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Olympic champions to receive prize money for first time at Paris 2024 Games

Olympic champions will receive prize money for the first time this year after World Athletics announced gold medalists at the Paris 2024 Games would be paid $50,000 (£39,400) each.

Athletics is the first sport to financially reward its stars for success at the Olympics, which has stayed true to its amateur ethos by never offering prize money.

Winners of all 48 athletics events will receive a payout from the world governing body, which says it will extend the benefit to silver and bronze medalists from the LA 2028 Olympics.

“The introduction of prize money for Olympic gold medalists is a pivotal moment for World Athletics and the sport of athletics as a whole, underscoring our commitment to empowering the athletes and recognizing the critical role they play in the success of any Olympic Games,” said World Athletics president Lord Coe.

“While it is impossible to put a marketable value on winning an Olympic medal, or on the commitment and focus it takes to even represent your country at an Olympic Games, 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 size of the payouts is modest compared to those on offer elsewhere in sport – the average salary of a Premier League footballer is around £3m, for instance.

But the move is nonetheless a milestone for the Olympics, and recognition that it will be increasingly difficult to justify asking the stars of its core events to compete for glory alone.

Many Olympic hopefuls rely on funding grants and personal sponsorship deals to train full-time, while others have to retain careers in order to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, athletes are being offered million-dollar incentives to defect to the doping-friendly Enhanced Games, a project Coe has derided as “bollocks”.

While winners of individual athletics events at Paris 2024 will receive $50,000, that sum will be divided up among team members for winners of the relay races. 

“This is the continuation of a journey we started back in 2015, which sees all the money World Athletics receives from the International Olympic Committee for the Olympic Games go directly back into our sport,” Coe added.

“We started with the Olympic dividend payments to our Member Federations, which saw us distribute an extra $5m a year on top of existing grants aimed at athletics growth projects, and we are now in a position to also fund gold medal performances for athletes in Paris, with a commitment to reward all three medallists at the LA28 Olympic Games.”