Le Tour - the winners get richer, the losers get poorer....

I don't know why I enjoy watching Le Tour, but it's become part of my yearly routine - putting it on as wallpaper in the background in the afternoons while I do whatever else I need to do that day.

And I guess it's stating the obvious that the winners receive more money than the losers - that's the case in every sport I know of, but the distribution in Le Tour is very skewed...

Here's a breakdown of the payouts received from the first 9 stages so far...

The most significant difference is between the leading team (by payout) and the rest - with Jumbo -VISMA having earned more than twice as much as P2 UAE.

Then it declines pretty steadily until we get about half way down, where jumbo earns 10 times more than the bottom half of teams and more than all of them put together!

I mean a team like TREK-SEGAFREDO - has earned < 10K Euros so far - there's no way that even scratches the surface of costs for the riders, support team, fuel.

Even 82K sounds like it's stretching it for 20 people all being paid for 10 days to work in Europe!

OK that will cover running costs, but with bike costing well over 5K it's hardly staggering profits either.

Things will be different by the end as around half of the prize money is awarded to the GT winners, most of that goes to the T3 - but any team finishing out of say the T5 isn't going to get anywhere near enough to cover their costs based on this!