Paris 2024: Athletics will be the first Olympic sport with prize money

World Athletics announced its “landmark decision” on Wednesday to award the prize money to any athlete who won a gold medal in each of the 48 track and field events in Paris (relay teams share the prize).

Athletes who win silver and bronze medals will receive tiered cash prizes starting at the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, the federation said in a statement.

“Although it is impossible to put a marketable value on winning an Olympic medal or the commitment and focus it takes to even represent your country at an Olympic Games, I think it is important that we start somewhere and “The support of our athletes at the Olympic Games goes directly back to those who make the Games the global spectacle that they are,” World Athletics President Sebastian Coe said in a statement on Wednesday.

The prize money for athletics is determined by the share of Olympic revenue that the IOC distributes to World Athletics.

The International Olympic Committee said Wednesday that 90 percent of its revenue will be redistributed to each country's National Olympic Committees and the international federations that govern each sport, which then decide how the funds are spent.

“This means the equivalent of $4.2 million flows every day to athletes and sports organizations at all levels around the world,” an IOC spokesman said in a statement. “It’s up to each individual [international federation] And [National Olympic Committee] to determine how they can best serve their athletes and the global development of their sport.

World Athletics' move comes amid ongoing changes in the world of amateur sport. In the United States, the NCAA adopted a policy more than two years ago that allows student-athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness. The change has been most noticeable in high-level college football and basketball, where college funding groups can pay star players through sometimes lucrative zero-cost deals.

When the modern Olympic Games began in Athens in 1896, the athletes had to be amateurs; Anyone who had ever earned money from competitions was excluded from taking part in the Olympics. For nearly the next 100 years, Olympic athletes competed primarily for the love of the game.

That changed in 1992 thanks to then-Spanish IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch, who had a more modern view of the sport, said Matthew Andrews, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who focuses on sports and politics.

“[Samaranch] “I believed that global sports viewers wanted to see the best athletes in the sport – and those were professional athletes,” Andrews said.

“We want to see Michael Phelps every four years and watch him grow up; We want Usain Bolt to come back and defend his title to see Simone Biles,” Andrews said.

The 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona opened the doors to the professional Olympics and brought powerful athletes to global audiences, most notably the Michael Jordan-led American men's basketball team known as “The Dream Team” and featuring NBA stars .

The only association that opposes the admission of skilled workers by the time was boxing.

“[The International Boxing Federation] “I thought a professional athlete could kill an amateur athlete,” Andrews said. Beginning with the 2016 Games, professional boxers will be allowed to compete in the Olympics.

While sponsorships are typically the sole source of income for Olympic athletes, medal winners are often compensated by their country, although the amounts vary. At the rescheduled 2021 Summer Games in Tokyo, the U.S. Olympic Committee paid $37,500 for a gold medal, $22,500 for a silver medal and $15,000 for a bronze medal – Amounts that are at the lower end of cash incentives worldwide.

Singapore pays the highest, offering a gold medalist $737,000. The island nation has only had one gold medalist, swimmer Joseph Schooling, who won the gold medal in 2016.

For athletes who compete in sports for which there are no professional leagues and who do not reach the podium at the Olympics, finances can be precarious.

“That's why for a long time we didn't see people competing in more than one Olympics – you had to get a 'real' job,” Andrews said.

Andrews said as much as the Olympics support the ideal of amateurism, brands and other companies have always found ways to get past the top athletes making money.

“People have always made money,” Andrews said, noting that World Athletics is in the process of formalizing a backdoor practice. “This is more of an open realization and the disclosure of that realization.”