Rio 2016: How much money do Olympians make by winning a medal for their country?

The Olympics. As an athlete, you train your whole life to compete in these games. All those hard hours of training and exhaustion comes down to the moment you step foot into that stadium as a proud Representative of your country, an Olympian on the grandest sporting stage in the world.

Every event in the Olympics consists of the best athletes in the world and global sporting superstars competing or vying for the honor of getting a medal for their country. If you manage to win a medal on the grandest stage defeating your rivals, its a completely different ball game.

So what’s in it for the athletes? The pride and glory of winning a medal for your country and seeing your nation’s flag rise to your name in the sporting gala is emotional for an athlete and perhaps makes all the hard work worth it in the end.

How do their countries reward them, though? Not all countries reward their medalists equally and you will be surprised to know the countries who reward their Olympians the best.
But before we get into the discussion of how much the athletes get paid for their medals, let’s see the value of the medal itself in the ongoing Rio Olympic Games 2016.

Value of Summer Olympics Medals:

Gold: $600 (The gold medal consists of just 1% of actual gold, 92.5% silver, and 6.16% copper).
Silver: $325 (The silver medal consists of 92.5% silver and 7.2% copper)
Bronze: $3 (Bronze medal is 97% copper and 2.5% zinc and 0.5% tin)

Did you know the Olympic Medals are taxable?

That’s right. Athletes are taxed on the medals they win in the Olympics. The hard work, the lack of money and funding from their federation not withstanding, athletes actually need to pay taxes as applicable on the medals, if they win in the Olympics.

Michael Phelps must be secretly wishing he does not win anymore medals to avoid even higher taxes

For each Olympic medal an athlete wins, a country usually rewards its athletes with a lot of money. Here is a bit of information about the money different countries pay their athletes.

Highest cash rewards paid by different national Olympic federations

No.	Country	Gold	Silver	Bronze
1	Singapore	1,000,000 Singapore Dollars (USD 734,000)	$367,000	$183,500
2	Malaysia	A solid gold bar worth $600,000	$255,000	$130,000
3	Azerbaijan	$510,000	$255,000	$130,000
4	Kazakhstan	$250,000	$150,000	$75,000
5	Thailand	$314,000 (over 20 years period)
6	Philippines	$237,000 (over 20 years period)
7	Kyrgyzstan	$200,000
8	Latvia	$190,000
9	Italy	$189,800	$95,000	$50,000
10	Russia	$180,000	$90,000	$45,000
11	Uzbekistan	$150,000
11	Belarus	$150,000
11	Ukraine	$150,000
11	India	$150,000	$112,000	$75,000
15	Australia	$126,000
16	France	$65,000
17	China	$31,400
18	USA	$25,000
19	Germany	$19,500
20	United Kingdom	No cash prize awarded by Britain’s Olympic Committee.

As you can see from the above table, Countries like Singapore and Malaysia award it’s athletes a fortune if they win at the Olympics. But it’s pretty surprising to see some of the top dogs of international sports like USA, China, Germany lagging down in the list and UK not rewarding their athletes.

Singapore’s Joseph Schooling just bagged a 1 million Singapore dollars after he defeated Phelps in the 100m butterfly event

 

 

But perhaps, the situation can be put into the perspective that their respective federations do in fact put in a lot of effort to make sure their athletes are in top shape for the event by providing the necessary facilities, coaching, and infrastructure to accommodate their growth in their respective sports, which some of the countries higher in the list cannot afford.

Irrespective of the prize money, it's still pretty clear that most athletes do not manage to earn as much as they should do for the amount of effort they put in and sometimes have to rely on sponsorship deals, advertisements or even other part-time professions to accommodate their training as expected.




Source:SportsKeeda

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