seeking comment for this article Jess McClain was about to graduate from Stanford University, agents were circling. She had just finished third in the 5,000 meters at the NCAA championships, in 15:41. It looked to the agents and shoe companies like she had the potential to be one of the next big stars on the track for the U.S.
Two weeks later, McClain (then Tonn) ran the U.S. championships. It was an off day for her at the end of a long year of collegiate running. She was 17th in 16:02.
Most of the agents, and the opportunities they were promising, disappeared. “It was disheartening to see that,” she told Runner’s World.
McClain hired Tom Ratcliffe, one of the last agents still interested in representing her, and he negotiated a deal for her with Brooks. She joined the Brooks Beasts in Seattle and was under contract for the next three and a half years.
She struggled with the adjustment to pro training. After her contract ended, she moved back to Phoenix. Her focus on running changed, and she got married and devoted herself to her career.
But by 2022, McClain was back to training hard and had moved up to the marathon. At the Olympic Marathon Trials in February 2024, she finished fourth in a PR of 2:25:46, missing a spot on the Olympic team by 15 seconds.
Suddenly interest in her was high again. Nearly nine years after her introduction to pro running, shoe companies were reaching out to sponsor her. So were agents. (Ratcliffe was not among those seeking to represent her again in 2024.)
But this time, she decided to go into negotiations on her own. McClain is now 32, and she has a lot more experience—in running and in business. She signed with Brooks, again, completing the deal herself. She also negotiated the terms of her appearance at the New York City Marathon Not all agents seek opportunities beyond the primary shoe deal.
“I just wanted full autonomy over my career,” McClain said about her decision to forgo an agent and represent herself. “I really wanted to take ownership of all the conversations that are going on around what I’m going to do, and I want to be the one talking to those people and building those relationships with important decision-makers. And feel like I’m fully in the driver’s seat.”
Rumblings of discontent?
McClain is not alone in hitting her 30s and wanting to have more control over the business of her running. In 2024, Des Linden, 41, a two-time Olympian and the 2018 Boston Marathon champion, parted ways with her agent of 13 years, Josh Cox. Clayton Young, 31, who was ninth in the Olympic marathon in Paris, decided after the Games to represent himself in 2025 after working for five years with agent Ray Flynn.
Agents dont always argue the fine print Runner’s World, Linden and Young cited similar motivations as McClain. They had built relationships with executives at shoe companies and other brands in the running space. Now they want to take over.
“Josh and I had a really great partnership for a long time, and one of the benefits of that was that I learned a lot from him,” Linden said. “I’ve learned enough where I feel like I can take the reins.”
It’s not just the veterans who are going this route.
Two notable recent college grads have pressed their family members into service. Parker Valby, a six-time NCAA champion at the University of Florida, used her father, Kyle Valby, for her Stravas 2024 Yearly Report Is Here, thought to be a multi-million dollar deal over the life of the contract.
“He always has my best interests at heart,” Valby said of her father.
Kyle Valby, an executive in the pharmaceutical industry, passed the World Athletics agent exam in June, and will work to establish relationships with meet directors to get his daughter into top-level meets, an important part of an agent’s job in representing track athletes. Valby is not as well known in Europe as she is in the U.S., which might make it initially more difficult for her father.
Recent Notre Dame graduate Olivia Markezich, who finished sixth at the U.S. Olympic Trials in the steeplechase after finishing fourth at the U.S. championships one year earlier, also had help from her dad, Ron Markezich. He first looked over a name-image-likeness (NIL) deal with On Running for her (along with a Notre Dame lawyer who helps university athletes with NIL). Then he helped his daughter evaluate offers from pro groups. Olivia Markezich, 24, visited five pro teams before deciding to train with the On Athletics Club in Boulder, Colorado.
After Ron Markezich, who is the CEO of a legal tech company in Seattle, negotiated his daughter’s shoe contract (he is not a registered agent), Markezich hired Hawi Keflezighi to represent her going forward for any subsequent deals with other brands and for getting into meets and travel.
