Kirsty Coventry, the first woman and first African to lead the International Olympic Committee (IOC), has settled one of sport’s loudest arguments for now. Olympic athletes will not be paid for competing or winning on her watch. “I don’t believe in paying athletes,” she told New Zealand outlet Sport Nation, defending a no-prize-money tradition the IOC calls its Olympic solidarity model.
The committee has stood on this ground before, and last time it lost. For most of the 20th century it defended a stricter version of the same idea, called amateurism, until the rule buckled under its own contradictions. Coventry’s stance also lands at an awkward moment: the federation that runs track and field already hands cash to gold medalists, against the IOC’s wishes.
Coventry Drew a Line the Champions Immediately Crossed
Coventry, 42, won seven Olympic swimming medals for Zimbabwe, including 200m backstroke gold at Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008. She knows the athlete’s side of the ledger. Her argument is that the money is better spent on scholarships, development programmes and athlete support routed through national Olympic committees rather than paid out for results.
Current champions did not wait long to push back. Cameron McEvoy, Australia’s reigning Olympic 50m freestyle champion, said the comments “could not have been stated at a more inopportune time.” Greg Rutherford, Britain’s long jump gold medalist from London 2012, went further, and his words read like the spine of the whole dispute.
I’m not saying every athlete should become a millionaire. I’m asking for an organisation that makes $12 billion, charges nations billions to host it, pays its executive millions, blocks athletes from earning and owns footage of their greatest moments to have a long, hard look at itself.
That was Rutherford, writing publicly after Coventry’s remarks. Former Irish sprint hurdler Derval O’Rourke piled on too, calling the no-pay policy “exploitation, plain and simple.” One detail sharpens the irony. After setting a world record at Beijing 2008, Coventry accepted a $100,000 cash prize from then-Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe on live television. The principle, it seems, has moved with the office.
The $12.4 Billion Backdrop to a No-Pay Stance
The scale is what makes the debate so combustible. According to the IOC’s 2024 annual financial report, the organisation generated about $12.4 billion across the 2021 to 2024 cycle, most of it from global broadcast rights and sponsorship. Coventry reportedly draws a basic salary of $350,000 plus a housing allowance.
The committee’s defence is that the money flows back out. It says it redistributes 90 per cent of revenue, roughly $4.7 million every day, into the wider Olympic movement. The catch, for athletes, is that almost none of it reaches them as a direct, individual payment for showing up or standing on a podium.
- $12.4 billion generated by the IOC over the 2021 to 2024 cycle, led by broadcast rights.
- 90 per cent of its revenue redistributed to the movement, the equivalent of about $4.7 million a day.
- $350,000 reported basic IOC salary for Coventry, plus a housing allowance.
- $0 paid directly to athletes for competing or winning a medal at the Games.
You can read the full sponsorship and television split in the Olympic marketing fact file. The numbers are not in dispute. What people disagree about is who has a claim on them.
The Amateur Rule the IOC Spent a Century Defending
Here is why “this will age badly” is more than a hot take. The IOC has run this exact play before, with a different label, and history did not vindicate it. For decades the charter barred anyone who earned from sport, on the theory that purity required poverty.
From de Coubertin to Brundage
Rule 26 of the Olympic Charter once defined an amateur as someone for whom sport was “nothing more than recreation without material gain of any kind.” Avery Brundage, IOC president from 1952 to 1972, enforced it with near-religious zeal under the banner of “sport for the sake of sport.” The problem was that the rule never matched reality. An investigation after the 1968 Mexico City Games found that only five track and field medalists had taken no compensation at all.
The Broken-Time Compromise
Under Brundage’s successor, Lord Killanin, the IOC began letting athletes recover lost wages and training costs, the so-called broken-time payments. It was a face-saving fudge: the committee kept the word amateur while quietly allowing money to change hands.
The 1986 Surrender
The dam broke in October 1986, when the IOC handed individual federations the power to admit professionals. Within a few years the word amateur was gone from the charter and NBA stars were playing in Barcelona. The lesson of that arc is hard to miss:
- 1894 to 1960s: strict amateurism, no material gain permitted, openly flouted by most top athletes.
