It’s outdated and naive to condemn Coe’s cash-for-golds plan as a betrayal of the Olympic ideal
It flashed across the International Olympic Committee’s skyline like a bolt from the blue yesterday morning. And so 128 years of Olympic tradition vanished with news that World Athletics would pay athletes for winning gold medals at this year’s Paris Games, and beyond.
Starting in the summer, victorious track and field competitors in each of the 48 disciplines will walk away with $50,000 (nearly £40,000). World Athletics have further committed to extend cash prizes to silver and bronze medallists in Los Angeles in 2028.
IOC president thomas Bach, a German gold-medal winning foil fencer from the financially ruinous Montreal Olympics of 1976, an event that stacked up $1.5billion debts through corruption and mismanagement that took the Quebec city 30 years to settle, was blindsided.
He had been in the French capital inspecting the next Olympic venue and pressing flesh with President Macron in the Elysee Palace the day before receiving short warning of the incoming lightning strike.
A strand of the story – the way the new arrangement was publicised if not the substance of it – is highly political. Lord Coe, president of World Athletic, whose pink-walled Monaco offices overlook the famous harbour and the grand prix, and Bach are no fans of each other. Bach, sources indicate, is determined that Coe should not become president of the IOC when the next election takes place in March next year, prior to instalment in July.
the bespectacled Bach, 70, will have served 12 years by then. the rules could be changed to allow him to run again (moves to this end are afoot).
the IOC want to push all talk of the election — for what is, only arguably the presidency of FIFA apart the most important post in world sport — back to the close of the Paris games on August 11 so it is not an obvious distraction, though it will be an all-consuming topic over cocktails wherever IOC members congregate. I am told Bach is unlikely to stand, in fact. A female candidate, perhaps Kirsty Coventry, Africa’s double gold medal swimmer from 2004 and 2008 and now Sports Minister in her native Zimbabwe, may win the day. She has yet to declare her candidacy.
Within the corridors of IOC power in Lausanne, there is a Bach-led consensus view of ‘anyone but Coe’, whose c.v. as one of the greatest Olympic athletes in history and head of the finest Games ever staged — London 2012, obviously — marks him out as ostensibly the outstanding candidate in innumerable ways.
He is seen as being too much of a thorn in the current regime’s side. He retains a significant rump of support, however, not least over his federation’s strong stances over Russians being excluded from competition and against transgender athletes taking part in women- only categories. He, again, has not declared, and may yet choose not to stand.
that, at any rate, is the backdrop against which yesterday’s money-for-golds news landed. But the bigger question is what paying winners means for the Corinthian spirit of Olympism, of the amateur ethos Pierre de Coubertin envisaged when he dreamt up the modern Olympics in 1896.
ONE’S first response can be one of outrage that those high ideals – Citius, Altius, Fortius, or ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’ — on which the whole enterprise was refounded are being traduced. the notion that gold is reward itself is over.
I hear it; it’s a compelling argument, but, I fear, naive. the French baron, De Coubertin, lived in another age, and structured the IOC on a quainter notion — the model of Henley Royal Regatta and their ‘ stewards’ — and recreated the lighting of an Olympic flame supposedly conjured from the sun’s rays by vestal virgins in the temple of Hera at Mount Olympus. Sport has moved on and become more complex and more financial, alas.
the IOC generated $7.6billion at the last Games in tokyo, mostly derived from sponsorship and tV rights. the IOC give some 90 percent of their wealth back to sport, but, whatever reciprocal good it does, the figures involved reveal how much money is central to the ‘business’.
Coe himself was a millionaire by approximately 1983 in his mid-tolate twenties, a year before claiming the second of his two 1500metres gold medals. A deal with Horlicks helped do the trick. Years on, Usain Bolt won endorsements worth 30 times per annum as much. the big stars do fine, thank you very much.
BUT what if you are a lesser name in, say, the discus? You’re not a Coe or a Bolt. Who, male or female, won the discus in tokyo? Me, neither.
A reward for gold of $50,000 for a young lifetime of sweat, toil and tears would, therefore, not be entirely unwelcome — nor, it should be pointed out, an amount significant enough to revolutionise anyone’s existence. It approximates to the country’s annual wage. And the winner of this year’s World Snooker Championship can add a nought to the proposed prize, in sterling: £500,000. the money- for- gold concept is not entirely new. the US Olympic Committee pay $40,000 to their gold medallists in all sports.
the biggest regret perhaps is that a price has been placed on Olympic glory. It makes an athletics medal more worthwhile than in other sports, the lesser known ones ( dressage, etc), where endorsements are harder to come by and less remunerative. that is a moral concern. As is whether a victory in the 100m on two legs should be valued more highly than one in the Paralympics on prosthetics.
now the cat is among the pigeons, and other international federations (IFs), and national Olympic committees (nOCs), will come under pressure to reward their champions as well. ‘It is an anti- solidarity move by World Athletics,’ someone from another sport told me. ‘the money could have been deployed more widely and evenly.’
Yet for Coe, supporting athletes is something fundamental, as well as political. His argument is that his body receive $2.4million from the IOC every year, and that it is his responsibility, which he feels deeply, to reward the stars of the show.
‘the introduction of prize money for Olympic gold medallists is a pivotal moment for World Athletics and the sport of athletics as a whole, underscoring our commitment to empowering the athletes and recognising the critical role they play in the success of any Olympic Games,’ he said, aware that the event’s blue riband sport is in need of a perkup in the post-Bolt era.
Coe, confirming he not had not spoken to Bach about the decision, added: ‘I am hoping they would welcome it. the world has changed, and it is really important that where possible we give money to athletes.’
to which the IOC responded, in what might be perceived as a passive-aggressive statement: ‘the IOC redistributes 90 per cent of all its income. this means that the equivalent of $4.2m goes to help athletes and sports organisations at all levels around the world.
‘It is up to each IF and nOC to determine how to best serve their athletes and the global development of their sport.’
AFLAVOUR of Coe’s heartfelt commitment to athletes is revealed in a moment he often remarks on and which is a central facet of his life: namely the British Olympic Association, at the direction of chairman Sir Denis Follows, defying Margaret thatcher’s calls for a boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
‘ I have always put athletes first,’ said Coe before and after the 2012 Olympics, thinking back not least to that time 44 years ago. Whatever anyone makes of cash- for- gongs, he believes he still is.