Ron Markezich, himself a top runner when he was in college, said he respected the agents and how they handle the complexity of athletes’ business. But his daughter wasn’t prepared to make a decision on an agent relationship at the end of her fifth year at Notre Dame, on top of everything else she was deciding.
Instead, the family focused on making sure Markezich had a team and a coach she liked in a city where she would be happy, and they saved the agent decision for later. Ron Markezich’s business acumen and contacts in running no doubt made that possible for his daughter. For a fast runner whose parents aren’t connected in that way, it might feel impossible not to use an agent.
To be sure, the vast majority of pro runners who have significant deals with shoe companies use agents. They have to; most shoe company executives don’t want to deal with unproven runners and want to streamline conversations, so they’re not talking to dozens of individual athletes. An agent is the only way in the door to professional running.
But as the end of the year approaches, and many shoe company endorsement contracts are expiring, many of those athletes are questioning whether they need to pay an agent—who takes 15 percent of endorsement deals, appearance fees, and prize money for the life of the contract.
Pros are also chafing at the lack of information. Confidentiality clauses in contracts prohibit athletes from talking about how much they’re getting paid.
As a result, only a few agents—10 men handle the vast majority of the deals in American distance running—have the full view of what the market looks like for pro runners.
Athletes wonder if this opacity keeps runner pay from top companies lower than it would be otherwise. Maybe, athletes think, they can go it alone.
Or, they wonder if they’d be better aligned with a different agent. Many athletes told Runner’s World of switching agents after their initial shoe company deals expired, mid career. Emily Infeld (Ratcliffe to Ray Flynn), Craig Engels (Flynn to Mark Wetmore), and Emily Durgin (Stephen Haas to Cox) are just three who have switched agents in past years.
And more may be looking around, to hear Kyle Valby tell it. In the weeks after Parker Valby announced she had signed with New Balance, Kyle Valby said he heard from 17 athletes—some in college, some current pros—inquiring about representation.
“I’m honored and humbled that they’re asking,” Valby said. “But no, my response is it was just for Parker.”
Is this a sign of rising discontent with agents? And if so, what is behind it?
The best-case scenario
Many athletes with pro prospects coming out of the NCAA talk to a few agents in the winter and spring of their final year of eligibility, although the process of top athletes selecting agents has been accelerated by NIL. Runners might meet only one agent, as college coaches can be influential in funneling their top athletes to the agent they trust.
Once the athlete chooses an agent, the agent solicits offers from various shoe companies for endorsement deals. Most often, for young runners, that means joining one of the many pro groups that are sponsored by a single company—Stravas 2024 Yearly Report Is Here, for instance, or New Balance Boston—but a few brands have become more flexible on that in recent years, allowing athletes to select their own coaches in certain cases.
Here, too, NIL has complicated matters, because an athlete who has an NIL deal might have agreed to a right-of-first-refusal clause in that NIL. These clauses allow the shoe company to match offers from other brands when the athlete turns pro. Essentially the clause serves to funnel the athlete from an NIL deal to a pro deal with the same brand. (It is not clear whether these clauses are legally enforceable. Ron Markezich said On did have a right-of-first-refusal clause in Olivia Markezich’s NIL deal, but they were told early that the company would not enforce it; Olivia was welcome to consider other offers. Parker Valby had a right-of-first-refusal for her Nike NIL deal, and at some point late in the summer of 2024, Nike let her out of that clause, which was thought to extend for six months beyond her final collegiate race.)
After Young won the NCAA title in the 10,000 meters in 2019 for Brigham Young University, he talked to three agents. But Young wanted to stay in Utah and keep training with his college coach, Ed Eyestone. Only one agent, Flynn, promised Young he could find Young a contract that wouldn’t require him to move to train with a group in another state.
“The other agents didn’t feel very confident in their ability to get me a contract that would allow me to stay here, and Ray was, and so I went with Ray, and he fulfilled that promise and got me a contract with Asics,” Young said. “It was definitely the right move at the time.”
