The male and female winners of this year’s Keirin Grand Prix races will collect significantly more prize money than last year – continuing the recent upward trend, and making limited progress on the sport’s huge gender gap.
Netkeirin says the jackpot prize in the men’s race, taking place at Iwaki-Taira on Wednesday 30 December, will be 160 million yen – a base prize of 154 million yen, plus 6 million in supplementary prizes. That’s a rise of 14 million yen, almost 10%, on last year’s total.
Based on today’s exchange rates: that 160 million total prize would equate to US$ 1.01 million, 909 million euros, or £760,000.
But it won’t be the first time the jackpot has exceeded US$ 1 million. With the yen unusually strong in the wake of the global financial crisis, the prize was worth over a million dollars from 2008-2012, peaking at an estimated US$ 1.287 million in 2011; and by our calculations, it would have worked out fractionally more than a million in 2020.
The top prize in the Girls Grand Prix (Tuesday 29 December) is increasing by almost 33%. The total prize this year will be 20.3 million (US$ 128k, €115k, £97k) – a base prize of 15 million, plus 5.3 million in supplementary prizes – compared to a total of 15.3 million in 2025.
This goes some way to closing an embarrassing gender gap: it puts the first-placed woman roughly on par with the third-placed man in 2026, compared to the fifth-placed man in 2025. But as the chart below shows, there is still a very long way to go.
The prize sums quoted can be confusing: you will often see two numbers quoted – a base prize, and a prize including supplementary prizes.
In 2025, the reported value of supplementary prizes for winning man Kohei Gunji was 6 million yen, just 4% of his base prize; but for Mina Sato, winner of the women’s race, the 5 million she won in supplementary prizes increased her total winnings by more than 50%.
Netkeirin breaks it down, explaining that both riders received 3 million yen from the JKA Awards Programme, and 2 million from the office of the Mayor of host city Hiratsuka. Each received other smaller sums.
The base prize for first place had been fixed at 95 million yen for many years, before starting to tick upwards – for the men, at least – in the mid 2010s. 2021 was the first year with a base prize over 100 million – but the overall value, including supplementary prizes, first reached 100 million in 2004.
The line-up of the men’s and women’s races is made up of the winners of the year’s GI-rated events, with the remaining places going to the riders at the top of the prize-money ranking. The qualifying period closes in late November, following the season’s final GI event.
