My family’s nightly routine for the last few weeks has been to sit down for dinner and watch the Olympics. Watching athletes competing at these elite tiers inspires so many questions in us. How much do they have to train? Did they always know they were talented in this sport? Will we see them at the next Olympics?
But for an accountant like me, slightly different questions come to mind. How can they afford to train so much? Who pays to get all of the athletes and their families to the games? How much money do they earn for winning a medal? While I can’t tell you with any degree of certainty the answers to the first two, my personal research during these Olympics has led me to the answer for the last.
And the truth is, it depends on the country. For example, per a July 2024 article from CNBC on How much athletes at the Paris Olympics earn for winning medals, Hong Kong (which competes separately from the People’s Republic of China) awards the following amounts for each of the medals—with a slight variance due to currency exchange:
Gold: $768,000
Silver: $384,000
Bronze: $192,000
There are some inconsistencies when it comes to this kind of compensation that make it difficult to compare. There are reports of medalists from several different nations earning cows, a meatball restaurant, 100 bags of rice, free food from restaurants, and public transportation.
The United States gives winning athletes the following amounts as compensation for their Olympic medals for the 2024 games:
Gold: $38,000
Silver: $23,000
Bronze: $15,000
Torri Huske was the medal leader for Americans in the 2024 Paris Olympics. From her swimming events, she won 3 gold medals and 2 silver for a total of $160,000. Not a bad earning from a few days of competition. However, even Olympic athletes owe taxes on their winnings. So in reality, she is walking away with less than that $160,000.
Of course, as any small business owner knows, there’s a lot more than just a few days’ worth of work that goes into being able to win that many medals. Torri is currently 21 years old and has probably been swimming consistently for the majority of those years. Even if she started really practicing and putting in the work to swim competitively starting at age 11, then she has earned $16,000 per year. I’m sure that’s not true and it’s a strange way to think about income, but it puts in perspective how little monetary compensation these athletes receive for decades of training prior to their Olympic debuts. (This exercise didn’t even factor in the silver she won in Tokyo in 2021 or her other medals from the 2022 Fina World Swimming Championships.)
Now consider Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time with 23 gold, 3 silver, and 2 bronze medals. He earned only $973,000 from his Olympic medals by today’s standards, which weren’t the same when he was competing. Thanks, Inflation! That is enough to live on for the 16 years he was competing in the Olympics, at about $61,000 a year, but it isn’t enough to retire on in your early 30s, when we swam at his last games.
Now is when you might be saying, “Well, these athletes don’t earn an income just from the medals they win; they have other sources.” And you are absolutely correct. Imagine how much a college swim program would pay to have Phelps associated with them or the amount he has collected from endorsement deals. He is set for the rest of his life financially. I don’t worry about him at all.
Then again, that’s Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time. What about the other competitors who participate in just one event or on a team? How much money will the prop position of the USA's Women Rugby 7s make? She earned a bronze medal this Olympics for a total of $15,000. I don’t even know her name; I can give you a list of the players on the team, but I don’t know who the prop was. We all owe her a debt for representing us in the Olympics, and she probably put in just as much work into her craft as Torri Huske has, but the difference in income will be significant. The only benefit is if that is all she earned, she won’t owe any taxes. There are many athletes who won’t even earn one medal from their time at the Olympics, but who worked just as hard.
While I don't necessarily endorse the government giving a greater amount of money to medal winners, I do think it’s important to realize the dedication these athletes put into their craft and sometimes how little they benefit from it. To me, it gives me a better appreciation for those athletes who put aside monetary comfort for the sake of being the best at their chosen event. So I hope you’ve enjoyed these games in Paris and remember these athletes’ stories of both struggle and success and the history they’ve made at these Olympic games.
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