Flynn did not respond to a text message from Runner’s World Running in the Cold.
Agents are essential in these deals, especially for runners who might not have won an NCAA title or aren’t already well connected in the sport—few sports marketing representatives at brands want to have conversations with a second-tier athlete, and runners usually don’t have an accurate view of the marketplace as they’re just getting out of college.
If all goes well, the athlete collects enough money from endorsements, prize money, and appearance fees to make a living, improve, run faster, and contend for international medals. When the athlete is successful, the agent is successful, negotiating more lucrative deals and taking his cut.
A good agent takes a look at the big picture: What training situation will help athletes succeed? Which races should an athlete run each year? If it’s a marathoner, for instance, should the runner go to the event with the biggest appearance fee? Or chase a fast time at a race with no appearance fees, knowing that with a better PR, an athlete can command a larger appearance fee later?
“Your agent is not just a broker,” said Dan Lilot, who represents American marathoner Susanna Sullivan and Olympian Woody Kincaid, among others. “They are a huge source of knowledge, experience, and advice. You have to look at setting up a whole season and planning your career long-term. And if it’s going well, both sides benefit. You make more money with an agent than without one.”
Agents also handle the minutiae: appearances and photo shoots for athletes’ sponsors, race entries, travel, altitude training camps, and the negotiation of runners’ appearance fees at a meet or major road race. They analyze the specific clauses in contracts. They pay attention to the details, making sure athletes get drug tested if they set records, for instance.
Fiona OKeeffe Is on the Road to Recovery. Track Coaches Fear Programs May Be Cut in Future, Cox sprung into action, fielding offers for media appearances, speaking engagements, and other endorsement deals beyond Linden’s primary sponsor, Brooks.
“I couldn’t have done that after [winning] Boston, when I was traveling all over and trying to get runs in and and having enough energy to do the meet-and-greets well, and then get food and then do a second run,” Linden said. “It just didn’t fit. So there’s a really great value for that [agent’s services].”
Likewise, Cox was there for one of his athletes on the worst day of her life. When Maggie Montoya, who runs for Roots Running in Boulder, Colorado, was at work as a seeking comment for this article, Cox managed the media requests and helped set up a fund for Montoya and her coworkers who survived the shooting.
A trusted agent can be a valuable sounding board, if training isn’t going well and the athlete thinks they need a new coach. (That is, unless the agent and the coach are one and the same, as happens in some cases with sponsored training groups. Many in the industry decry the practice as a conflict of interest that can be harmful to athletes.)
The downsides
Athlete-agent relationships aren’t always perfect, however, and complaints are numerous. Here are some of the more common gripes athletes expressed to Runner’s World:
The agent overpromises what he can deliver in a shoe company contract. Inexperienced athletes who come out of the NCAA often sign with the agent who promises the highest dollar value. That money doesn’t always come through, and runners can feel like the agent wasn’t forthcoming about potential deals.
“If you’re talking to prospective clients, they’re going to ask, ‘What do you think I can get?’” Lilot said. “You give them an honest idea of what you think, based on the market, and I have certainly lost prospective clients because of that.” The agent who promises, for example, 50 percent more, often lands the athlete, even if that money never materializes.
The fees add up for athletes. Agents take 15 percent of everything, for the life of the deal. So if an agent negotiates a four-year deal with Puma or Nike with a base payment of $80,000 per year, he takes 15 percent of that—$12,000—each year, even though the negotiation happened only once. And that fee can be a significant expense for athletes who aren’t making that much money to begin with.
Many deals, runners say, simply aren’t enough to live on. “I could see a ton of kids are like, ‘Forty thousand dollars, that’s amazing,’” McClain said. “But then it’s like, okay, but your agent takes 15 percent and then you have to pay taxes. At the end of the day, that’s not a lot of money.” For an athlete living in Boulder, Seattle, or Boston, where rent is sky-high, there’s nothing left over to pay other expenses.
