The total amount of prize money involved is said to be close to thirty million dollars.
For scheduled tournaments players sign up to play for a set amount of prize money.
But as the risk of embarrassment at the hands of unknown giant-killers has increased, so too has the amount of prize-money for those who avoid it.
A financial review by Price Waterhouse Coopers into the amount of prize money on offer at men's tournaments has been commissioned by the ATP.
Wimbledon, the oldest tennis tournament, started awarding women the same amount of prize money as men in 2007, and the prize money for the winner of La Course is equivalent to that for a stage winner in Le Tour.
Dani King, another Olympic gold medallist on the track, told the Independent on Sunday that having a women's Tour "would be brilliant" for the sport, which lags its male counterpart in every possible way, from the number of races held to the amount of prize money up for grabs.
Proposals understood to have been discussed include changing the end of the programme to require more of a skill-based finish rather than contestants simply choosing red or black, potentially reducing the amount of prize money on offer, making it a weekly show, and scaling back the stunts.
"The challenge ran for two weeks, the total amount of prize purse available was about $40,000 – it cost us about $80,000 in total and in three weeks we got a completely open source algorithm model that could be used to calculate the optimal positioning of those longerons," she said.
However, the total amount of prize money will not be extended, so fewer people will win prizes.
