The £3m Prize Fund at the 2028 European Athletics Championships: When the Money Changes How It Is Split and People Are Forced to Recount Fairness

I read the news on an August morning in Nairobi, while the runners circling Karura Forest were still finishing the last lap of their early training session. The road in Silesia will host the European Athletics Championships in 2028, and the organisers had just announced a record prize fund of about £3 million. People called it the largest prize pot in the history of this continental championship. But what made me sit longer in front of the screen was not the total figure, but how that figure is divided. When numbers learn to speak names, the whole field must listen. Here, the numbers are telling a story about how athletics — the sport I have followed for forty-five years — decides who gets paid, for what, and by what logic. It is a story about the politics of distribution, not about the speed of feet. And for someone who has spent a career counting every pass, every stride, every second of the clock to bear witness to injustices the eye cannot see, this is precisely the kind of story I cannot ignore. Silesia is an old industrial region in southern Poland, where coal was once the heartbeat of the whole community. It will host the European Athletics Championships in 2028, and European Athletics has decided that all 50 events — from sprints on the track, high jump, pole vault, javelin, to combined events and road running — will pay prize money to the top eight athletes. It sounds simple. But when I peeled back each layer of this decision, I realised it is one of the most structurally important changes in European athletics in decades. Let me begin with the payout table itself, because the payout table is where the truth lies down into concrete numbers. First place in an event receives €30,000. Second place receives €15,000. Third place receives €10,000. Fourth place receives €5,000. Fifth place receives €4,000. Sixth place receives €3,000. Seventh place receives €2,000. Eighth place receives €1,000. Added together, each event pays out exactly €70,000 to the top eight positions. Multiplied by 50 events, the total is €3.5 million. At the exchange rate the news item implicitly uses — about €1 to £0.857, derived from €30,000 equalling £25,720 — €3.5 million is roughly £3 million. The "about £3 million" headline matches the detailed payout table down to the unit. This is the kind of verification I always perform before trusting any press release: take the total, divide it back through the structure, and see whether they meet in the middle. If the story stopped there, it would be an ordinary commercial item. But what makes the difference lies in the fact that the old model has been replaced by a new one, and the two models operate on two entirely opposing philosophies. The old model paid based on the quality of performance. Organisers used World Athletics' scoring tables — a system converting marks into points, accounting for wind, altitude and equipment — to rank performances. The ten best performances across ten event categories, split five men and five women, each received €50,000. It was called the "Gold Crown". The money flowed toward the surprise record-breaker, toward the athlete with an extraordinary mark, toward the freak moment of some afternoon. The new model pays based on finishing position. You finish first, you receive €30,000 — regardless of whether your mark is a world record or merely enough to win a slow race. You finish eighth, you receive €1,000 — regardless of whether you nearly broke a continental record. Performance is no longer the measure for payment. Position is. The philosophy shifts from "paying for the moment" to "paying for the position". This is the point where I want to pause for a long while, because it contains an entire value system. At 61, I have learned that sport never grows old, only our way of looking at it wears out. The old model, with its "Gold Crown", sounded more glamorous — it rewarded absolute excellence. But I have witnessed too many times that glamorous models often forget the many behind them. When I was a young reporter, I believed sport was the story of the best. Then I realised sport is also the story of those who finish fourth, fifth, eighth — people who train twelve hours a day only for no one to remember their names. What does the data tell us about the old model? Look at Great Britain & Northern Ireland at the Birmingham edition. They won 19 medals, nine of them gold. It was a dominant team performance. But not one of those nine golds earned the €50,000 "Gold Crown" bonus. That means nine European champions, each standing at the summit of an event, received not a single extra penny from that special bonus pool. That money flowed elsewhere — to performances scoring high on the conversion tables, in events or conditions favourable to scoring. Between winning and being paid a quality bonus, there was a gap that very few fans noticed. The new model erases that gap in a very different way: it pays everyone who finishes in the top eight, in every event, without distinguishing by performance. The champion is paid for being champion. The eighth-place finisher is paid for reaching the final. This shifts from a "lottery" to a "payroll". I want to state this clearly because it matters as analysis, not as emotion. A lottery is highly volatile. An athlete can go through an entire career without ever touching the "Gold Crown", simply because her best performance fell on an afternoon when everyone else also performed superbly, or in an event the scoring tables do not favour. A payroll is highly predictable. If you are a top-eight athlete on the continent in your event, you know how much you will be paid when you come to Silesia, and you