Prize money

We owe our understanding of how professional cyclists were remunerated at the time to Fredy Budzinski, the long-standing editor-in-chief of Radwelt magazine. In the annual Radwelt sports albums, he listed the prize money earned by professionals during the past season.

The amounts listed in the table were taken from various editions of the Sportalben. Although Walter Rutt's financial income can only be documented incompletely, the data at least allows us to estimate how wealthy he was.

“Exile” refers to his time in France, all monetary values are in marks.

By way of comparison, the annual income of a locomotive driver in the early twentieth century was around 2,200 marks.

The prize money of Walter Rutt / Excerpt
(with the kind support of Monika Mischke)