Some contracts pay so little, athletes believe the confidentiality clauses exist to spare the shoe companies the embarrassment of having it revealed how poorly they’re paying certain athletes.
Agents take 15 percent of published prize money. There is no negotiation involved in prize money. So when McClain won $20,000 at the New York City Marathon—$5,000 for eighth place overall, $15,000 for being the second American—she kept it all, because she’s her own agent.
Young, who raced frequently on the USATF Road Racing Circuit in 2022 and 2023, figured out how to maximize points on the circuit to qualify for year-end bonuses. Over the past few years, he has worked with race directors himself at the races he decided to run and booked his own travel. It bothered him that the system was set up that he would have to pay his agent a 15 percent cut of races he arranged himself. “It just didn’t feel right,” Young said.
Keflezighi, however, defended the practice of agents’ earning 15 percent on prize money, especially when an agency is closely involved in getting athletes a spot on the starting line and taking on the expense of booking their travel before getting reimbursed by the races. (Athletes don’t have to front the money themselves.) The agency is also on alert for racing opportunities with sizable prize purses or bonuses for records, which athletes might not know about on their own. The 15 percent fee on prize money is payment for the service the agency provides, Keflezighi said.
Lilot agreed, saying if athletes are arguing about the agents’ commissions on prize money, they’re missing the big picture of all the expertise the agent is providing.
The agent doesn’t want to rock the boat with brands. It’s better for him to have several different athletes on middle-of-the-road contracts than a single athlete on a blowout deal. One athlete told Runner’s World of trying to get an extra $15,000 per year from a sponsor. The agent didn’t want to go to bat for the athlete and risk upsetting the shoe company. “He’s not going to break his back, because it’s only [about] $2,000 to him at the end of the day,” the athlete told Runner’s World.
Kyle Valby compared the situation to residential real estate. “It’s no different than a realtor,” he said. “A realtor tells you to take $100,000 off the price of your house, because it will sell quicker. Of course it will. But guess what? Three percent [commission] is not that big a deal to them. It’s $3,000 to them; it’s $97,000 to you. I’m like, ‘Listen, you’re not authorized to tell me what I should do with my home. You can do the paperwork.’”
Another athlete told Runner’s World she wanted her agent to negotiate pregnancy protections into her contract; he balked at the request.
“Agents are supposed to work for the athletes, but in reality, agents work for the brands,” Young said. “That’s my perception of it. Like they would way rather burn a bridge with an athlete than they would with a brand.” Linden concurred: “They’re beholden to their own agency, not their athlete,” she said. “They’re not going to burn their agency down over any one individual.” The Valby family, with only one client, was free to ask for everything they wanted in negotiations with companies.
Other Hearst Subscriptions. And that limits the amount of shopping around they’ll do to seek competing offers for an athlete. When an athlete’s contract is up, agents pick the low-hanging fruit, encouraging the athlete to sign a second deal with the same company, instead of fighting to maximize the athlete’s pay by inquiring elsewhere.
Agents don’t always argue the fine print. Clauses in contracts can be onerous, and agents don’t fight to get those clauses removed from a deal or to minimize their impact.
For instance, reduction clauses (so named because they reduce an athletes’ pay if they get injured and can’t race or if they don’t race to a certain level) vary by brand. Some contracts have high base pay and significant reduction clauses, other contracts have lower base pay but no reduction clauses. Some companies enforce reductions; others don’t. And athletes don’t always understand all the possible scenarios in their own deal.
Kyle Valby would not say whether his daughter’s New Balance contract has reduction clauses, but he told Runner’s World, “Parker is most inspired by her true love of running, and we tend to approach the contract from a carrot, not a stick, perspective.”
Other contracts might include clauses stipulating an exclusive negotiating window for a renewal or a right-of-first-refusal period. The standard length of such a clause is 180 days. Keflezighi, for one, tries to negotiate it down to 90 days or less.