can put that into your annual financial planning. From the perspective of a female sports journalist, I pay particular attention to how the new model treats women's events. Under the old model, ten bonuses were split five men and five women — fair in quantity on the surface, but still a concentrated mechanism, selecting only five outstanding women's performances from the entire women's programme. Under the new model, every women's event has its own payout table, identical to the men's. A female athlete finishing eighth in her event receives exactly the same amount as a male athlete finishing eighth in his. This is a structural step forward that I want to acknowledge, because throughout my career I have grown too accustomed to women's events being treated as an appendix to the programme — mentioned last, paid last, broadcast last. But I will not stop there. Because if we look only at the surface fairness of the payout table, we will miss the harder questions behind it. Question one: The money flows only to eighth place. What does the ninth-place finisher receive? Nothing. In a European athletics championship, the number of athletes competing can reach thousands of entries across all events. The €3.5 million fund, though it sounds large, is in fact allocated to only about four hundred payout slots — eight positions times fifty events. Most athletes present in Silesia will go home empty-handed, exactly as they have gone home empty-handed at every previous edition. A record prize fund does not equal widely shared prosperity. This is the kind of distinction I always try to make clear in my writing, because total figures often hide the distribution structure within. The total sounds big, but the distribution funnel is narrow. Question two: Where does the money come from? The news item announced the fund but did not specify the funding source — local organisers, European Athletics, or a commercial sponsor. For someone who has spent years reading the budget reports of sports federations in East Africa, I always ask about sustainability. One record payout at one edition does not prove it will become the norm at the next. If this fund is the result of a time-limited sponsorship commitment, it could vanish by 2030. And then, athletes who have grown used to expecting a placing-based payment will have to readjust their entire expectations. Question three, and this is the question I consider most important: Who benefits most from a placing-based model? The answer does not lie with lone stars. It lies with nations possessing squad depth. Think about it in simple arithmetic. Under the old model, a country could gain greatly if one of its athletes suddenly produced an extraordinary mark, scored high on the conversion tables, and brought home €50,000. That was concentrated, hard-to-predict luck. Under the new model, money is spread across everyone who makes the top eight. A country with many athletes capable of reaching finals across different events will collect a much larger aggregate flow, even if none of them sets a record. In other words, the new model rewards breadth, not lone peaks. What does this mean for the power map of European athletics? A team like Great Britain & Northern Ireland — with 19 medals at Birmingham, meaning the capacity to place many athletes in the top eight — will be a clear beneficiary. Poland, as 2028 host, benefits doubly: a large squad, home advantage, and a greater capacity to push athletes into finals backed by home crowds. Large federations like Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands sit in the same group. Meanwhile, a small country with a single outstanding athlete will receive less than before. The new model, deliberately or not, subsidises squad depth — and squad depth has always been the privilege of large nations. I once witnessed a similar logic in football, as Europe's big clubs grew ever richer from broadcast rights and continental cup slots while smaller clubs drifted further from competitiveness. Money in sport is never neutral. It always flows down the slopes that already exist, and those slopes are usually created by the very power that already holds them. Here, the same story is unfolding: a prize fund described as "fairer" because it pays every event alike, yet in practice reinforcing the position of the nations already strong. But I do not want this article to be merely an indictment of injustice. My resistance, as always, lies in counting — not in shouting. So let us keep counting, at another layer of the story. What that news item did, and did rather clearly, was place the £3 million continental fund beside another event: World Athletics' new "Ultimate" championship, held over three days in Budapest, with a self-described "largest prize pot in the history of the sport" of $10 million, about £7.4 million. Let those two figures stand side by side: £3 million for a multi-day championship spread across 50 events, versus $10 million for a three-day event. The gap is not only about scale of money. It is about business model. The European Championships tries to maintain the comprehensiveness of the sport — all events, all types of athlete, all nations. The "Ultimate" championship tries to condense commercial value into a short window, to maximise broadcast appeal and public attention. Side by side, the £3 million fund no longer sounds record-breaking. It is a substantial sum, but a second-tier sum. And I think the important thing to see is this: the European Championships announcing its "record" fund in the same news context as the $10 million "Ultimate" championship is very likely a defensive move. If World Athletics opens a three-day stage with triple the prize money, continental federations must raise their own payouts or risk losing top athletes to the more financially