FIFA will splurge $1.3b on World Cup prizemoney. It’s time Olympic athletes were paid fairly, too
In modest Australian dollars, this month’s FIFA World Cup has $1.3 billion in prize money. If a team gets through U.S. Immigration and ICE unscathed and then promptly loses all three group matches, their national federation will still be guaranteed $13 million.
Compare that to the going rate for Olympic immortality.
The IOC’s new president, Kirsty Coventry, who toured New Zealand last week, publicly declared that she does not believe in paying athletes competing at the Games. He noted that the athletes stayed in beautiful villages, competed in beautiful venues and had an overall beautiful experience, and all of this visible beauty came from the money the IOC raised.
To understand how we arrived at such a contrast, you must understand that Olympic amateurism was never the noble abstraction it was presented as. This was a class weapon. When Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived the Games in 1896, he imported the Victorian amateur gentleman ethos; A code quite consciously designed to exclude the working man.
A “gentleman” could not compete for anything because the gentry had a private income; The miner and the bricklayer did not do this. The rule’s most infamous manifestation occurred in 1912, when Jim Thorpe, perhaps the best all-around athlete the Games had produced, was stripped of his gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon, paid for a one-time ashtray exchange to play minor league baseball.
It took seventy years for the IOC to return them; By this time it had been 30 years since Thorpe died.
Around 1981 the word “amateur” was quietly deleted from the Olympic Charter. The doors later opened to professionals such as tennis players and the United States “Dream Team” of NBA millionaires in 1992. The ideals for which Thorpe was crucified were abandoned when they became commercially unviable.
And the result is the opposite. IOC abolishes amateurism for athletes least Protection was needed for participants in the Games and it effectively protected poverty. The NBA basketball player, already a multimillionaire, is camping in the village; The race walker, the judoka, the modern pentathlete arrive, remortgaging a future they can never save.
The “fundamental principles” of the Charter speak seriously of the dignity of the athlete and mandate the IOC to support them. The IOC responds by pointing to redistribution; It says nearly 90 percent of its revenue, more than $2.8 billion annually, goes back to the Movement.
This is a really big figure, but the money that reaches the management, officials and venues of the national Olympic committee is not the money in the hands of the athlete who wins the race.
And within the noisy there is a quieter theft; Go read Article 40 of the Olympic Charter. The IOC checks athletes’ own names, images and likenesses; using a competitor’s defining performance to permanently sell out the Games and prohibit the athlete from monetizing the most valuable thing they will ever create. Until recently, athletes were arrested for just a few Instagram posts during the Games.
Leisel Jones, the winner of nine Olympic medals, said she would no longer discourage a young person from pursuing their Olympic dream because it would result in a flood of debt. Cam McEvoy, who broke a world record in Paris and was given nothing in return, put a number on the fix: a participation fee for anyone who did it, a six-figure prize for Olympic gold.
These are not the complaints of the rights holders, but the arithmetic of people who gave everything and returned home with a certificate.
Compare this to what will happen in North America starting June 11. Football’s governing body will distribute the bulk of a billion US dollars among rival nations.
No one seriously claims that money corrupted the World Cup or dried a single tear from the winners’ eyes. It is simply understood that the people who produce the show should share in the wealth created by the show. Football has made peace with the obvious. The Olympics seem unlikely.
Defenders of the Old Order may object that the comparison is unfair; that football is professional, the Olympics are something purer. But that naivety died in 1981 and was burned before I left high school.
It is not an ideal that is permanent. It’s an arrangement: the IOC sits atop the most valuable sports property in the world. It sells broadcast rights for billions, builds a vast and welcome bureaucracy on the proceeds, and asks talent to perform for free in the name of a love the establishment cast aside decades ago.
It didn’t need to be this way, and the proof came from within the Movement. Before Paris, World Athletics became the first federation to break through the rankings by paying US$50,000 to each athlete who wins a gold medal in athletics and committing to reward the entire podium in Los Angeles.
Lord Sebastian Coe’s logic was simple: Income comes from athletes like that show, so some of it should go to them. The sky did not fall. A door opened slightly. Coe received the lowest eight votes when he ran against Coventry for the IOC presidency. You don’t know why people vote for what, but the establishment does not forgive deviants.
There is a serious objection here, and frankly this is Coventry’s best point: the gold award does no good to the swimmer who reaches fourth, the heptathlete whose body fails in race six, or the thousands of others who never win a medal but whose sacrifices are no less wonderful. But this is an argument for a better pricing model, not for any model.
FIFA pays millions to the worst teams on the field and the football circus survives and thrives. So pay a participation fee to every Olympic athlete who qualifies, so no one is left out of pocket just for being there. Reward medal winners; and fund it from athletes’ income, as World Athletics has shown it can be done.
The Olympic movement is based on a great story: Citius, Altius, Fortius Above all, the flame, the oath, the arrogance that for two weeks the world stood up to something money couldn’t buy.
But the story is not a defense. And no athlete should have to pay the price for romance while everyone else around them is banking the proceeds.
The question the movement has refused to answer for a century is not complex. If everyone in the room is sailing on the river of gold, why is the person performing this stunt the only one to return home with a medal deep in debt?
If you answer this honestly, you decide the only thing that matters here: whether the Olympic ideal is a principle or just an excuse. Does the IOC highlight athletes? Or not?
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Darren Kane is a sports columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect with: X or email.
