With the NCAA’s March Madness at full fever, the spring marathon season is nearly upon us. Boston and London are just weeks away. The streets will be packed, the “Seven-Star” medals polished, and the participation boom will once again take center stage. London is even in advanced talks for a “Double London” two-day weekend in 2027 to accommodate another 50,000 from the staggering 1.13 million entry requests.
But beneath the celebration, something quieter is happening: the professional runner is disappearing as an iconic cultural figure. With the retirement of former marathon world record holder Eliud Kipchoge and yet another high-profile AIU ban announced today, no singular figure has risen to fill the vacuum of positive public recognition.
The math helps explains why.
In 2012, the Boston Marathon entry fee was $130 and the winner’s paycheck was $150,000—the highest public check among the Abbott World Marathon Majors.
In 2026, the Boston entry fee is $260, but the winner still gets $150,000. That is a 30% cut in real-world spending power over 14 years.
While every other major sport has exploded into the era of $300 million contracts and $3 million winner’s checks, the marathon has kept its elites sealed inside a financial time capsule.
The GOAT Debate: A Matter of Visibility, Not Ability
When sports fans argue about the “Greatest of All Time,” the names are always Jordan, Brady, Messi, LeBron. You almost never hear Ashton Eaton, Dan O’Brien, much less a distance runner like Eliud Kipchoge in a general-market conversation.
Why? Because GOAT debates aren’t actually about athletic ability and achievement. They’re about visibility and stakes.
A $50 million contract tells the public: This person matters. This performance has value.
A world indoor track champion running for $40,000—less than the luxury tax on a backup NBA point guard’s car—signals the opposite. The public doesn’t see a professional; they see a high-status hobbyist.
The Korir Ban: Desperation or Greed?
The five-year ban announced today (March 30, 2026) for Albert Korir—the 2021 NYC Marathon champion—is the perfect “gotcha” moment for critics. After testing positive for CERA (a synthetic EPO) in three separate samples, Korir’s results since last October, including his third-place finish at the 2025 NYC Marathon, have been erased.
“Why pay them more if they’re just going to cheat?” the critics ask. “We’ve been burned too many times.”
It’s true that over 140 Kenyan athletes are currently under sanction by the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU). But now look at the economics. When the difference between first and tenth place at a Marathon Major is the difference between a career and a side hustle ($150K vs. $5,500 in Boston; $100,000 vs. $2000 in NYC), you aren’t just rewarding excellence—you’re incentivizing desperation.
We’ve built a closed loop:
• One Big Win can change a life!
• But only in developing economies.
• Steeply descending purses shrink international development.
• Drive for the Big Win & shrinking purse pushes athletes toward risk.
• Risk produces positives.
• Positives justify keeping purses low.
Meanwhile, race directors pivot to marketing the Seven-Star medal—a product that never tests positive and never generates a messy headline months later.
Don’t Be Naive
To those who insist that more money won’t fix doping, would they consider whether structure would? Do you think other sports are drug-free? Of course not. The difference is that other sports mount billion-dollar entertainment properties with the structure to manage their image and their athletes.
Running remains a loose confederation (at best)—not a regulated tour with a unified roster, centralized enforcement, and a professional ecosystem. By remaining siloed and keeping prize money at 2012 levels—after essentially eliminating their two-year series prize in 2022—while every other metric in the sport has skyrocketed, the Majors aren’t “protecting” the sport. They’re signaling that they don’t believe their champions are worth the investment.
The Bottom Line
A sporting prize is a cultural flag, a signal. It tells the world: This skill matters. This athlete has merit.
By flying that flag at half-mast for fourteen years, the sport reinforces the public’s perception that running isn’t worth paying attention to. In fact, the sport isn’t poor; it’s just opaque. There is real money for a small few—appearance fees and private bonuses—but that money is hidden, a relic of the “shamateur” era. Hidden money helps the athlete, but it does nothing for the sport’s public stature.
Until running builds a structure worthy of its athletes, it will keep losing them to invisibility, scandal, or silence, surfacing only when the next drug positive hits the wire.
END
tonireavis.com 
There is huge money and celebrity in track & field. Just look at Nike, Max Siegel, Michael Johnson, WADA, and Sebastian Coe and the huge organizations they lead.
I subscribe to multiple athletics sources that I read everyday and I barely can keep track of the multitude of basically anonymous East Africans who come and go. And if they do well it seems only a matter of time until they test positive. The jogging public, 99% of marathon fields, know or care very little about who wins. Look at popular sites like Marathon Maniacs, There is zilch about elite running. If .01 % of the London or Boston who fields aive a toss who won I’d be amazed. So the idea race directors will increase money for elites is not going to happen.
I find road running pretty boring these days. lts not the 1980s anvmore. 10 or more East Africans I never heard of or will aaain break 2:05…zzzzz…If road money disappeared I think it would be a net positive. The real excitement is American distance running on the track from 800 to 10,000. Cooper Lutkenhaus is a iov to watch. And whoo is more entertaining than Cole Hocker or Grant Fischer or Jakob Ingebrigtsen? Or Keely Hodgkinson or Faith Kipyegon?
