The Courier welcomes the news not only that Australia Post has signed a three-year deal to continue to sponsor the Stawell Gift, but that in an almost unprecedented gesture has made the women’s prize money equal to the men’s.
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The prize money for the 120m race will increase from $6000 to $60,000 with first place taking home $40,000.
This is a staggering tenfold increase in the existing prize money and should go a long way to raising the prestige of an already prestigious race but potentially throw the invitation open to an international field of runners.
Making the Australia Post Women’s Gift and the Stawell Gift the two richest footraces on the Australian athletics calendar will only add to the focus on the Grampians town for one weekend in the year too.
Despite some misplaced rumours that Ballarat would steal Stawell’s signature race, in reality Stawell now has the jump on all its competitors and the ball is in the court of all those other Gift races that hope to catch a bit of this limelight.
The challenge now laid down for Ballarat, Maryborough, Daylesford and other popular handicap races is to generate similar funding to lure the competitors and the crowds.
The benefits to Stawell as far as tourism and civic pride go have been well documented and cannot be underestimated.
A list of female competitors at the Gift including Cathy Freeman, Tamsyn Lewis, Jana Pittman, Melinda Gainsford-Taylor and Melissa Breen, is like a who’s who of first-rate Australian runners, so The Courier can only applaud this reward of successful and up and coming athletes
This is also a positive step that may help in partially redressing the imbalance between the funding and attention paid to women’s sport.
Perhaps one of the most telling quotes is from top female runner, Melissa Breen.
“We run the same distances, we train the same hours, we love the sport equally . . .”
Cynics would argue the prize money is not there because the audience is not there. The audience is not there so the media pays little attention, and so the cycle continues with generations of world-class female athletes consigned to obscurity and hard-working frustration.
Several vanguard sports like tennis and golf have shown that this need not always be so. If Australia Post is setting a precedent here it is one that we hope will be imitated by other sponsors.
