Paul Campos shares this amusing story (with further details here) about Bill Ackman, a rich guy who played tennis with some actual pros in an actual tournament. Kinda like George Plimpton except that Plimpton was openly doing it for the story value, kinda like Heaven Can Wait except that Warren Beatty was 40 when making that movie and Ackman is 59. Also this wasn’t a movie, it was an official tennis tournament, so real life, kinda. In his post, Campos argues convincingly that the pros went easy on the rich guy–they beat him and his doubles partner but to be nice they let them win a few games rather than just slamming the ball at the rich guy and winning just about every point. In his post, Campos expresses annoyance at the corruption of pro sports:
The three other players in this match threw the match, in the sense that they did not give an honest effort, which is a huge breach of ATP rules for obvious reasons. Bill Ackman, billionaire and influential political figure, bought his way into a pro tournament, and bribed three actual professional players to pretend to play him. He did this because he is so completely delusional that he thinks he deserves to be on a professional tennis court, on the basis of, to use one of his favorite words, “merit.”
It’s important to emphasize that this was not an exhibition, or a pro-am, i.e., the kind of event where Roger Federer hits around with Bill Gates for charity, and everybody realizes it’s not real. This was a real match, for real ATP points, with real players . . . This is obscene and disgusting and really disturbs me [Campos], as trivial as it is by itself. We worship billionaires in this society now like Stalin or Mao or Hitler were worshiped in their societies. Vladimir Putin scores eight goals when he plays hockey against professional Russian hockey players because that’s the way the world works I guess, but is nothing sacred? Not even the one place — the playing field — where the only privilege is supposed to be the privilege of actual, as opposed to purchased, ability?
I can’t quite get so worked up about the tennis thing–pro sports is entertainment as much as it is anything, and Ackman’s stunt can be viewed as a boring and money-soaked distant relative of classic Bill Veeck promotions such as the movable fence, exploding fence, and midget batsman. I’m more interested in the question of what Ackman was thinking when doing this. Unlike Veeck, he has no particular need to promote a sports franchise.
One reason for playing with top pros is that you can get an amazing tennis experience–but, as Campos notes, Ackman could get that just as well by playing with the pros at his local country club. Another motivation is the competition–this is a real-life tournament game, not just the Memorial Day tournament at the Park Avenue Country Club or whatever. But, if you want competition, you’d want actual competition with your peers, right? You wouldn’t want to be playing with pros who hit easy shots to you. So I’m still not getting it.
The closest analogy I can see is that I used to play squash with a guy who was much better than me–I’m not good at squash at all!–and he was nice enough to give me shots that I could reach. Instead of just killing it every time, he’d hit soft looping shots that would land right in the corner. So it was work for me–indeed, I couldn’t usually return the shots–but it was fun, and I felt that I always had a chance. It wasn’t the same experience as playing a different friend who was roughly equal in ability to me–he was slightly better, too, but not so much better that I couldn’t take the occasional game from him–, but in some aspect the game with the much superior player was more fun, even though the competitive aspect was removed.
So my guess is that Ackman is trying to get the best of both worlds–the fun of playing with someone who is much better than you and can push you to your limits, and the excitement of live competition. He played doubles with a pro, against two other pros. As noted above, I’ll take Campos’s word that in a competitive doubles match of this sort, the two pros on the other side could easily win by just targeting the amateur, so the competitive aspect of this is fake–but maybe Akman is ok with the fake, in the same way that business executives can get used to deference from their employees. I guess I get that too–students treat me with a lot of politeness, they sometimes even laugh at my jokes, storekeepers are usually pleasant to customers, etc. If the server at a restaurant is nice to me, I’m under no illusion that that person likes me personally–especially if it’s somewhere I’ve never been to before!–but I still appreciate the politeness. I don’t enjoy servility, but politeness is fine. Ackman is more of a big shot than I am, we have different tastes, and for him it’s ok for some pro tennis players to pretend that he can play at their level.
The next question is, how much does Ackman believe what he’s saying about playing in an actual competitive match?