attractive new circuit. The "record fund" is therefore not merely a generous announcement. It is also a response in a race no one openly admits to running. I call it a price-raising race. And I have seen it before in women's football, as clubs raised wages ever higher to retain players while the market expanded rapidly. A price-raising race can be a sign of growth, but it can also be a sign of instability. When all parties must spend more to hold position, those who ultimately bear the risk are usually the smallest parties — or the athletes themselves when the money flow one day stops. Every transfer contract has an untold story, and data is the key that opens the door. Here too. A payout table is a form of contract — a commitment to distribute money. And the untold story lies in this: for an ordinary athlete, what does this money actually change? Try to place yourself in the position of a female track and field athlete from one of Europe's smaller nations. She has trained for years, perhaps working part-time to cover her costs while pursuing her sport. She comes to Silesia 2028, qualifies, reaches a final. She finishes eighth. She receives €1,000. A thousand euros — in many parts of Europe, that is a month's rent, or the cost of several weeks' training with a personal coach, or flights and lodging for the next international meet. It is a meaningful sum, especially for an athlete without a major sponsorship. But it is not a life-changing sum. Compare with the winner: €30,000. That figure can help an athlete cover a year of competition costs, hire a better coach, access better sports medicine. Which means the gap between first and eighth is the gap between a career step forward and a temporary support. The payout table is steep at the top — but the tail is fairly flat and thin. The last positions of the table receive only small sums. At 61, after covering five Olympic Games and many world championships, I realise that small sums are often the most important sums. They determine whether an athlete can pursue her sport for one more season, or must give it up for full-time work. They determine whether a female athlete has enough money to organise her life in a way that lets her keep competing at the top. Big numbers on headlines attract attention, but the small numbers at the tail of the payout table are the ones that touch real lives. I once wrote a series in 2026, when the pandemic froze world sport. I called women coaches in East Africa and found many players had to return to farming after losing their income. A 22-year-old, who had scored 15 goals in the national league, had to train alone with a ball made of cloth scraps. Those stories taught me that the truest star is not the fastest runner, but the one who endures in silence. And when I read about the £3 million fund for the European Athletics Championships, I thought of those people — people for whom even a small sum could change an entire year. If a new payout structure can help more athletes get paid, that is a good thing. But if it helps only those already near the top, it has not solved the root problem. I want to look at this story from one more angle, the angle I consider least noticed. Under the old model, the "Gold Crown" bonus was split into ten slots, five men and five women. That means at most five female athletes on the whole continent received a large sum from that special bonus pool at each edition. Given that the women's programme has some twenty-five events, each with dozens of continental-class athletes, the proportion of female athletes able to access that bonus was extremely small. It was a lottery very few won. This means most of the large sums in women's athletics flowed to a very narrow group of top stars, while most of the female labour in the sport — those who give themselves to the events, the championships, the finals — received nothing. The new model changes that to a certain degree. If every women's event has its own payout table, the total number of female athletes paid at Silesia 2028 will rise substantially — perhaps over a hundred slots if the women's programme makes up about half of the 50 events. That is a structural shift I want to acknowledge, because it means more women are recognised in money, not just in praise. Over forty-five years in this profession, I have learned that how a sport pays women is one of the most honest indicators of how it values women. Words are easy. Money is hard to fake. But I do not want to turn this acknowledgement into naivety. Paying top-eight women does not automatically fix the deeper inequality: inequality in training opportunities from childhood, inequality in facilities, inequality in national federation investment, inequality in media coverage. A fairer payout table at the summit cannot compensate for injustices accumulated at the base of the pyramid. But it is a brick, and I believe small bricks can still build large walls. I once stood at the 2026 World Cup and saw only one thing: prejudice. Then I counted every pass to erase it. I still remember that evening in Russia, when an older male journalist said women should only write about fans. I did not argue back. That night I wrote an analysis of how Belgium neutralised France's pressing through a 3-4-3 shape, with data on a midfielder's touches and distance covered. The piece was republished by a European magazine, and the man sent an apology. I retell this not to praise myself, but to say that my way of resisting is always the same: I do not shout slogans, I present numbers. Looking at the £3 million fund, I do exactly the same. I do not say it is generous or stingy. I peel it into layers and see who gets what, who gets nothing. And in doing so, I realise something about the nature of these changes. Athletics, through most of its modern