Top-Earning Female Athletes

By Tom Van Riper and Kurt Badenhausen, Forbes.com

They’ve come a long way, baby. A handful of them, anyway.

When it comes to making money in sports, women are narrowing the gap with men, at least at the top of the pyramid. For women, the highest-paid athletes come almost exclusively from tennis and golf, where prize money and endorsement dollars flow overwhelmingly to the brightest stars.

In contrast, women’s basketball and soccer are still a long way from producing the next LeBron James or David Beckham.

Golfers Annika Sorenstam, Michelle Wie and Lorena Ochoa have broken into eight-figure earnings territory, a testament to the LPGA’s efforts to globalize. The women’s tour not only has top golfers from numerous countries (Sorenstam is from Sweden, Ochoa from Mexico, while Wie is Korean-American, born in Hawaii), but has made a point to broaden its international appeal by holding more events for players in their home markets.

“The tour has a much more international flavor to it,” says David Carter of the Sports Business Group, an industry consultant.

Women’s tennis has been on the upswing a lot longer, dating back to Billie Jean King’s victory over Bobby Riggs in a 1973 match appropriately named “The Battle of the Sexes.”

The publicity from that match led to the Women’s Tennis Association’s first major national television contract, just in time for Chris Evert to blossom as the first TV star of the women’s game.

A little bit later, when attendance and television ratings held firm for the prime years of Martina Navratilova, Hana Mandlikova and Pam Shriver, it was clear that the public was ready for strong, hard-hitting women, and an international players roster helped ensure a wide audience.

Today, the four highest-paid female athletes in the world are from the tennis circuit: Maria Sharapova (Russia), Serena and Venus Williams (U.S.) and the newly retired Justine Henin (Belgium).

No question, the compelling rivalries of the past decade, particularly between the Williams sisters, have done a lot to overcome occasional obstacles like the 1993 stabbing of Monica Seles, the downfall (and brief return) of Jennifer Capriati and the degeneration of over-marketed Anna Kournikova into a caricature of herself.

Will women’s team-sport athletes ever catch up to men? Probably not any time soon, given the lack of depth that’s tied to a shorter history of organization and development.

It could happen one day, though, Carter thinks, given the consistent, incremental growth of women’s sports and the national trend that has more women in charge of family budgets and entertainment spending.

“The chance does exist, especially as women’s sports get more coverage in the Olympics,” he says.

Olympians and WNBA stars like Diana Taurasi and Lisa Leslie don’t get the same money from Nike that LeBron does, but they’re in the stable. How effectively their personalities are marketed may determine whether the basketball stars of the next generation make their millions or leave the big money to tennis and golf.

The top five:

1. Maria Sharapova
2. Serena Williams
3. Venus Williams
4. Justine Henin
5. Michelle Wie