I see two possibilities:
Possibility 1: Ackman sincerely believes that he could legitimately play tennis at the level of pros who are decades younger than he is. This sounds hard to believe, but rich people can believe some damn stupid things. Some examples are here (“mad kings, megalomaniacal sociopaths granted dangerous power through wealth and/or political position, prone to wild schemes of empire and grandeur”), here (“percentage of slaves or serfs in the world”), and here (“clueless graphs from clueless rich guys”), and here (“Rich guys and their dumb graphs”).
The question is whether Ackman is prepared to believe something unbelievable about himself, rather than about something more abstract such as “The third transportation revolution” (see last link above). On one hand, at some level he has to be aware of his simple logic of the situation. On the other hand, what can I say, people can be pretty stupid if they want to be.
Possibility 2. Ackman knows that his opponents in that match were going easy on him, so it was not the competitive match he was claiming it was. This would be similar to that speedrunning fraud, or the recent story about Elon Musk cheating on a video game, or the old story of the cheating triathlete. I’m assuming that none of these people have split personalities or were in fugue states or whatever–they knew they weren’t doing what they said, and they were willing to lie about it.
This then raises the question about why they were lying about it in the first place. Here my best guess is that, in each case, the people involved painted themselves into a corner: They bragged about something they couldn’t do or didn’t do or maybe hoped to do, then other people called them on it. At that point, admitting the misrepresentation would be embarrassing, so the decision is made to double down.
Why did Elon Musk cheat on video games? I don’t know. My guess is that he was going around telling people what an awesome player he was, people were (correctly) skeptical of his claim, so he decided to make up evidence. In his mind, perhaps he really is awesome, and he’s just too busy to actually play the games, so his fake is just a way to demonstrate a higher truth. Similar to how that tough-guy psychology professor from Harvard misrepresented his data: he knew his theory was true, and if his actually monkey videos didn’t show it, then, well, he’d have to dissolve his dataset and elect another.
Why did that speedrunner cheat at Minecraft? I don’t know. My guess is that he was going around telling people he was the best Minecraft player in the world [I don’t actually know what that would entail. — ed.], people were (correctly) skeptical of his claim, so he decided to make up evidence. In his mind, perhaps he really is awesome, etc. Maybe he thinks that everyone else is cheating too, I dunno. Or maybe there’s a financial incentive here, that if he’s the world’s best player he can make some money from endorsements?
What about that cheating triathlete? I don’t know. My guess is that she was going around telling people she was an awesome athlete–or maybe she just had the ambition to rule at the triathlon but couldn’t quite hack it. In any case, if she’d already told her friends how amazing she was, or even if she’d just told herself this, then by cheating she doesn’t have to give up the story. Sure, she knows she didn’t complete that race as claimed, but she can still get the respect of others.
What about Ackman? I don’t know, and I guess if he weren’t also a political figure, we wouldn’t be talking about his tennis match. A cheating speedrunner or a lying triathlete–these are interesting and unusual human interest stories. A rich guy who gets some pros to play soft against him in a sporting event . . . this must be happening every day at some country club near you, indeed it’s pretty much a cliche at this point. Anyway, my guess of Ackman’s motivation is pretty much the same as for the others: he deluded himself into thinking he’s the equal of pro tennis players, in the same way that woman deluded herself into thinking she could prevail at the triathlon, in the same way that those gamers thought they could play at a higher level than they really could. And then he committed to this belief, so that he couldn’t handle the embarrassment–both to himself and to others–of admitting he’d overstated his abilities.
From one perspective, this seems kinda weird: why would you want credit for something you didn’t do? And once it comes out, the whole thing is even more embarrassing–indeed, people might be talking about it years later, as I am now! The point is, though, that these people may well have been deluded enough to think that their claims were true. From that perspective, their mistake was to commit to their beliefs–to treat them as facts rather than as hopes and dreams–long before any good evidence came in to support those beliefs. That’s the painted-in-the-corner thing. Recall the Armstrong principle.
The other thing is that not everyone thinks about these things in the way that Paul Campos, Andy Roddick (“This was the biggest joke I’ve ever watched in professional tennis”), and I do. From my perspective, the tennis match was an embarrassment which was only exceeded by Ackman’s later statements on the topic. But I guess that a lot of people don’t really care about the truth; rather, they see life as some sort of grand struggle of will, and they admire a rich guy who will get out there and never back down. As a social scientist, it’s important for me to try to understand this attitude, even though it repulses me. Hence this post.
