When the armistice is signed, there are always winners and losers. More often than not, though, the ripples of the truce extend far beyond the parties at the table.
When the PGA Tour and LIV Golf signed their ceasefire recently, they ended the bitter divide that has gripped the heart of golf for the better part of two years. For those unfamiliar with the story, LIV Golf presented a new format of the sport and, backed by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, set about pumping the money pipes to turn its vision into reality.
Awash with a seemingly limitless supply of funds, LIV Golf set about poaching the best golfers it could get its hand on (or at least the ones willing to take the payday). The golfing establishment, led by the PGA Tour, retaliated by banishing the golfers that sided with LIV.
Indeed the PGA and LIV ended up in a lawsuit that further deepened the acrimony engulfing the sport.
Yet all of a sudden, the war is over amid news of a merger between the two organisations.
The nature of the truce can be perfectly encapsulated in a quote from George Orwell’s 1984. “Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.”
Peace has arrived in golf, but the fallout from the armistice has not settled.
From its distant vantage point, triathlon should watch the happenings of the golfing world with both curiosity and alarm. If it can happen over there, how long before it happens in this realm too?
One of the big driving forces in the golf settlement was the tacit understanding that LIV, with its Saudi Arabian money, could sustain itself indefinitely. By contrast, the PGA Tour could be bled dry in a matter of years through a combination of litigation and LIV poaching.
When it comes to the submission of sports, there are two major elements at play. The first is financial. The second pertains to power.
There is a simple law of gravity when it comes to money. Uncomfortable as it may be, the deepest pockets are usually the ones that bend reality to its will.
Money from countries like Saudi Arabia now seeps into plenty of sports. Football is flush with “oil money” from the Gulf States while Saudi Arabia recently got in on the game by purchasing Newcastle FC in England.
Such is the financial might of said economies (and the willingness to utilise centralised investment funds in such ways), there are few sports that can resist. Formula 1 now has the Saudi Arabia Grand Prix. Likewise boxing is now steering ever-closer into Saudi Arabia’s embrace.
Compared to such sports and the billions they generate in revenue, triathlon barely registers on the radar.
Indeed, the entire sport could easily be purchased for what would amount to pocket money compared to the investments in football and golf. From a financial perspective, the question is not whether triathlon will withstand gravity; rather, it is whether the behemoths will look its way.
This then brings us to the second aspect. Power.
There is a temptation to reach for accusations of Eurocentrism or outdated thinking when it comes to criticism of regimes such as Saudi Arabia. Maybe there is a sense of disgruntlement in some circles at them taking the toys of the traditionalists. No country is perfect after all.
However, the Saudi government, to stick with it as the example, is problematic to say the least. The public and brazen murder of the dissident Jamal Khashoggi is one notorious instance of its condemnable behaviour.
Closer to home in the triathlon community, the regime has also sentenced three men to death on terrorism charges for resisting the forced evictions surrounding the NEOM project. Even the United Nations issued a press release expressing its alarm at the sentencing of the trio. Moreover, when it comes to NEOM, the evictions, bloodshed and threats of violence have been public knowledge since 2020.
LIV has fielded repeated accusations of being a vehicle of sport-washing for the Saudi Arabian regime. In a similar manner, observers had said the same of Newcastle FC; many also took up the same line regarding the Qatar World Cup in football last year.
Sport-washing, however, misses the point.
Image is nice (and international relations scholars reading will usually agree that there is validity to the concept of soft power). Power is nicer.
Buying up elite sport hands gains governments an institution of modern society. Sport is everywhere nowadays and that ubiquity creates influence. And if you have enough money, you can gradually work to the point of purchasing the keys to the kingdom. Investment in and control of elite sport is not to encourage tourism to countries like Saudi Arabia or to make people say good things about the regime. Rather, it is designed to insert such governments in the highest echelons of power.
Sport is just one stepping stone in a far grander scheme.
Power is also the reason that a secondary influence has entered the world of sport since the turn of the century. The billionaires.
Roman Abramovich’s purchase of Chelsea FC in England might just be the archetype of this approach. Again, there is a financial reality at play insofar that billionaires could pump as much money as they please into sport.
However there is also a power aspect at play.
Whereas state ownership can be conceived in terms of mechanisms of international power, billionaire ownership is all about personal control. Whether you are a billionaire or a foreign government, owning a club or a sport feels good. It is the physical manifestation of winning the game of Monopoly. The more one acquires, the deeper they become entrenched into the systems of governance that operate in the sporting sphere and beyond.
As for the sport-washing itself, it cannot be denied that there is an element of value. After all, sport can be used to distract prying eyes from asking uncomfortable questions.
Abramovich used Chelsea FC to avoid questions over his links to President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government for years. It was only the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that put paid to that. In a similar vein, Saudi Arabia can hope to use its increasing foothold in sport to deflect from significant questions over its ongoing war in Yemen and other abuses within its own borders.
As such, in this shifting landscape of sport, triathlon will be at the mercy of being sucked into the orbit of money.
The first steps are already underway. Super League Triathlon took its final to NEOM last year. Whatever the question marks over NEOM and the actions of the Saudi Arabian government, they have displayed an incipient interest in the sport.
Super League, though, is not the concern here. As a private enterprise, they are free to do as they please. Instead, it is World Triathlon that are the key.
On that front, the signs are not promising.
To start with the pinnacle of the sport, World Triathlon charges a sanction fee of USD 150,000 to host a WTCS event. When packaged with other costs, such as prize money and broadcasting, the true total expense is more like USD 1,000,000. What is a million compared to the billions pumped into the conquest of golf and football?
All things considered, it would not take a particularly big pay cheque for a party to essentially purchase the entire sport of triathlon. For the merger between LIV Golf and the PGA, insert World Triathlon plus public investment fund of your choosing.
It would also appear that World Triathlon have been struggling to find new venues for its flagship product. The 2024 and 2025 WTCS Finals were supposed to have been announced last November. The 2024 Final in Malaga was confirmed, six months late, in May. There has also been no word on the 2025 Final.
Why does any of this matter? At the end of the day, triathlon will still (probably) continue, regardless of the owners. If nothing else, the matter ultimately comes down to what the sport means.
Is it a chess piece for nation-states, a plaything for billionaires, a source of growing profit returns to be financialised, securitised and commercialised to within an inch of its life?
There are committed heartlands of triathlon, such as Yokohama and Hamburg, that will help it survive in the meantime. However the financial strength of the sport is laughable compared to what could potentially be stacked against it.
Faced with such financial realities, the question is therefore not whether triathlon will succumb to the lure of money. It is when it will happen.
The day will eventually come in which the eyes of money and power fall upon this small fish. Some athletes will get a big pay rise when it happens. Others will also win from whatever truce will be signed. Upon that day, though, there will be no point in asking how things came to be or if it ever could have been stopped.
When it comes to the deep waters of money and power, triathlon never stood a chance.
Whatever the future holds for the stewardship of triathlon, it has to be one that puts the athlete first. Some of these big money investments have come at the detriment of competition and there’s always a risk that the welfare of the racers is put at risk “for the show”. How long term are some of these investments as well? What happens when the government fund changes direction and the money goes away and can’t be replaced?