurdles record to 12.09 in Zurich three weeks ago. Wanyonyi has spent the season chasing David Rudisha’s 1:40.91, and Duplantis has raised his own record 15 times. The one final with a world record, Eugene in 2023, shows what a strong last meeting can do when the field is deep enough.
The case against is that five of those six finals produced meeting records and nothing more. Meetings in September, at the end of a long season, reward winning. The $150,000 is paid for winning a title, and World Athletics has published no bonus for a record alongside the prize list.
History is wrong if Duplantis treats Budapest as one more record night, as he has at ordinary meetings since 2020, or if the hurdlers who broke records in Zurich arrive in the same form.
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