This all reminded me of a book from a ways back, Andy Roddick Beat Me With a Frying Pan, and I found this article that mentions some survey results on how many amateurs think they could beat a pro https://www.thetennisgazette.com/features/what-the-score-was-when-andy-roddick-used-a-frying-pan-as-a-racket-against-an-amateur-20-years-ago/
Why isn’t there a word for that horrible feeling you get when someone else has embarrassed themselves beyond all redemption in your presence? Here is Ackman on Twitter after his loss:
“I can speak in front of an audience of a thousand people or in a TV studio on a broad range of topics without any preparation and without a twinge of fear, but yesterday I had my first real experience with stage fright.
I found myself on a tennis court in a live streamed professional tournament with a few hundred in the crowd. Throughout the match, my wrist, arm and body literally froze with the expected negative outcomes. I had difficulty breathing, and it was not a fitness issue. It got a bit better as the match progressed, but I was not able to overcome it.”
Stage fright? He could have used the word everyone else uses and just admitted that he “choked.” The irony here is that for a real athlete, the worst thing you could admit to is having choked in the big game. Somehow it is more important to Ackman that he be perceived as a competent tennis player, and that he is “fit,” than that he has a tendency to melt into a puddle of anxiety under stress.
The postscript is pretty embarrassing as well. Realizing that the damage to their reputation already exceeded any benefit they might gain, the Tennis Hall of Fame did the wise thing and rejected Ackman’s attempt to grease his way out of the situation.
There are other possibilities too
The possibilities are endless: Bill Ackman doesn’t care about public opinion, or he just wanted to see what would happen. Perhaps he was once quite skilled when he was young, but lost his passion along the way. Maybe he knows he can’t compete with the best of the best, but still thinks he is good enough to put on an interesting show. Alternatively, he may have thought that competing was the best way to refine his technique or the general public’s technique. He may be good enough in other sports, too.
Or more importantly, he wanted to use his accidental visibility to bring attention to the big players or to the sport as a whole. He might have studied the big players very closely when he was a kid.
P.S.: Maybe the pro players were easy on Bill Ackman, not out of greed or cynicism, but because they had their ego under control. Maybe they knew they were already at the top and didn’t feel the need to humiliate an old guy publicly.
P.S.: Thank you, Andrew
Maybe Bill Ackerman now regrets everything and will now retreat to the deepest form of silence.
There’s a lot of time spent on this blog post. I typically love your posts, but this was just nonsense.
Hey, no problem! Send me a self-addressed stamped envelope and I’ll mail you a refund check.
aw, I miss Car Talk.
In defense of Bill Ackman:
I took up tennis eighteen months ago, so I’ve watched a few YouTube videos about how to serve and that sort of thing. So now YouTube offers me tennis videos all the time, and every now and then I watch one. One that I have at he is from the “Nothing Major” channel. Two former pros play a couple of decent amateur players. The amateurs start every game ahead 40-0. I’m guessing most readers know tennis scoring but if not: ignore the “40”. A game of tennis is to four points, win by two, and the amateurs started every game ahead 3-0.
The pros won the match and it wasn’t close, I think it was 6-2, 6-2 or something like that.
This was two amateurs, not an amateur and a pro on the same team. On the other hand they were playing former pros, not current pros. And both amateurs are young and fit and are good players by club standards.
Speed and agility don’t matter nearly as much in singles as they do in doubles, but they do matter some.
Putting it all together, I do think it’s clear that the match was a joke and at least somewhat eroded the integrity of the sport.
But honestly, who cares? Well, obviously Campos cares and I’m sure there are others who care too, but, like Andrew, I can’t get too worked up about it. There may be an unstated or perhaps stated rule that every pro must play as hard as they can in every match — hey, gotta maintain the integrity of all sports when it comes to gambling on the point spread, amirite? — but in practice this is both unattainable and unenforceable. There’s no way Carlos Alcaraz is going to play just as hard when he’s up 6-0, 5-1 in the second round against number 71 in the world as when he’s playing in finals against Sinner. (Note to non-fans, Alcaraz and Sinner are the best players in the world). I wouldn’t have any problem with a player treating a match as a practice session in a sense: if you’re losing anyway, or winning anyway, work on some skills: hit a drop shot every time, or alternate between dropshots and lobs, or whatever.
