With the Keirin World Series now at an end, the inevitable question is: how much did the foreign stars earn from racing in Japanese domestic keirin in 2026?
The JKA publishes details of the prize money attached to every race; and the official Keirin.jp website posts rankings of the 50 top-earning men and 20 top-earning women per calendar year. But we can find no public source allowing you to look up the total prize money for any given rider.
However… if we know every race a given rider participated in, the category of that race, and where they finished in it, we can try to calculate a total for ourselves.
Global Keirin therefore estimates the total prize money earned by each Keirin World Series participant to be:
| Rider | JPY 🇯🇵 | US $ 🇺🇸 | EUR 🇪🇺 | GB £ 🇬🇧 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lavreysen | 14,773,000 | 92,272 | 79,582 | 68,221 |
| Truman | 14,012,000 | 87,518 | 75,482 | 64,707 |
| Richardson | 3,335,600 | 20,834 | 17,968 | 15,403 |
| Andrews | 4,938,000 | 30,842 | 26,601 | 22,803 |
| van de Wouw | 3,653,000 | 22,816 | 19,678 | 16,869 |
| Gros | 3,331,000 | 20,805 | 17,944 | 15,382 |
These are Global Keirin‘s own best-effort calculations, based on published information on prize money alone; our understanding of how complications like disqualifications and dead heats are handled; and AI-powered online analysis and translation tools. As you will appreciate, it’s quite a challenge – especially when virtually all of the source material is in a language you don’t speak.
Plus, there will almost certainly have been other payments and bonuses, as well as contributions to travel and living costs.
Harrie Lavreysen naturally comes out as the top earner, having won 18 of his 19 races – that’s by far the best winning percentage of any man in Japanese domestic keirin over the past 4 months.
But the one race he didn’t win was the most lucrative race of the entire Series, the final day of the GIII-level meeting at Wakayama. That race was won by Joe Truman, earning him 5.1 million yen (US $ 32,000) – accounting for more than a third of the British rider’s total winnings for the Series. Lavreysen’s third place only earned him 2.1 million yen (US $ 13,200).
On the women’s side, Ellesse Andrews was the top rider of the Series, also with 18 wins from 19 – but with one being a dead heat. But with pay parity still a long way off in Japan, her total earnings were only a third of Lavreysen’s, for an identical win percentage.
The international guest riders were mostly competing at meetings rated FI: the Wakayama meeting was GIII for the men, higher than normal; whereas the one-off women’s race was at the reduced FII level, reflecting its clash with the major Women’s All-Star Keirin meeting.
These are the lower levels of the Japanese pyramid, where prize money falls far short of the jackpot sums on offer for GI and Grand Prix races. But even in these modest races, the prizes are many, many, many times more than what’s on offer at a UCI event.