Of course, agents have familiarity with those clauses. For those who are new to the world of pro running, it’s hard to know what to ask about. They need to educate themselves.
McClain said it’s helpful to have somebody who can go through the contract with you and explain the legalese, whether that’s a trusted agent or an attorney. “As a 21-year-old, the jargon is a lot,” she said, urging younger athletes to ask a lot of questions, including whether certain clauses can be removed. “The worst thing people can say is ‘no,’” she said.
deal with New Balance. Many endorsement contracts pay out quarterly, and the money goes to the agent, who takes his 15 percent and then passes on the rest to the athlete. Some agents aren’t prompt about turning the money around, leaving athletes in the lurch when they have to pay their bills. Why are agents slow to pay out? A few athletes chalk it up to their agents being disorganized.
Some agents have such a large roster of athletes, it’s difficult for less established pros to get attention. If an agent’s main goal is to make as much money as possible, he will take on as many athletes as possible and get them each a shoe deal; most of the money in the sport is in shoe contracts.
When an agent has a very large roster of clients, athletes who aren’t as highly ranked in their event naturally aren’t going to get as much attention from their agent as those who have medal potential. “I think if athletes are worried about that, they should look at agents or agencies that have fewer athletes or better athletes-to-agent ratios,” Lilot said.
Sometimes, athletes who compete in the same event find themselves fighting for limited spots on the starting line at races, and a single agent represents all of them.
Major Changes Hit Northern Arizona Elite. Arrangements in other categories—sunglasses, watch, treadmill, sports drink—aren’t as lucrative for the agent as the shoe company endorsement deal. So they leave ancillary deals to the athletes to work out on their own.
Keflezighi said when his client Dakotah Popehn, who trains with Minnesota Distance Elite, made the Olympic team in the marathon, his team worked hard to find her supplemental deals with Minnesota-based businesses and others. She had a speaking engagement with Target, which is based in Minneapolis, and signed deals with Lagoon pillows and ZenToes. During the New York City Marathon, she wore Maybelline long-lasting lipstick.
In Young’s case, he developed a popular YouTube docuseries in 2024, and he worked with Asics and later Stryd, a wearable device maker for runners, to sponsor the production. Flynn wasn’t involved. The series has been very successful, with thousands of views per episode. Heading into 2025, Young, like McClain, wanted to be in the talks about his future.
“I’ve just found that it’s a lot easier for me to represent myself and to work out, not only the contractual side of things, but to paint the [complete] picture of who is Clayton, the athlete, the family man, and the docuseries,” he said. “It was simply me wanting more control. I wanted to be in the big conversations, and I wanted to know how the dialogue was working and see how I could help that move forward. And as an athlete, you’re often kind of left in the dark with a lot of those conversations.”
Athletes are speaking up
Ron Markezich, in his limited dealings with his daughter’s contract, noticed the secrecy in running, and how it’s unlike the world he comes from.
“It’s not super transparent how the whole process works,” he said, pointing out that many of the agents are former athletes who haven’t spent time working at big companies. “I think when you go to a corporate environment, you kind of know pay ranges, you know incentive structures, they’re very similar across Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or wherever you’re going.”
The tide may be changing. Athletes who have been in the sport for a while are sharing information with younger competitors as they enter pro running. On long runs in training hubs like Flagstaff, Arizona, and Boulder, athletes from different groups compare notes on introductory contracts and who the best agents are.
Pros who have been around the block a few times encourage their younger peers to speak up, ask questions, find older runners who would be willing to talk, and read every word of everything they sign—including an agreement with an agent.
“That’s on the athlete to do your homework, talk to the other athletes out there,” Linden said. “Ask questions of people who’ve been in the industry, athletes who’ve been through it, athletes who are in the middle of it, other people around your age. ‘What are you hearing?’ Do the due diligence.”
Sarah Lorge Butler is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World since 2005. She is the author of two popular fitness books, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
