"It's Embarrassing" — Trek Has Now Spent More Than $300,000 Of Its Own Money Topping Up The Prize Purses Of Women's WorldTour Races, And CEO John Burke Says The Whole Point Is To Make The Cheques Obsolete
Trek Bicycles has confirmed that it has now spent more than $300,000 of its own corporate funds since the start of the 2024 season topping up the prize money of women's WorldTour races to match what the men receive at the same event. CEO John Burke, speaking to Fortune this week, framed the cheques less as a marketing campaign and more as a corporate-responsibility line item — and said his stated goal is to make them unnecessary.
"It's embarrassing that we have to do this in 2026," Burke said. "We do it because the gap exists. The day a race organiser tells me my cheque is no longer needed is the day I will write the press release I actually want to write." Trek's accounting team confirmed that the year-on-year top-up bill has, in fact, fallen — from $134,000 in 2024 to roughly $108,000 in 2025 and a projected $84,000 in 2026 — as more organisers have moved to equal purses on their own books.
The biggest single gap Trek is still closing is at the Ardennes Classics. The 2026 women's Liège-Bastogne-Liège Femmes ran a total prize fund of just over €22,000 against €50,000 for the men's race the same weekend. Demi Vollering received approximately €5,400 for winning the women's Doyenne. Tadej Pogačar received €20,000 for winning the men's. Trek's cheque, paid privately to its own riders only, made up some of the difference for them — but only for them.
That last detail has produced a sharp split in the women's peloton. Privately, several riders not on Trek-supported teams have grumbled that the company's gesture, while welcome, has the side-effect of widening the gap inside the women's peloton between Lidl-Trek riders and everyone else. Burke acknowledged the criticism. "Of course it's not a perfect mechanism. The perfect mechanism is the race organiser paying equal purses. We are using the imperfect tool because the perfect tool isn't on the table yet."
Several Lidl-Trek riders have, in fact, redirected the top-up money to charity or to their team's domestiques rather than bank it personally. Lizzie Deignan, in her final season, has confirmed she will hand the entire 2026 figure to Lidl-Trek's women's-development pipeline. Elisa Longo Borghini said in March that she had used her 2025 cheque to pay for a junior-team training camp in Tuscany.
The wider industry pressure is starting to land. ASO, owners of the Tour de France Femmes and the Vuelta Femenina, raised the women's Tour purse to within 30% of the men's for 2026 and have signalled that 50% is the target by 2028. Flanders Classics has equalised the Tour of Flanders purse since 2024. The Ardennes — owned by ASO and locally co-organised — remain the biggest hold-out, with the women's Liège purse barely over 40% of the men's.
Burke's broader argument was that prize-money equality is "the easy part" of women's-cycling equality. The harder parts — broadcast windows, calendar slot, sponsorship per team — require structural cooperation between organisers and broadcasters that no individual sponsor can buy. "I can write a cheque to fix the prize money. I can't write a cheque to fix the TV window," he said, an apparent reference to Vollering's complaints this week about the limited live coverage of the women's Doyenne.
Trek's confirmation that the bill is shrinking has been welcomed across the women's peloton, and the company's stated ambition — to spend $0 on prize-money matching by 2030 — has been quietly endorsed by SD Worx-Protime, Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto and FDJ-Suez. Whether the race organisers will hit the same target on the same timeline is an entirely different question.