FIFA will splurge $1.3b on World Cup prizemoney. It’s time Olympic athletes were paid fairly, too

In humble Australian dollar terms, there is $1.3 billion in prizemoney riding on this month’s FIFA World Cup. Should a team get past US Immigration and ICE unscathed then promptly lose all three group games, their national federation will still trouser a guaranteed $13 million.

Compare that to the going rate for Olympic immortality.

Touring New Zealand last week, the new(ish) president of the IOC, Kirsty Coventry, declared flatly that she didn’t believe in paying athletes competing at the Games. Pressed, she noted that athletes get to stay in beautiful villages, compete at beautiful venues and, overall, enjoy a beautiful experience – and all of that manifest beauty comes from money the IOC raises.

To grasp how we arrived at such a contrast, you need to understand that Olympic amateurism was never the noble abstraction it was presented as. It was a class weapon. When Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived the Games in 1896, he imported the ethos of the Victorian gentleman amateur – a code engineered, quite deliberately, to exclude the working man.

A “gentleman” could compete for nothing because the gentry had access to a private income; the miner and the bricklayer didn’t. The most infamous manifestation of the rule came in 1912, when Jim Thorpe – perhaps the finest all-round athlete the Games has produced – was stripped of his gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon for once being paid ashtray change to play minor league baseball.

It took the IOC seven decades to hand them back, by which time Thorpe had been dead 30 years.

Around 1981 the word “amateur” was quietly deleted from the Olympic Charter. The gates then swung open to professionals – such as tennis players and, in 1992, the United States “Dream Team” of NBA millionaires. Those ideals for which Thorpe was crucified were abandoned once it became commercially inconvenient.

And the result is perverse. The IOC dismantled amateurism for the athletes who least needed protection, and effectively preserved poverty for the ones who embody the Games. The NBA basketballer sets up camp in the village already a multimillionaire; the race-walker, the judoka, the modern pentathlete arrives having remortgaged a future they may never recover.

The Charter’s “fundamental principles” speak solemnly of the dignity of the athlete and charge the IOC with supporting them. The IOC answers by gesturing at redistribution – some 90 per cent of its income, it says, returned to the Movement, more than $2.8 billion annually.

That’s a genuinely large number, but money that reaches a national Olympic committee’s administration, officials and venues isn’t money in the hand of the athlete who won the race.

And there’s a quieter theft inside the noisy one – go read Article 40 of the Olympic Charter. The IOC controls the athletes’ own names, images and likenesses, using a competitor’s defining performance to sell the Games in perpetuity while forbidding the athlete from monetising the most valuable thing they’ll ever create. Until recently, athletes would get busted just for a few Instagram posts during Games time.

Leisel Jones, possessor of nine Olympic medals, has said she would now discourage a young person from chasing the Olympic dream, because it ends in a torrent of debt. Cam McEvoy, who actually broke a world record in Paris and was handed nothing for it, put a number on the fix: an appearance fee for everyone who makes it, a six-figure reward for Olympic gold.

These aren’t the grievances of the entitled, but the arithmetic of people who gave everything and went home with a certificate.

Compare that to what will unfold across North America from 11 June. Football’s governing body will distribute the better part of a billion American dollars among the competing nations.

Nobody seriously argues that money corrupted the World Cup or dried a single tear in the winners’ eyes. It’s simply understood that the people who manufacture the spectacle ought to share in the wealth it creates. Football has made its peace with the obvious. The Olympics can’t seem to.

The defenders of the Old Order might protest that the comparison is unfair; that football is professional, while the Olympics is something purer. But that purity died in 1981, and was cremated before I left high school.

What endures isn’t an ideal. It’s an arrangement: the IOC sits atop the most valuable sporting property on earth. It sells the broadcast rights for billions, has built a vast and feted bureaucracy on the proceeds, and asks the talent to perform for free in the name of a romance the institution itself discarded decades ago.

It needn’t be like this, and the proof arrived from inside the Movement. Before Paris, World Athletics became the first federation to break ranks, paying US$50,000 to every track-and-field gold medallist and committing to reward the full podium in Los Angeles.

Lord Sebastian Coe’s reasoning was disarmingly plain: the revenue exists because the athletes are the show, so some of it should go to them. The sky didn’t cave in. A door was opened slightly. Coe polled a low eight votes when he ran against Coventry for the IOC presidency. You can’t know why people vote how they do, but the establishment doesn’t forgive heretics.

There’s a serious objection here, and in fairness it’s Coventry’s best point: a prize for gold does nothing for the swimmer who touches fourth, the heptathlete whose body fails in the sixth event, or the thousands who never medal but whose sacrifice was no less total. But that is an argument for a better compensation model, not for no model at all.

FIFA pays millions to the worst teams in the field and the football circus survives and thrives. So, pay an appearance fee to every Olympic athlete who qualifies so that nobody’s left out of pocket merely for being there. Reward the medallists on top; and fund it, as World Athletics has shown can be done, from the revenue the athletes themselves generate.

The Olympic movement trades on a wonderful story – the Citius, Altius, Fortius of it all, the flame, the oath, the conceit that for two weeks the world contests something money can’t buy.

But a story isn’t a defence. And no athlete should have to pay for the romance while everyone around them banks the proceeds.

The question the Movement has spent a century refusing to answer isn’t complicated. If everyone in the room is sailing on the river of gold, why is the person making the spectacle the only one going home with a medal sinking in debt?

Answer that honestly, and you decide the only thing that matters here: whether the Olympic ideal is a principle, or merely an alibi. Does the IOC put athletes at the forefront? Or not?

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