Gold medalists at the Paris 2024 Olympics will receive monetary rewards in addition to the honour and the medal, aiming to motivate athletes to break records. World Athletics, the governing body for global track and field, announced that it will pay athletes for their success at the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, marking a significant departure from the Olympics’ “amateur” roots.
World Athletics has allocated $2.4 million from its IOC revenue-sharing allocation to compensate gold medalists in all 48 Olympic track and field events. Each individual gold medalist will receive $50,000, while $50,000 will be shared among each relay gold-winning team. Silver and bronze medalists will also receive payouts at the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.
Although medalists often receive bonuses from their national teams or personal sponsors, the IOC and its global governing bodies have not previously paid athletes for their success. World Athletics’ programme is more meritocratic, creating a direct link between the IOC’s Olympic revenue and payments made to some of the Games’ biggest stars.
The IOC stated that it distributes 90% of its income and that “it is up to each” international federation or national team to determine how to spend it.
World Athletics is led by Sebastian Coe, a former Olympian and British politician, who is considered a leading candidate to become the next IOC president when Thomas Bach’s term ends next year. World Athletics’ decision to pay gold medalists could indicate a shift at the highest level if Coe takes charge in the future.
“While it is impossible to put a marketable value on winning an Olympic medal,” Coe said in a statement, “I think it is important we start somewhere and make sure some of the revenues generated by our athletes at the Olympic Games are directly returned to those who make the Games the global spectacle that it is.”
The Olympic payouts are less than what World Athletics pays its athletes for success at its world championships. At the 2023 event in Budapest, gold medalists received $70,000, with payments made down to eighth place ($5,000). However, the Olympic payouts exceed what many national teams pay their stars. Team USA awarded its athletes $37,500 for each gold at the Tokyo Summer Olympics, Japan gave about $45,000, and South Africa awarded approximately $37,000.
World Athletics reported $237.5 million in revenue from 2019 to 2022.