Appreciate the give and take. Thanks for the engagement.
You’ve just made my case. You know Cole Hocker. You know Jakob Ingebrigtsen. You know Faith Kipyegon. You can name them, track their seasons, form opinions about them, argue about them. You find them entertaining. Why? Not because they’re more talented than marathoners. Because someone built the infrastructure that made them visible — recurring competition, broadcast presence, a circuit with enough continuity that the public has time to learn their names before they’re replaced by the next anonymous East African, to use your phrase. Road running has no such infrastructure. Every race is a one-off. The elite field assembles, races, disperses, and reassembles somewhere else the following weekend in a completely different configuration. There is no season. There is no through-line. There is no reason for the jogging public — or anyone else — to follow the professionals because the professionals never appear in the same place twice long enough to become familiar.
You’re not bored by the athletes. You’re bored by the architecture. Those are different problems with different solutions. On the East African anonymity point: you’re describing a symptom of exactly the system I’m critiquing.
When prize money stagnates, and the athletes can’t sign shoe deals, they are left with the lowest cost of living and the highest desperation threshold. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the market clearing.
Raise the stakes, build the structure, contract the athletes to a tour, and you get the kind of field visibility (and control) that makes Cole Hocker a household name in his event.
Marathon Maniacs is a completion community. Of course they don’t follow elite results — the product was never designed to connect them to the elite race. The jogging public doesn’t know who won Boston because nobody has ever given them a reason to care. That’s not inevitable. It’s a design failure.
The 1980s we both miss had Rodgers, Salazar, Shorter, Waitz, Samuelson — athletes who were visible because the sport was small enough and the coverage concentrated enough that the same faces kept appearing. The participation boom dispersed that attention across thousands of races and millions of participants without building the engagement architecture to hold it together.
We traded depth for width and called it growth. Road running is not less exciting than it was. It’s less visible. Those are the same problem with the same solution. There has to be intent to engage before engagement can be achieved.
Who would sponsor a road series that is dominated by East Africans. That is why interest in World cross country withered away.
Prize money could go to $ 1 million and no one would notice. But it would create a larger pool of athletes willing to do EPO. Win a big race and you are set!
Big city marathons are huge jogathons whose participants couldn’t care less who won. London is going to 2 days! So why should the race directors pour money into a dubious adventure.
And the comparisons with team sport is getting old now and pointless. Especially since those sports are driven these days more by gambling than anything else.
The present situation is probably ideal under present circumstances. The big marathons could dump prize money altogether and few would care.
Frankly the positives in athletics these days is almost entirely East African road runners. Which does the rest of athletics, which is actually doing well these days, no favors at all. If any thing I’d get rid of prize money for marathons altogether.
At this stage of the game, I tend to agree, it wouldn’t matter to the vast majority of runners if there was a professional field. The first year Cleveland did away with a pro marathon and some Cleveland State grad student won in 2:28, it was a bigger story in the Plain Dealer than the previous year’s 2:14 pro win.
Some runners would care, but each year that we see the same old, same old, the fewer and fewer fans there will be.
This situation has all been self-created. The events never saw the need to consolidate into a pro wing, and this is the consequence of that laissez-faire system. Thanks for contributing to the discussion.
toni
You’ve described the problem accurately and drawn exactly the wrong conclusion from it. Yes, mass participants mostly don’t care who wins. That’s the indifference machine — and it’s a product of the lack of structure, not an inherent feature of the sport. It was built. It can be rebuilt. On doping: higher stakes don’t automatically produce more cheating. They produce more scrutiny, more structure, and eventually more accountability — if the governing architecture requires it. The current system produces doping under a compensation model too low to justify the testing infrastructure needed to catch it. That’s not an argument against raising the stakes. It’s an argument for building the system that higher stakes would fund. On team sports and gambling: you’re right that engagement in those sports is partly mechanical — fantasy leagues, betting, DFS platforms. That’s not a critique of those sports. It’s a blueprint. The engagement mechanisms exist. Road running hasn’t built them. ProField Fantasy is one attempt to do exactly that — give the mass participant a structural reason to care about the front of the race they’re running in. On eliminating prize money altogether: that’s a coherent position if you believe the professional competition has no value. I don’t. And I’d suggest that the 1.1 million people who applied for London this year weren’t motivated entirely by indifference to athletic excellence.
Well said Toni but I suspect our sport will never have any increased visibility in regard to monetary incentives.You and I have witnessed over our long time in the sport that it’s certainly no longer about the professionals but more about making money to let everyone be a star (if they can afford it). Anyone can “run” a marathon or shorter distances if they can pay the price. I have removed myself from the craziness and greed. I put in over forty five years volunteering and running but the sport is not what it used to be. I am glad I was a part of the glory days but I fear they have gone. I still enjoy my daily runs.
Toni, thank you for saying out loud what needs to be said. Well articulated, and to the point. I wonder if the tide will ever turn.
Thank you Toni. Sometimes I think I must be crazy but then you come along and articulate the truth the heart of the matter. Never thought it would happen but I’ve lost interest in the Boston Marathon. To me it’s just a spectacle that’s lost its way.