My guess is that the billionaire just wanted to see what it’s like to play tennis at the pro level. How good are these guys really, what’s the tournament experience like, and so on. Plimpton-esque, but for personal edification rather than a journalistic endeavor.
If he was so deluded that he thought he’d be competitive, well, thats kinda sad. But if he just did it for kicks I don’t really see the harm… as long as it doesn’t become a thing.
Phil:
Agreed on all counts. I’m not worked up about this either. As I wrote in the above post, the interesting part was not that Ackman did a pro-am dress rehearsal for kicks; the interesting part was that he went to so much trouble to insist that the match was legit.
Also it’s interesting and potentially important when considering Ackman as one of a few hundred rich guys who are trying to take over the country and tell everyone what to do. I don’t know if it’s good or bad that these people with a legitimate prospect of bossing us all around are so deluded or shameless or whatever it is. None of this is new–it’s the standard “Emperor has no clothes” story–but it remains important.
I guess he could get the pro’s into trouble if he says it’s not legit. It might not be for his sake but for the sake of others.
It’s not just for gambling that playing with integrity matters. People tend to stop watching if the results don’t matter – people watch not just for the sporting prowess but also for the drama.
I guess professional wrestling negates that somewhat.
Oops…I meant “speed and agility don’t matter nearly as much as they do in singles”, not the other way around!
“My guess is that the billionaire just wanted to see what it’s like to play tennis at the pro level. How good are these guys really, what’s the tournament experience like, and so on. Plimpton-esque, but for personal edification rather than a journalistic endeavor. ”
I think this is probably generous. I find it more likely he thought he would put on an ok game and be able to say that he played professional tennis. Whether he played an ok game or not, no one can take away that he played in a professional tennis match.
I don’t know if this really compares to the Elon Musk/cheating situations. It doesn’t seem like Ackman is deceiving anyone about his abilities or that he really sees himself as a pro-Tennis player. If I had to guess I imagine he sees it as more of a quid pro quo arrangement where he gets to play in this (technically professional) game in front of a crowd, and someone on the other side gets some benefit. Maybe the ATP was hoping to get some positive press, or more likely Ackman made some donation to someone somewhere. So while it does hurt the credibility of professional tennis and while some aspiring pro lost out on a slot, Ackman probably sees the damage as relatively marginal.
There was a news story about a tech CEO paying to conduct the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, I think this is more comparable to that. There was also Kobe Bryant’s final game, where he scored 60 points but it was pretty clear that the Utah Jazz were going easy on him. In my mind Honourary Doctorates or the act of naming buildings after donors also fall in this category.
Blackthorne:
I’d agree with you–if Ackman were to admit that this was a fun little tennis exhibition game where the pros went easy on him. But the whole point of the story is that he pretty much refused to admit that! In his telling, it was a legitimate match. Which makes him delusional if he was speaking sincerely.
Well, I’d have to agree on the fundamentals that Bill Ackman cannot actually provide a competitive game in a professional tournament. (I have no specific relevant knowledge, but I’m happy to draw the conclusion with certainty from general principles.)
I can’t understand the linked article’s hatred of his game. If the tournament is open entry there’s no problem. If not, and he paid off the organizers for a spot, he’s not taking anything away from the other entrants; playing him means getting a free bye.
You could almost make the case that he displaced one “real” entrant, but (a) that’s a small loss because anyone at the level where they can be displaced didn’t stand to gain much from the tournament; and (b) if this becomes a normal practice where rich people frequently buy their way in to tournaments they’re not really qualified for, the ecosystem will adjust and more room in the tournaments will be made for the qualified players. (Why would you turn down free money?)
Michael:
Like you, I feel no indignation about this. Maybe because I’m not a big tennis fan.
As I wrote in the above post, the interesting part was not that Ackman did a pro-am dress rehearsal for kicks; the interesting part was that he went to so much trouble to insist that the match was legit, that he couldn’t just be comfortable saying that he paid for some pros to give him a fun match and not go too hard on him. His ego seems too tied up in the idea that he actually belongs on the court with these pros who are decades younger than him (and also, I can only assume, have much better tennis skills).
