In an Olympic first, gold medalists on the Paris 2024 Video games will obtain pay for play.
Observe and discipline is to turn into the primary sport to introduce prize cash on the Olympics with World Athletics saying it should pay $50,000 to gold medalists in Paris.
The transfer, introduced on Wednesday, is a symbolic break with the newbie previous of the Olympics in a number of the video games’ most-watched occasions.
The governing physique of athletics mentioned it’s setting apart $2.4m to pay the gold medalists throughout the 48 males’s, girls’s and blended occasions on the observe and discipline programme for this 12 months’s Paris Olympics. Relay groups will break up the $50,000 amongst their members. Funds for silver and bronze medalists are deliberate to begin from the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
World Athletics President Sebastian Coe informed reporters that the transfer is supposed “to acknowledge that the income share that we obtain is largely as a result of our athletes are the celebrities of the present”.
The prize cash will come out of the share of Olympic income that the Worldwide Olympic Committee (IOC) distributes to World Athletics.
Nonetheless, the transfer might upset the stability of energy within the Olympic motion forward of the Paris Video games. Coe mentioned World Athletics gave the IOC “a heads-up” of its intentions solely on Wednesday morning, shortly earlier than it revealed its announcement.
In response, the IOC mentioned it was as much as every sport’s governing physique to resolve learn how to spend its share of Olympic income.
“The IOC redistributes 90% of all its earnings, particularly to the Nationwide Olympic Committees [NOCs] and Worldwide Federations [IFs],” the IOC mentioned in a press release. “Because of this, day-after-day, the equal of $4.2 million goes to assist athletes and sports activities organizations in any respect ranges all over the world. It’s as much as every IF and NOC to find out learn how to finest serve their athletes and the worldwide growth of their sport.”
The fashionable Olympics originated as an newbie sports activities occasion, and the IOC doesn’t award prize cash. Nonetheless, many medalists obtain funds from their nations’ governments, nationwide sports activities our bodies or sponsors.
The USA Olympic and Paralympic Committee awarded $37,500 to gold medalists on the final Summer season Video games in Tokyo in 2021. Singapore’s Nationwide Olympic Council guarantees $1m for Olympic gold, a feat achieved solely as soon as to date by a Singaporean competitor.
In sports activities like tennis and golf, the Olympic match is the one time in a season that {many professional} gamers compete at no cost with medals on supply however no prize cash. Coe didn’t need to speculate on whether or not different occasions might observe observe and discipline’s lead.
“I’ve at all times made it some extent to not communicate on behalf of different sports activities,” Coe mentioned.
There’s no signal but of another Olympic sport providing prize cash.