In Los Angeles in 2028, silver and bronze medalists will also be paid.
World Athletics, the No. 1 sport in the Olympic landscape, made a precedent-setting move, announcing it would pay gold medalists at the Paris Games. Total prize money: $2.4 million. Winners across each of the four dozen track and field events will receive $50,000 each. Relay teams will split the $50k. Starting in Los Angeles in 2028, silver and bronze medalists will also be paid.
The timing may seem like World Athletics is following the Russians. To be clear, very clear: it is not.
Instead, we have parallel paths, both recognizing the inevitable in the world we are in now—not the hazy, black-and-white world of the Olympics of 1924 nor even the grand piano and rocket-man technicolor LA Games of 1984, but our 21st-century era, one marked most of all by a reckoning and, if need be, reordering of anything and everything, perhaps even its most familiar touchpoints.
That means: in global politics, with the decline of American influence and the rise of Russia, China, India, the Gulf States and the Global South, and in the ways those nations and their allies project soft power through international sport and, as well, the role athletes have traditionally played in advancing not just the interests of their sports federations and their nations but, now – themselves.
“I have to accept the world has changed,” World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said Wednesday in an interview with Steve Scott at ITV.
“If you had asked me that question 30 or 40 years ago,” whether paying athletes for winning was in line with what Scott called the Olympic ‘ethos,’ Coe went on to say, “I might have given you a different answer.”
