OLYMPIC GAMES
Do Olympians get paid? How much do they get for winning medals in the 2024 Olympics in Paris?
The world’s finest athletes gather to compete for medals but their financial compensation is much less than you may think.
More than 10,000 athletes will compete across 329 events at this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris. Global sporting stars will take part in the spectacle, hoping to return home with medals and their names etched into the Olympic’ illustrious history.
With the eyes of the world on Paris you may expect that the athletes - the stars of the show - will receive a generous salary for the years of hard work. After all, a single Olympic appearance is the result of a lifetime of dedication and sacrifice.
But that’s not the case. Neither the International Olympic Committee (IOC) nor World Athletics offers a salary to participants and prospects for sponsorship, government funding and prize money varies greatly between athletes.
How do Olympians makes money?
Most most lucrative source of income for Olympians, by some distance, is sponsorship. Big stars like Simone Biles, Usain Bolt and Eliud Kipchoge all signed huge sponsorship deals with major brands, featuring in adverts and using their products during competition.
Ahead of the 2021 Games, Biles had secured a reported $5 million in annual deals with MasterClass, Facebook Watch, Uber Eats, United Airlines and Visa. Bolt agreed a huge $10 million annual sportswear contract with Puma. Nike have created a whole running collection around Kipchoge’s incredible achievements.
But, with the Olympics only coming around once every four years, there is a vanishingly small window for brands to get the most out of athletes. This means that only the biggest of names can realistically hope to bag a partnership with major corporate sponsors.
For most Olympians government funding and sporting grants are the best route to financial support, but that depends on the nation. For example the Team USA Fund raises money for Olympic and Paralympic Games athletes, “providing support to cover living, training and healthcare costs.” In the UK, athletes with Olympic prospects can receive around $36,000 a year to help cover expenses.
How much do you get for winning Olympic gold?
Many athletes at this summer’s Games will have to work a regular job, in addition to a gruelling training schedule, to make ends meet. For most athletes the only way to really bump up earning power is to take home a gold medal. Not only does this increase an athlete’s marketability, they can usually expect to receive a healthy winning bonus.
World Athletics, the governing body for track and field events, announced earlier this year that it would be offering Olympic gold medallists a $50,000 payment. In the case of relay events, that figure will be split between team members.
This $2.4 million World Athletics prize pot does not extend to other disciplines but many nations offer their own bonuses. In the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing US competitors were paid $37,500 for a gold medal, while athletes were given $22,500 for silver and $15,000 for bronze.
At the same Winter Games Italy paid out $201,000 to each of its 17 gold medal-winning athletes. The largest of these government-funded schemes can be found in Singapore, where gold medallists bag a massive $737,000 bonus for their triumph.
The financial rewards for Olympians vary greatly. For the marketable, successful athletes in widely-followed events the returns can be substantial, and the promise of a lucrative career in the media follows. But for the lesser-known competitors giving up a decade of their lives for a shot at Olympic glory, the cost of those efforts is steep.