POSTED: January 21st 2012
NewsUpdate
NEIL WILSON: Is there a price on Olympic dreams?
THE NEIL WILSON COLUMN / An exclusive, authoritative series from Sports Features Communications
LONDON: At a reception in the Russian Embassy in London last week members of its national Olympic committee revealed that any Russian winning gold at the Games in London will become an instant dollar millionaire. And that does not count a cent they might make from commercial gains after the Games.
The “money for medals” comes from four sources, an athlete’s federation, its region, from Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Lisin, a vice-present of the NOC who happens to be the country’s wealthiest man.
The $1.27 million which the USOC paid out for its most successful Winter Olympics in 2010 pales by comparision. A single Russian in 2012 could earn more, and the US bonuses were spread among 82 medallists. Apolo Ohno and Derek Parra, for a gold and silver apiece, were highest earners with $40,000.
The question remains whether bonuses have any effect on a nation’s medal haul. The Singapore Olympic Committee put up a bonus in the 1990s of $1 million to any Singaporean winning Olympic gold. It remains uncollected. So, perhaps, not.
Lord Moynihan, chairman of the British Olympic Association, who was present at the Russian reception, commented to The Times: “I do not believe that there is a single athlete in our team of 550 who would perform better if there was money on the table.”
Dreams drive Olympic aspirations. Money does not enter into them. Why else would the British canoeist Tim Brabants have taken two years out of his career as a doctor to prepare for each of the last three Olympic Games, damaging his prospects in the profession and costing him money?
A gold and a bronze in three Games is his reward but little else. In his country not even an Olympic gold makes a canoeist marketable. Yet for 2012 he decided to put medicine on hold again for another two years to prepare again for the Olympics.
Some, of course, do make millions. Mark Cavendish, the world’s top sprint in road cycling, is to be paid a reputed $3.75 million by sponsors Sky to ride for its Tour de France team this year. Bradley Wiggins, his team-mate, earns around $2 million.
Yet, on July 28, they will ride together in the Olympic road race in the colours of Britain for not one penny piece, and winning a gold medal of no intrinsic value will mean as much to them as all their riches.
More significantly there will be riders on the British team that day – and on rival national teams - who will be there as worker bees, whose function is to fetch and carry refreshments for Cavendish and Wiggins, to protect them from the wind and pace their efforts. Not a chance for them of individual glory, and yet they will compete all summer for the honour of being there.
Moynihan is right. On a freezing day in January what motivates Olympians to train is not a million dollars but a medal worth in dollar terms next to nothing.
NEIL WILSON reported his first Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. He has since covered another nine summer and nine winter Olympics for various newspapers, including The Independent and the Daily Mail with whom he has worked for the last 19 years as Athletics and Olympic correspondent. He was Britain's Sports Journalist of the Year in 1984 and is the author of seven books.
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