Source :- PERTH NOW NEWS
Making money from his two Olympic gold medals meant just as much work for Kieren Perkins as the endless laps he swam in the pool.
The Australian sporting great said on Monday that at the risk of sounding like a “grumpy old man”, the lessons he learned back in the 1990s hadn’t changed.
His comments at Melbourne’s SportNXT conference come in the wake of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games and the financial incentives from mining magnate Gina Rinehart for the Australian swimming team.
Ahead of Glasgow, Australian star Kyle Chalmers had also spoken about the financial challenges he faced as a top-level swimmer.
Perkins, now the Australian Sports Commission chief executive, won gold medals in the 1500m at the 1992 and ’96 Olympics.
“There is no doubt that winning opens the door. You have to win, to have permission to be in the environment,” Perkins said.
“But no, it won’t deliver a commercial outcome at all.”
Perkins said it is one of the “fundamentally frustrating things” he sees in sport.
“I was very commercially successful in my sporting career,” he said. “It had absolutely nothing to do with the laps I swam.
“The gold medal got me the attention and every commercial opportunity I delivered in my life.
“From there, I worked just as hard on that and spent just as hard on that and spent just as many hours and just as much effort working on that as I did swimming laps.
“That has not changed, at all, in our sporting environment. If you want to be commercially successful, you have to put in the work.”
