€11,000 for 6 hours in the near-death zone in 35 degrees heat with 150 crazed shaved-leg-lycra-clad Rabidos trying to smash your dreams to pieces – at the very top of the sport … makes you wonder if it’s enough, no?
Two weeks and fifteen stages into this Tour, the money charts look exactly like you expect when an oil-washing super-rich petro-dollar state bankrolls the most expensive cycling team on earth – that’s right, Cofidis are top!
Not really.
THE TEAM STANDINGS
UAE Team Emirates-XRG lead comfortably with €96,620, more than Visma-Lease a Bike (€63,790) – lease it? they can afford to buy it! – and Alpecin-Deceuninck (€48,840) – with that much money they can all afford hair transplants, never mind caffeine shampoo – combined don’t quite catch them.
Lidl-Trek (€44,120) and Soudal Quick-Step (€40,960) round out the top five. At the bottom of the pile, Cofidis have banked just €5,370 across the same fifteen days of racing — a reminder of how brutally top-heavy this sport’s economics are.
THE INDIVIDUAL TOP 5
- Tadej Pogačar — €71,050
- Jonathan Milan — €33,300
- Jonas Vingegaard — €28,840
- Mathieu van der Poel — €28,270
- Ben Healy — €23,380
So stage win at the Tour de France is worth €11,000 – and that’s €11,000, split with the team that got you there – and the mechanos and the soigneurs.
Compare that to combat sports. An entry-level UFC fighter earns $12,000 to show and $12,000 to win — for one fight, one night, 15-25 minutes of work. A genuine superstar at the level of a Pogačar or Vingegaard — someone who dominates their sport globally — commands $2-4 million per fight at UFC’s top tier.
The true outliers go stratospheric: Conor McGregor banked a guaranteed $30 million just to step into a ring with Floyd Mayweather.
Take that Conor!
Sure t’ing Floyd, all night fer dis moolah!
Pogačar’s €71,050 fades a bit eh?
A single fight night for an equivalent-tier MMA superstar pays 30 to 400 times that, for a fraction of the suffering (in total!) and a fraction of the time.
How much tho can Pogi take for a whole 3 week Tour?
If he keeps his current pace and takes yellow all the way to Paris:
- Current average: €71,050 over 15 stages ≈ €4,737/stage
- 6 stages remaining × €4,737 ≈ €28,420 more
- Plus the overall win bonus: €500,000
- Projected total: roughly €599,470
Nearly €600,000 for three weeks of the hardest physical suffering in professional sport — dominating the world’s biggest bike race outright. It’s a serious payday by cycling’s standards. It’s also less than what a single UFC superstar fight, let alone a McGregor-tier crossover bout, pays for one night’s work.
Different sports, different economics, sure. But cycling remains the hardest-worst-paid sports in the world.
(And let’s not mention the women pro roadies…).
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