history, was an amateur sport. Athletes competed for national glory, for the sporting spirit, not for money. Prize money, in the view of federations for decades, was a threat to the sport's legitimacy. When the first sums began to appear in athletics competitions, there were fierce arguments over whether this would destroy the spirit of the sport. Then time passed, and gradually money became an accepted part of the structure. The 2028 event in Silesia, with its £3 million fund spread across 50 events, is another milestone in that normalisation. It shows that money in athletics is no longer a matter of principle in dispute. It has become a technical matter: how to divide, to whom, by what criterion. That is why I call this a governance story, not a performance story. Very few sports articles tell readers that they are reading about governance rather than competition. But this is clearly a story about how an organisation decides to distribute resources. There is no performance in this news item. No mark, no wind, no altitude, no season ranking. Only money, and how to divide it. And in stories of this kind, what is worth analysing is not who runs fastest, but who holds the power to decide the rules. I want to spend the rest of the article on two things I consider the biggest blind spots of this story. The first blind spot concerns how we read claims about money. The second concerns the future of this distribution system. First blind spot: a rise in prize money is often conflated with a rise in competitive quality. When people read that a championship has a record fund, they tend to believe the sport is growing, that the standard is rising. But the two are entirely independent. A championship can raise prize money without any change in competitive standard — simply because a sponsor has been added, or because organisers want to attract media attention, or because they are reacting to competitive pressure from another event. In this case, there is no performance data allowing us to conclude that European athletics stands at a higher level than before. The only thing we know for certain is that the amount allocated has risen. That is a truth about money, not a truth about running legs. At 61, I have learned to distinguish the two. In football, a transfer fee does not measure talent. A player bought for a record fee can play badly, and a player bought cheaply can become a star. Similarly, a championship with a record fund is not necessarily the highest standard. That is why I always keep a distance between two concepts: commercial value and competitive value. Commercial value can be measured in money. Competitive value must be measured in performance. In the news item about the 2028 fund, we have only commercial value. The competitive value remains open, and we will have to wait until Silesia to know it. Second blind spot: the future of this distribution system is not guaranteed. I have spoken of the unclear funding source. But there is a deeper problem: even if the funding source is secured, the question remains whether this placing-based model will become a lasting norm, or is merely an experiment of one edition. The way we will know the answer is to observe the edition after 2028, to see whether a similar model is maintained, or whether organisers revert to a quality-based bonus model. This is why I believe any analysis of this change must come with a monitoring component. We should not conclude that European athletics has permanently shifted to the new model based on a single announcement. I want to add one aspect I find interesting yet also concerning: the shift in how nations invest in athlete development. If prizes increasingly reward squad depth, national federations may begin to redirect their strategies. Instead of concentrating resources on a few promising stars who might bring home gold, they may invest in producing a broad group of athletes capable of reaching the top eight. In theory, this seems good for the sport — more athletes with opportunities, more competition. But it could also lead to smaller federations being increasingly unable to compete, because they lack the resources to build depth at the scale of large federations. The concentration of power could increase, not decrease, under a payout table designed to look fairer. This is the kind of paradox I have witnessed many times in my career. Policies designed to widen opportunity often benefit those who already hold advantage. Subsidies called equalising often reinforce existing inequality. Not because the designers are malicious, but because the structure of the sport — population distribution, facility distribution, financial resource distribution — always leans to one side. For a policy to be truly fair, it must actively counter that lean, not merely be technically neutral. So does the 2028 payout table actively counter that lean? My answer is: not enough, but it is also no worse than the old model. It is equal between men and women at the event level — that is progress. It widens the number of those paid — that too is progress. But it does not solve the deep problem of inequality between nations, and it leaves most athletes outside the distribution funnel. My assessment is objectively data-based: this is a structural shift, not a revolution in fairness. I want to return to the story of Mercy Achieng, the girl I discovered in 2026 through data analysis. Back then, Kenyan sports journalists still dismissed data analysis. I used my statistics knowledge to review the national women's football league and found that the 19-year-old midfielder had an 87 percent pass completion rate — the highest in the league — yet had never been called up. My article was mocked by male colleagues. Three months later she was called up and scored on her debut. A Swedish