SWIMMERS INSIST CASH FOR MEDALS WILL MAKE WAVES

BRITAIN’S leading swimmers believe seeing athletes earn cash for Olympic gold medals could cause friction in Paris. World Athletics announced earlier this month that trackand-field stars will take home $50,000 (£39,800) in prize money if they win gold at the Games, breaking 128 years of the Olympic tradition as an amateur competition. Double Olympic gold medallist Tom Dean, who was announced as part of Team GB’s swimming team for Paris yesterday, said he thinks the prize money on offer is going to be the talk of the town come the Games. ‘It’s quite tough when you are a swimmer and you’ve worked for however many years and someone from track and field has worked just as hard for just as many years is getting these financial rewards for winning medals,’ said Dean, who won 200m freestyle gold in Tokyo. ‘Ask any swimmer and that’s a stark contrast that’s going to be highlighted in Paris. ‘When I tell other people that we don’t receive any prize for winning Olympic gold medals, that’s always a shock and a surprise. People don’t do it for the money but, when you see your other Olympic counterparts earning a paycheque, then it’s a pretty obvious contrast. ‘I think you could argue that Olympics hasn’t strictly stayed true to being a purely amateur sport because you look at the kind of stars that attend anyway and they are earning loads of money, whether that be tennis players or golfers and all these different sports.’ World Aquatics are believed to have considered prize money ahead of Tokyo in 2021 but opted against the move and are said to have no plans to follow their counterparts in athletics whose £1.9million prize pot for gold medallists comes from their share of the Olympic broadcast revenues. ‘The cheek of athletics saying that it’s less than the prize money they get at a World Championship,’ joked Duncan Scott, who, in Tokyo, became the first Brit to come home from a Games with four medals. ‘It’s not what drives me in the sport and it’s not the reason I do it but it’s an incentive that might come into play. I think, financially, something needs to change.’ Meanwhile, Scott says becoming the most decorated Olympian in British history will not be at the forefront of his mind in Paris. In total, five Scots have made the cut, with Scott joining Kathleen Dawson, Keanna MacInnes, Lucy Hope and Katie Shanahan in the swimming team. For Scott, it could be a seminal Games. Should he come home with another four medals, he would surpass the current record held by cyclist Sir Jason Kenny. The Englishman has set the standard with seven golds and two silvers from previous Games, while Scott currently holds five silver and one gold from his performances in both Rio in 2016 and Tokyo in 2021. ‘It’s not something I think about at all, to be honest,’ said Scott. ‘Even in Tokyo, I had no clue after the third medal.’