The Olympic Wealth Gap: Stars Make Bank While Most U.S. Olympians Struggle

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Getting to the Olympic Games is an expensive feat, and even those who win rarely become rich doing so.

eam USA Olympian Brittney Reese competes in the long jump tomorrow in Tokyo—tonight on American TV screens—as she looks to qualify for the finals in the event on Tuesday. It will likely be the last long-jump competition of the four-time Olympian’s career, capping a years-long grind familiar to most independent Olympic contenders.

“Most of our [athletes] make less than $50,000 a year, and for many, much less than that,” says Tom Jackovic, CEO of the USATF Foundation, which connects track-and-field athletes pursuing their Olympic dreams with private cash grants. It gave out But Biles and Ledecky were two of the most famous faces coming into the Games. There are more than 11,000 athletes, including more than 600 from the U.S., competing for 339 gold medals this year, most of them cobbling together financial support from prize money, equipment subsidies, hard-won endorsement deals and a smattering of highly competitive private grants.

“I think there aren’t a lot of opportunities domestically to make a living or an income,” the USATF Foundation’s Jackovic says. “There’s just not that many means here in the U.S. You typically have to travel to Europe or elsewhere to compete to make money.” As a shot putter, Kovacs clinched the gold standard of sponsorships when he inked a Nike contract in 2012. Although he declined to comment on his contract terms, he notes that landing a Nike deal doesn’t mean the end of financial struggles, especially since base contracts can change year to year and are not guaranteed.

 

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