All shoe companies and other major sponsors hire specialist firms to track logo exposures- in other words, what it would cost to get the same exposure in print, TV, internet etc that their sponsored athlete generates for their product if they had to buy it as advertising. On top of that, however good an ad appears to go over to the public, you cannot directly establish a sporting product as capable of supporting top performance without placing it on the top performer. You don’t see many Puma ads on TV precisely because it’s FAR cheaper to get exposure via Bolt.
358mil vs perhaps as little as 4.5mil so far.
The 4.5 mil figure would be a low ball for several reasons:
1: He would have massive bonuses on top of his base.
2: Most well negotiated contracts have a roll-over clause, meaning that, for example, 50% of the bonus money earned in year one would be rolled over into base pay for year two, etc. This is fairly easy to negotiate because, by making bonus’s hard to reach, bonus earning performances make the spread between payout and benefit far greater in favor of the company.
I can only give the one example from memory of Ben’s Diadora contract 21 years ago;
1 million/yr base in year one plus 300,000 for each indoor and 1 million for each outdoor WR plus bonuses for breaking 9.80 and then 9.70 etc, not to mention the 1 million bonuses for Olympics and WCs.
If nothing adverse had happened in Seoul, you just need to look at the splits to see how many WIRs over 50y 50m 60y 60m etc he could have gotten as well as outdoor records based on how much he shut down. He could have rolled up millions, half of which would go into the next years base on top of the first payout.
Another example would be a milk contract he had- 80,000 up front, plus 10,000 after each race where they were responsible to take a picture of him sipping their milk, plus a 1 million bonus for the Olympic win.
With all the media contracts in various countries for exclusives and other ads, you can see how fast money could pile up even then. You would need to multiply all these figures by at least two to give present comparative dollar buying power today.