club took notice and brought her to Europe for a record transfer fee for Kenyan women's football. That story taught me that data can open doors the eye cannot see. And it also taught me that the value of a structure lies in whether it sees those others overlook. Looking at the 2028 payout table, I ask myself: does this structure see those who are overlooked? It sees the eighth-place finisher — an advance over seeing only the first-place finisher. But it still does not see the ninth, tenth, twelfth — those who may be a hundredth of a second short of the final. In athletics, the gap between eighth and ninth in an event is sometimes smaller than a blink. Yet one receives €1,000, the other nothing. This is the cruel nature of a sport measured by the clock, but it is also the nature of any threshold-based reward system. The sports world always wants to rank. I only want to understand why they run, why they cry. When I read the Silesia 2028 payout table, I do not think about who will win the most money. I think about those who will finish eighth, receive €1,000, and stand in the breeze of an August evening in Poland, knowing they have done something very few people on earth can do — yet still having to ask whether they will have enough to continue next season. That is the truth payout tables never fully tell. And that is why I keep writing. I want to spend the final part of the article on what needs tracking over the next two years, until Silesia takes place. Because if there is one principle I have drawn from forty-five years in this profession, it is this: announcements matter less than what happens afterwards. The £3 million fund is an announcement. The question is whether it turns into real money, really awarded, to real people, on a summer evening in 2028. The first thing to track: the funding source. If European Athletics discloses the source clearly, we will know whether this is a sustainable commitment or merely a one-off support. How they answer this will say much about their long-term vision. The second thing to track: the relationship between the European Championships and World Athletics' "Ultimate" championship. If the three-day Budapest event succeeds commercially, pressure on continental championships will rise. If it fails, events and federations may retreat from the price-raising strategy. This is a race whose outcome is undecided. The third thing to track: whether the placing-based model is maintained after 2028. A policy change only becomes a norm when it is repeated. We will know the answer at the next edition. The fourth thing to track: the actual distribution of payouts by nation. If my prediction holds — that deep-squad nations benefit most — we will see it in post-event data. This is the kind of verification I always perform: make a prediction, then wait for data to check it. In 2026, I built a prediction model based on ten years of African teams' World Cup data. It showed Senegal had a 58 percent chance of reaching the quarter-finals thanks to a defence with the lowest expected goals conceded in the group stage. I published the article and was mocked by male journalists in Nairobi. When Senegal did reach the quarter-finals, I received hundreds of interview requests. But I wrote only one piece explaining the method, with data and model error. I did so because I believe the value of an analyst lies not in predicting correctly, but in honestly explaining how one arrived at a conclusion — and in acknowledging one's own limits. Applying that principle to the 2028 fund story, I offer my predictions with full caution. First: nations with large squad depth will be the clearest beneficiaries in total money received, even if they do not win more golds than before. Second: the number of female athletes paid at Silesia 2028 will be substantially higher than at the previous edition, perhaps over a hundred slots. Third: pressure to raise prize levels between events will continue to grow between now and 2028. I offer these three predictions in full awareness that my model may be wrong, and that future data will be the final arbiter. The small girl with worn-out shoes does not appear in the report, but I have seen her in every number. In the 2028 payout table, that girl could be the eighth-place finisher, receiving €1,000, using that money to buy a new pair of shoes, to pay another month's rent, to keep pursuing her dream. Or she could be the ninth-place finisher, receiving nothing, forced to choose between continuing to compete and finding stable work. The difference between those two fates is sometimes a hundredth of a second. And a payout table, however record-breaking, cannot erase the cruelty of a hundredth of a second — but it can decide who is supported once that hundredth has passed. At 61, I have learned that sport never grows old, only our way of looking at it wears out. When I was young, I thought of sport in medals. Now, I think of sport in small sums flowing to large people. The £3 million fund at Silesia 2028 may be a step forward, or it may be a glamorous announcement hiding an unequal structure. We will know the answer on a summer evening in 2028, when the last runners cross the line, and when the last numbers are published. Until then, I will sit here, in Nairobi, counting every stride, and waiting to see whether those numbers can speak the names of those who deserve to be named. When numbers learn to speak names, the whole field must listen. My question for the next two years is simple: how many names will this payout table be able to speak, and among them, how many are names we have never heard before? If the answer is more than zero, then perhaps European athletics is truly entering a new phase — not because there is more money, but because the money is divided in a way that sees more people.