14 seconds of Floyd Mayweather or six nights with Frankel - what could you get for the Olympic money cut by UK Sport?

Sport
The disparity between earnings in different sports is stark

Right now there are hundreds of sportsmen and women with no idea what their professional future holds after seven Olympic and Paralympic sports were stripped of their entire funding ahead of the Tokyo 2020 Games.

Archery, badminton, fencing, goalball, table tennis, weightlifting and wheelchair rugby were yesterday informed that UK Sport had rejected every one of their appeals to overturn the cuts, leaving them facing a battle to somehow keep afloat without the millions they require to function.

Badminton, the first sport to lose all its funding after delivering a medal in the most recent Games, had already warned that the loss of its £5.74 million funding pot would be "catastrophic".

Adrian Christy, chief executive of Badminton England – which runs GB Badminton’s elite programme – told Telegraph Sport: "We know that the elite programme would be at least halved at best and is likely to be even smaller than that.

"With coaches and support staff the group at the moment is 31, including 18 players. If the funding is not reinstated it would come down to about 10 to 12 players and six support staff.

"If the money goes, it’s a little bit like wandering down Oxford Street and all the shutters have been pulled down. You can’t actually see the opportunities inside. That’s what it’s going to be like for us."

As ever, the sports contributing the most medals - cycling, rowing, athletics and sailing - have been given the biggest slice of the pie, but it is the complete omission of seven sports that have proven most controversial.

Here are the amounts that have been taken away:

Perhaps the most startling aspect of all is the size of the figures at stake - in the high-spending world of sport they are minuscule.

Telegraph Sport reported yesterday that the Rugby Football Union - which has overtaken the Football Association as the country’s biggest money-making national governing body with an annual turnover of £407.1 million - has refused to stump up the £760,000-a-year that GB Wheelchair Rugby has lost.

The annual sum required by goalball - one of the few sports played by totally blind athletes - is even less at around £128,000 per year. It is a measly amount.

In this current sporting landscape of extraordinary mismatches between the haves and the have-nots, we decided to have a look at what these relatively low sums of money could provide in other sports.

17 days of Carlos Tevez / A year of badminton funding

It is no secret that salaries in football are vastly out of sync with the rest of the working world, and the growth of the Chinese Super League has only served to emphasise that.

The figures offered to good, but not great, players in an attempt to lure them to China have been astronomical, with the likes of Graziano Pelle, Hulk and Oscar now in the top 10 highest paid footballers in the world. But it is Carlos Tevez who sits top of the pile.

The Argentina forward earns a whopping £615,000 a week at Shanghai Shenhua, which equates to £87,857 every day.

17 days of Carlos Tevez - £1.49 million
A year of badminton funding - £1.44 million 

14 seconds of Floyd Mayweather / A year of fencing funding

Floyd Mayweather's Instagram account is an odd place, primarily consisting of the retired boxer throwing wads of cash around his house.

The American has not struggled for money throughout his career, but it was his victory over Manny Pacquiao in 2015 that broke all records and earned him a reported £170 million. The fight went the entire 12-round distance, meaning that Mayweather raked in more than £78,000 for every second.

Just 14 seconds into the fight, he had already made more money than is required to keep British fencing going for an entire year.

14 seconds of Floyd Mayweather - £1.10 million
A year of fencing funding - £1.06 million

A Formula One gearbox / A year of wheelchair rugby funding

The world of Formula One is one shrouded in secrecy, with teams fiercely guarding their technical expertise to gain an advantage over their competitors. As such, precise figures are hard to come by.

It is estimated that a Formula One gearbox costs anywhere between £500,000 and £775,000, with repair costs throughout a season running the figure for that single component of the car into millions.

Formula One 
Formula One is a world awash with money Credit: getty images

The total cost to build a whole Formula One car is around £10 million... and that's before things start to go wrong during a race.

A Formula One gearbox - £775,000
A year of wheelchair rugby funding - £760,000

Six 'sessions' with Frankel / A year of archery funding

The highest-rated racehorse in the world when he retired in 2012, Frankel transcended horse racing by remaining unbeaten through all 14 of his runs.

The horse earned just shy of £3 million in prize money during his racing career, but his estimated worth is £100 million due to his breeding potential.

Frankel
Frankel's offspring are highly sought after Credit: getty images

Frankel's stud fee is £125,000 - an amount that is only likely to rise once his offspring start impressing at race courses worldwide - and he covered 133 mares in his first year of retirement.

Six 'sessions' with Frankel - £750,000
A year of archery funding - £737,500

Reach Wimbledon semi-finals / A year of weightlifting funding

It took 26 years for the prize money awarded to the winner of the Wimbledon men's singles to increase from £100,000 to £1 million in 2010. By last summer - just six years later - it had doubled to £2 million.

Andy Murray was the man to take home that amount, when he beat Milos Raonic in the final, but he need not have even reached the final to have earned enough money to fund British weightlifting for a year.

Losing in the semi-finals would have been enough for that, with Roger Federer and Tomas Berdych pocketing £500,000 for their exploits in reaching the final four.

Make the Wimbledon semi-finals - £500,000
A year of weightlifting funding - £427,500

Fifth place at The Masters / A year of table tennis funding

There is no more iconic tournament in golf than The Masters, played at the pristine Augusta National club every April.

Last year, Britain's Danny Willett took home the grand sum of £1.45 million for his first victory in a Major, but the big sums continued down the field, with every golfer in the top 20 taking home in excess of £100,000.

Dustin Johnson
Dustin Johnson has earned more than £33 million in his career Credit: getty images

It was the man who finished fifth at last year's Masters who could have funded the entire British table tennis set-up for a year, with the £322,240 he pocketed for his weekend's work. That man was Dustin Johnson, whose career earnings total more than £33 million.

Fifth at The Masters - £322,240
A year of table tennis funding - £302,500

Eight Tymal Mills IPL overs / A year of goalball funding

England's left-arm seamer Tymal Mills described the £1.44 million fee he will be paid by Bangalore to take part in this season's Indian Premier League as "crazy".

Indeed, when you break the figures down even further it only gets crazier. The maximum number of matches Bangalore can play in the tournament is 17 and Mills is restricted to four overs per game.

So, if Mills bowls his absolute maximum number of potential deliveries during the tournament, each six-ball over will cost £21,176. If he bowls less, the 'per over' amount only goes up.

Eight Tymal Mills IPL overs - £169,408
A year of goalball funding - £128,000

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