IAAF Golden League: new impetus for the Grand Prix in Athletics
1998 will be the Year of Women in Athletics, but it will also go down in history as the year in which the IAAF launched the IAAF Golden League. This new formula will offer successful athletes the possibility to benefit from a million dollar jackpot.
The introduction of the IAAF Golden League is another step forward in the continual process of modernising athletics, providing athletes with still greater incentives to excel and guaranteeing the fans of the sport a top class show.
The IAAF Golden League groups six of the top IAAF Grand Prix meetings in a new series which has been named the IAAF Golden League. Participating athletes will have the possibility of winning outright or sharing a million dollar jackpot, which will be split among the athletes who win their event in all of the meetings in the League series and the Grand Prix Final - which will take place in Moscow, in September 1998. This could well mean that a single athlete will walk away at the end of the season with a cool one million dollar jackpot bonus.
The series will comprise six meetings (Rome, Oslo, Zurich, Brussels, Berlin and Monte Carlo) plus the Grand Prix Final in Moscow, in 1998 and will be extended to include further meetings for the 1999 season.