Track and field will be first sport to award prize money at Olympics
New hardest way to earn 50 grand just dropped: winning the Olympic 400-metre hurdles.
What happened: This year in Paris, track and field will be the first-ever Olympic sport to pay prize money to gold medallists. World Athletics, the governing body in charge of track and field, has set aside US$2.4 million to pay $50,000 to first-place finishers across 48 events.
- Olympic athletes are typically paid by their country’s national sporting body and through sponsorship deals — though truly lucrative deals are few and far between.
Why it matters: Amateurism was one of the founding principles of the Olympics, ensuring athletes were competing only for the love of the game. This concept has dissipated over the years and now looks more like a flimsy excuse not to pay the athletes who drive viewership.
- The Olympics make billions from broadcast rights — NBC is paying US$7.65 billion for them between 2021 and 2032 — and hit an ad sales record for this year’s event.
- Yet a 2020 survey of 491 elite athletes across 48 countries found that over half were financially unstable — that could be even higher now, given pandemic after-effects.
Zoom out: The broader concept of amateurism in sports is dying off. Since 2021, US college athletes have been free to sign sponsorship deals, and, just last month, the Dartmouth men’s basketball team became the first-ever NCAA team to unionize.
What’s next: Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, has been touted as a candidate for the next International Olympics Committee president. If he ends up with the role, some people believe he could expand medal prizes to every Olympic event.
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