Yes, it seems like he really thought he would be as good as someone who has trained from a young age, worked his way through the system to be skilled and successful enough to be on the ATP tour.
Having spent time studying swindles, which very often target rich people, I know that they rely on those rich people believing that they are so smart that they are the only ones who are smart enough to really understand this get rich quick scheme.
Well put.
It’s not just the rich who go in for this kind of thing. In the crossword field, I’ve always been puzzled by the dozens of ‘neutrinos’ (as they are nicknamed) who try to get a high position on the London Times crossword club leaderboard via solving in advance and then speedily typing in the answers online – see https://times.xwdsnitch.link/solvers/neutrinos . What do they achieve by pretending to be good at crosswords? – maybe that’s a topic for social science …
Martin:
That’s funny! My guess is that, for the neutrinos, getting on the leaderboard is a game in itself. Solving the crossword is one kind of accomplishment; getting on the leaderboard is another.
Who is we? I don’t know anyone who does this.
I think we here is mainstream media writers and such. You know, people who work for the propaganda machines owned by (*checks notes*) billionaires.
Could be. I prefer r/highstrangeness for my alternate reality news. Really, why waste time with this half-baked stuff? Give me people on DMT reporting on the current mantid situation.
Ask anyone wearing a MAGA hat, Anoneuoid.
Pretty much nobody worships billionaires as a class. Most people worship at least one billionaire; that’s THEIR billionaire. Think old school paganism. Pantheon of gods, but a tribe will focus on one. A lot of immigrant Chinese Americans worship Elon Musk. Maybe it’s Donald Trump, or Kanye West, or Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, or Charlie Munger, or Warren Buffet, or Steve Jobs, etc.
Oooh, well put! I like that framing. Except that I’ve never heard of Charlie Munger, but I guess that’s part of the point.
Fascinating. This is a total alternate reality. The only place I’ve ever seen something close is online. Never in person. And certainly not “most people” or even a substantial number are going to be putting up pictures of their favorite billionaire in the wall.
Of course, the next step is for the claims to be walked back by diluting the term “worship” (and original comparison to hitler, etc) to be meaningless. Ie, like “worshiping” celebrities in general (musicians, athletes, actors).
Give me the Mantids performing psychosurgery via drones to prune negative emotions instead.
Lol guy who spends all his time commenting on blogs unsurprisingly doesn’t know very many actual people
https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/af5f988/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2048×1152+0+0/resize/1200×675!/format/webp/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F78%2Fcc%2F08e56cba30e75dde2b72c83a7ac5%2Fla-miwood-1478102584-snap-photo
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/worship
“Words are whatever I take them to mean. When everybody else means something else with a word other than what I mean, it’s everybody else who is wrong”
It’s a lonely world for people like you
I know this is continuing a dead thread, but just went to a wedding in rural Tennessee that was also a family reunion (for the other side I had never met before). There was no one out of ~ 100 worshiping billionaires.
Guy has social interaction and has to tell us they weren’t worshipping billionaires. I was at a wedding recently too and 0 people out of 175 were worshipping any kind of god, so I guess people don’t do that either.
I once spoke with a band who told me the last wedding they was an all Taylor Swift wedding. Every song was a Taylor Swift song. Walkout, ceremony, first dance, father-daughter, mother-son, and reception setlist.
I played some JV tennis at Columbia and crossed paths with Ackman on a few tennis courts in high school. Even back then, he came across as a budding megalomaniac without the megalo. So it was quite satisfying to break up his undefeated high-school doubles streak in the last match senior year and to knock him out of a big county tournament a few weeks later — both in close matches that could have gone either way.
As for the ATP Challenger, I don’t doubt Ackman genuinely thought that, playing with Jack Sock (who won the men’s doubles at Wimbledon and the US Open in 2018), he had a decent shot at winning the first-round match. But I suspect he realized early — probably as early as the warmup — that he was in over his head. He admitted somewhere that he “froze” due to the occasion and the crowd. The full match was streamed by the ATP and is still up on YouTube: you can see him struggling to get a series of backhands over the net in the warmup from about 5:25 despite being fed softballs. Following the match, from what I have read, he has been “humble” (by his standards) — posteriors seemingly moved far from his priors by the on-court data. That’s my reading, anyway.