- 1970s: broken-time payments introduced, a compromise that conceded the principle in practice.
- 1986 onward: federations allowed to admit professionals, and the amateur rule disappears entirely.
Coventry’s solidarity model is not the amateur rule. But it rests on the same instinct, that the institution decides what athletes deserve, and that direct payment cheapens the Games. That instinct has a losing record.
World Athletics Already Broke the Seal in Paris
The clearest sign the wall is cracking came at Paris 2024. World Athletics became the first international governing body to pay Olympic prize money, awarding $50,000 per gold medal across all 48 track and field events from a $2.4 million pot drawn from its own IOC revenue share. It did so over the committee’s objections.
Sebastian Coe, the World Athletics president who lost his own IOC presidential bid last year with just eight votes, has said the federation plans to extend the payments to silver and bronze winners at Los Angeles 2028. You can see the outline of World Athletics’ Olympic prize-money programme on its own site. Once one federation pays, the others face an obvious question from their own stars: why not us?
The split is now visible across the movement, with three different answers to the same question.
| Body | Pays Olympic medalists directly? | Amount | Since |
|---|---|---|---|
| IOC (solidarity model) | No | $0 to individuals | Founding principle |
| World Athletics | Yes, gold only | $50,000 per gold | Paris 2024 |
| World Aquatics | Records, not Games | $30,000 per world record | Its own events only |
| US college sport (NCAA) | Name, image, likeness deals | Market rate | 2021 |
The college comparison stings most. The NCAA’s name, image and likeness rules changed in 2021 so that even unpaid student athletes can now earn from their own fame. The IOC, by contrast, can use an athlete’s name, image and likeness to sell the Games while the athlete receives nothing for it.
Why the Bill Lands Hardest on Track and Field
For some athletes the gap between value created and value received is now absurd. Take McEvoy. He broke the 50m freestyle world record in 20.88 seconds at the China Open in March, and collected exactly $0 in record bonus, because the meet was not run by World Aquatics, which pays $30,000 for a world record at its own events.
That is the system in miniature. The performance is historic, the audience is global, and the payment depends entirely on which logo was on the start line. Athletes in less commercial sports, the ones Coventry says the solidarity model protects, are precisely the ones with the fewest outside endorsements to fall back on when the Olympic cheque reads zero.
Coventry is not without a case. Her own Olympic Solidarity scholarship, she says, was decisive in her career, and she has plenty of company among officials who fear prize money would widen the gap between rich and poor nations. The push for athletes to have a stronger voice runs through the movement too, with current and former Olympians among those standing for seats on the IOC’s athletes’ commission. The question is whether “we know best” survives contact with a generation raised on direct earnings.
The Math Pointing Toward Los Angeles 2028
The pressure is not easing, it is building. World Athletics has set qualifying standards for next year’s World Championships in Beijing that are dramatically harder than before. The men’s 100m mark dropped under 10 seconds, to 9.95, against 10.0 a year earlier. The women’s 100m standard went to 10.96, the women’s 400m to 50.00 flat, and the men’s 1,500m from 3:33.00 to 3:30.00, faster than several national records.
Read those two trends together and the contradiction is stark. Athletes are being asked to run faster and jump further than ever, often beyond the limits their countries have ever produced, while the body sitting on $12.4 billion insists the reward stays a medal and a memory. That tension carries straight into Los Angeles in 2028, where Coe wants silver and bronze paid too.
Coventry inherited the most powerful job in sport from Thomas Bach, whose own tenure was defined by fights he chose to absorb rather than settle, from the IOC’s handling of neutral athletes at Paris 2024 to the long argument over commercial reform. If the LA Games arrive with one federation paying gold, silver and bronze while the IOC pays nothing, Coventry’s line holds and the pressure becomes someone else’s problem. If a second federation follows World Athletics before then, the no-pay stance starts to look less like principle and more like the amateur rule did in 1985, a year before it fell.
