Tim Montgomery and Khalid Khannouchi are two Americans who have set world records this year, and their paydays were remarkably close: Tim earned $250,000 prize money for his day's work, while Khalid raked in $255,000.
Of course, if you want to pro-rate this over the time spent actually putting one foot in front of the other it's no contest. KK's 2:05:37.8 marathon works out to some $121,786.20 per hour, while TM's 9.78 for 100 meters comes out (if I did the math right) to a whopping $92,024,540 per hour.