Dr. Amira Rose Davis
Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas-Austin, where she specializes in 20th Century American History with an emphasis on race, gender, sports, and politics.
Email: amirarosedavis@utexas.edu
Twitter: @mirarose88
Website: amirarosedavis.com
Before the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, U.S. water polo player, Maggie Steffens posted on Instagram to share her excitement and draw attention to the women’s water polo team. The three-time gold medalist called for exposure and support “… most Olympians need a 2nd (or 3rd) job to support chasing the dream…most teams rely on sponsors for travel, accommodations, nutritional support, rent/lodging, and simply afford to live in this day and age. Especially female sports and female athletes”.
To her surprise, Steffens received a comment from rapper and reality show star, Flavor Flav, promising to sponsor the entire team. During the Olympics, the cameras often found Flavor Flav poolside cheering for the team and followed their unlikely partnership during the competition The media framing was light and airy, and little space was given to exploring why his sponsorship was needed, or why a four-time Olympian and three-time gold medalist had taken to Instagram asking for support in the first place.
Steffens post was an important reminder that while the Olympics generate billions of dollars, the athletes who captivate the world do not receive direct compensation. Many of them often struggle for support and financial stability.
Pierre Coubertin and the inaugural Olympic Congress were clear when they revived the games in 1892: the Modern Olympics would be for men and amateurs. No one who earned money in sports as a player or teacher would be eligible to compete. It also banned monetary prizes for earning medals. Over the next century, ideas about amateurism would continue to govern the games, even as the official rules were progressively relaxed (and women were eventually allowed to compete). While professional athletes have been welcomed at the Olympics since 1988, the IOC still does not offer direct compensation for medals earned, or athletic labor performed at the Games.
Today, the Olympics has grown into a big money machine. While host cities are left with exorbitant bills, the IOC gets the ever-increasing revenue from ballooning media rights deals and sponsorships. The media deals for the 2024 Games are estimated to bring in around $3.4 billion alone.
While the IOC proudly claims to distribute 90% of the revenue back to the federations via investments and support, the disparities between the Olympic have and have-nots are increasingly stark. While IOC officials enjoy large per diems and generous accommodations at the games, 45,000 volunteers who make the games run, are paid simply in lunches and a t-shirt. The athletic labor at the heart of the Olympics is celebrated and profited off of, there are still too many athletes saying that they are experiencing financial precarity and who are turning to crowd-sourcing platforms like GoFundMe to supplement their income while they train and compete.
The IOC leaves compensation up to governing bodies and national federations, and support for athletes can vary widely. For example, in Hungary, a gold medalist gets a $148,362 payout, while in the United States, a gold medalist earns $37,500.
This year, World Athletics became the first federation to offer compensation to medalists, guaranteeing monetary rewards for track and field citing the fact that “the revenue share that we receive is in large part because our athletes are the stars of the show”. Still, not everyone was supportive of this move. With detractors claiming that these awards will “threaten the integrity of the Olympic Games.”
The IOC and federations such as the USOPC, cite athletes earning potential as justification for the lack of monetary support. Yet the ability to earn sponsorships is heavily determined by the sports athletes compete in, and their perceived “marketability” which is often influenced by their gender, race, and sexuality. A few superstars can cash in big, but most Olympians are not in that position. Even for athletes with sponsorships, the IOC’s Rule 40, restricts the content athletes can make with their individual sponsors for the weeks before, during, and after the Olympics. The IOC does this to protect and prioritize its own branding relationships.
Still, athletes are using their platforms to create new sponsorship pipelines, outside of traditional media markets. They are also speaking candidly about the realities of being an Olympian. Rugby bronze medalist, Ariana Ramsey, went viral for her videos about using her time in the Olympic Village to get health care, vision, and pap smears. Ramsey wanted to raise awareness about U.S. health inequalities and the challenges she had accessing care back home.
Athletes continue to assert the value of their athletic labor, and organizations like Global Athlete are helping to unite Olympians as a labor force. The payments to medalists are a start but what support will there be for most Olympians who will not win medals, but are laboring just the same?
Individual celebrities, taxpayers, crowd-sourced support campaigns, and athletes working night jobs as content creators, are mere band-aids for the festering wounds of exploitation and financial disparity between the Olympic haves and have-nots.
As the Opening Ceremony came to life on the Seine this summer, a beheaded Marie Antoinette stood in a window of the tower where she was historically imprisoned. Long understood as a symbol of “excess and indulgence”, the headless monarch appeared while “Let the People Sing” turned into a rock song in the background. The IOC officials unironically applauded this symbolism from their perch under the Eiffel Tower, while the unpaid volunteers served as their umbrella holders to shield them from the rain. Boats of athletes floated down the river and crowds pressed into security gates restricting access to the Ceremony. Olympian Veronica Farley took it all in- this was her dream! Tomorrow she would wake up in the Olympic village, prepare to compete- and try not to worry about how she would pay her rent.
