Swimming, gymnastics given revenue promotion by IOC

SWIMMING and gymnastics were the big winners yesterday in a new revenue-sharing ranking of Olympic sports, signalling the start of the debate over how to split the money from the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) executive board promoted the international swimming and gymnastics federations into the top tier along with track and field in a list of five groups comprising the 28 summer Olympic sports.

Previously, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) was ranked alone in the highest of four groups and received the biggest share of the hundreds of millions of dollars generated from television rights and other deals from each Summer Games.

Under a revised formula announced by IOC president Jacques Rogge, swimming body Fina and gymnastics federation FIG join the IAAF in Group A. One of the big losers was modern pentathlon, which dropped into a new Group E, the bottom rung.

The Association of Summer Olympic International Federations, the umbrella group com-

Aquatics is a nice sport and gymnastics is a nice sport. But you cannot compare (them) with athletics.

prising all the sports, asked the IOC to come up with the new groupings. Now it will be up to the association to figure out how to divide the money.

“You are throwing a hot potato in our hands,” Rogge told association president Francesco Ricci Bitti, adding: “Now I am handing you back the hot potato.” While the IAAF is now expected to receive less than before, IAAF president Lamine Diack made clear he feels his sport remains the top draw at the Olympics and deserves the greatest share.

“Aquatics is a nice sport. Gymnastics is a nice sport,” Diack said. “But you cannot compare with athletics. We are the only sport which makes the games universal. We filled the stadium in London for nine days.

“The games in Rio will start when the athletics starts. The sport that will make the games special is athletics.”

The IAAF is getting about $45m from the total of $520m in revenue being shared out among the federations from last year’s London Olympics.

“The IAAF will get less money than in the past,” association director-general Andrew Ryan said. “The groups are important, but we don’t know yet how the calculations will work for Rio.”

According to Ryan, the sports which moved up in the groupings were table tennis, badminton, boxing, judo, archery, shooting and weightlifting.

Moving down into lower groups on the rung were equestrian, handball, hockey and modern pentathlon. Sapa-AP