Prize money

We owe our understanding of how professional cyclists were remunerated at the time to Fredy Budzinski, the long-standing editor-in-chief of Radwelt magazine. In the annual Radwelt sports albums, he listed the prize money earned by professionals during the past season.

The amounts listed in the table were taken from various editions of the Sportalben. Although Walter Rutt's prize money can only be documented incompletely, the data at least allows us to estimate how wealthy he was.

No figures are available regarding the amounts of his appearance fees and advertising contracts, which he always negotiated personally. However, they were likely substantial as well.

By way of comparison, it should be noted that the annual earnings of a miner in the early twentieth century were approximately 1,350 marks, while those of a locomotive engineer were approximately 2,200 marks.

The prize money of Walter Rutt / Excerpt

Year | Domestic | Foreign|Total

all monetary values in marks
(with the kind support of Monika Mischke)