The high price of Olympic gold
If you wanted to buy an ounce of gold last week it would cost the sobering sum of $1,732. But if you wanted to purchase an Olympic gold medal for your country, it would cost far, far more.
As we marvelled at the incredible feats of athletic prowess on daily display in the Rio Summer Games, as we thrilled at how fast humans can run, how high they can leap, how gracefully they can tiptoe on a balance beam, it’s worth keeping this fact in mind.
Skill, muscle, training and perseverance count for a lot, yes indeed. But cold hard cash is just as important. Countries have to pay if they want to play to win. Canada, to be sure, had a good Summer Games winning 22 medals, including four gold. In comparison, Canada won just a single, solitary gold in London, England four years ago. One reason for the comparative gold rush this time is Canada’s Own the Podium program which saw this country spend $139.2 million on Summer Olympic athletes, federations and centres of excellence over the past four years. That investment is reaping real returns – for the athletes on the playing fields as well as the jubilant Canadian spectators watching it on TV back home. It’s hard, for instance, to put a price on the adrenalin rush of national pride that surged through Canadians when Canada’s women’s rugby sevens team captured the bronze medal. But we do have the bill for what it cost to put them on the podium. In the four years leading up to Rio, Canada spent a cool $7 million on this women’s team. In comparison, a mere $55,000 was spent on the team before the 2012 London Olympics – where no rugby medal was won. So, money matters. If Canada enjoyed a gratifying Games, the United Kingdom, with slightly less than twice our population, is celebrating phenomenal success after finishing third in the medal count with a total of 67 medals, including 27 gold. Only the United States and China racked up more medals overall, and only the U.S. won more gold. The Brits are not inherently the winningest athletes. At the Atlanta Summer Games 20 years ago, the U.K. finished dismally in 36th place on the medal table and took home only one gold medal. But after that, and unwilling to be embarrassed as host of the 2012 Games, Britain turned on the spending taps. The payback? A third-place finish on the medal table four years ago with 29 golds. And while Canada invested generously in this year’s Games, the U.K. was lavish, spending the equivalent of $588 million Canadian on Olympic sports over four years. The Guardian newspaper estimates each Olympic medal costs British taxpayers 5.5 million pounds – or $9.2 million Canadian.
As fierce as the competition is in global sports, it will only become fiercer. Canadian athletes are faster, stronger and able to leap higher than ever before. But so are the athletes from other nations they’re going up against. And many of those nations are happily spending more than we do to make sure they win. With this Olympiad now over, Canadians should ask themselves: How much faster should our politicians be writing the cheques for our athletes; and how high should they go?