As one of the most prolific alpine skiers, Lindsey Vonn has amassed considerable wealth. She has 82 World Cup wins and an Olympic title to her name, making her the most decorated female skier in history. Currently, Vonn’s estimated net worth lies at $12 million.

However, all that wealth didn’t come from big fat checks accompanying her numerous titles. Rather, her many sponsorship deals take the credit for that. Skiing, unfortunately, doesn’t count as a fiscally lucrative sport.

Lindsey Vonn reveals how much skiers get paid

Olympic champion Lindsey Vonn retired in 2019, after her knees, battered from years of injury, could no longer hold her weight on skis. Appearing in a recent interview for Kneading Dough, Vonn revealed the cold truth of competitive extreme sports. They don’t have a lot of earning potential.

“Getting paid through ski racing is very, very difficult,” Vonn said. “It’s a very steep pyramid. If you’re not in the top five or ten in the world, you’re struggling to not have to get a second job.” Unfortunately, unlike many well-paying sports, ski racers can’t depend on competitions to keep them afloat.

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“It’s not like golf or tennis, okay? There’s no six-figure checks coming our way.” At her last Olympic event in Pyeongchang, Vonn bagged a bronze in the downhill, and the prize money amounted to just $15,000. The best that skiers can make from competitions lies around $30,000. 

“Normally, it’s about $30,000 before taxes,” Vonn explained. So even that much they don’t get in hand. “Usually, we’re in another country, so we’re taxed from, you know, Austria or Switzerland or wherever, and then taxed again from the US. So, really, it’s nothing.”

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Despite being a top athlete like Tiger Woods, she had a very different experience

For ski racing, the athletes receive their payouts from the International Ski Federation. The rules dictate that a minimum of 120,000 Swiss francs, or about $125,500, get distributed among the top 30 athletes. The athlete in 30th place gets a check of about $200. On the other hand, sports like golf sometimes pay down to the top 60 athletes.

Reportedly, professional golfers get paid a percentage of the purse for each tournament. The 60th place at the U.S. Open in 2011 went home with $17,000, while the winner received a check for $1.4 million. Tiger Woods, the golfing legend who dated Lindsey Vonn for almost three years before they split in 2015, earned nearly $95 million through 2011.

The enormous pay gap between the sports becomes glaringly obvious as most extreme sports athletes make somewhere around $50,000 to $200,000 a year. Comparatively, those who play in major sports leagues of popular ‘stick and ball’ sports regularly sign multi-million dollar deals.

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