The stunt had some really awkard implications in the era of sports-betting. Most betting scandals in tennis have been at Challenger level, where guys are struggling financially. A bet on how many games Sock-Ackman would take would largely be a bet on how many games Tomic-Jasika would feel it polite to give them. So when, during the match, Tomic casually returned an Ackman shot out of the air from behind the baseline (an already “out” ball), he was almost certainly just playing along — but bettors somewhere could have been winning or losing money as a result. A very awkward situation for the real pros. I think the ATP learned its lesson, and I’ll be surprised if they let something like this happen again.
Rod:
I want to say that anyone who’d bet on a match like that would deserve whatever they get, but I guess that wouldn’t be fair, because there are lots of people who would bet on absolutely anything.
The other weird thing about the betting angle is that Ackman is on record recommending people to make money manipulating prediction markets. So I guess there’s the off chance that he did the whole stunt as a way of making some money on a side bet, in which case he might be laughing all the way to the bank.
Andrew:
Agree 100% on not empathizing with the bettors. What I was thinking but didn’t say is that if the ATP detected unusual betting patterns, a routine match-fixing investigation would have found plenty of anomalous behavior on the court (violating the “maximum effort” rule) — if judged as a normal professional match and not as the glorified pro-am that tournament organizers allowed (or encouraged) it to become.
Not sure this is relevant, but I’m a little tipsy…
I met an English guy on (the original) Ithaca who had set up a cafe there, and he claimed that the locals cheated like hell at backgammon and thought it was better to win by cheating because it required more skill than winning through playing by the rules.
Is it harder to win at tennis by getting really good at tennis, or by becoming a billionaire?
Wins thread.
In this case, it would be harder getting really good at tennis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_D._Ackman
That was my thought, albeit without the backgammon story. The real flex is engineering the situation without significantly impacting your finances.
Re Rich people and sports.
There was an obituary in the NY Times a few days ago for Leo Hindery Jr. He was a cable TV executive who got into automobile racing in middle age. He raced in the Le Mans 24 hour race.
Here’s the NYT headline:
Leo Hindery Jr., Dealmaking Power in the Cable TV Industry, Dies at 77
As an executive, he helped negotiate AT&T’s $50 billion acquisition of TCI and later led the Yankees’ YES Network. He also drove his sports car to victory in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
On a related note, the endlessly embarrassing Ackman is a 2nd generation nepo-baby, which reminded me of our exchange from over a decade ago, which has aged fairly well.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/01/31/are-we-becoming-more-tolerant-of-nepotism/
There is also the question of what constitutes a ‘legit’ game. If Ackman defined a legit game as ‘real pros are playing in an official ATP tournament’, then by all means he did participate in one! If the legit match, however, is defined as ‘tennis titans clashing against each other in an epic battle, giving their all’, then his match probably was not ‘legit’ after all, from what it sounds like.
On a side note: I doubt that it is that easy to meet a tennis pro at the country club and ask them for a game. They are competitive athletes with a tight training schedule and routine. Also, they have a reputation to uphold and a brand to protect.
On the other hand, you can book a training with Emma Raducanu for a mere 2,000 USD per hour! That is a lot of Jamaican beef patties! It should be noted, however, that the proceeds go to charity. Source: https://www.tennisworldusa.org/tennis/news/Tennis_Stories/133847/revealed-where-2000-from-emma-raducanu-s-online-tennis-lessons-really-go/
Raphael:
I assume Ackman is a member of some exclusive country club where it is possible to schedule games with a tennis pro. If not, he’s rich enough to have his own tennis court and pay the local pros to come to his house and play him–he can afford whatever thousands of dollars an hour it costs.
ooops! Just appeared on the BBC Sport web site:
Alcaraz v amateurs in Million Dollar One Point Slam
Amateur players will have the chance to win A$1m when they face tennis’ top professionals – including world number one Carlos Alcaraz – in a single-point showdown before January’s Australian Open.
Organisers of the year’s first Grand Slam have announced the Million Dollar One Point Slam, which will pit 10 amateur players against 22 professionals in a knockout tournament at Melbourne Park.
Players will play ‘rock, paper, scissors’ to determine who serves or receives, and whoever wins the point will progress to the next round.
The winner of the event will take home £490,000.