Medals cost money. This is the real financial reality: Glory is not cheap. High performance sports have become a competitive ‘arms race’ where countries pour hundreds of millions of dollars into elite programmes aimed at winning gold medals.
The Olympic system works on a four-year Olympic/Paralympic cycle. In countries that have a dedicated High Performance and Podium programme, sports have to make commitments for the long term to athletes, coaches and support staff.
Here in T&T, there needs to be a national consensus about elite Olympic sports. It's clear from the Paris 2024 public discourse that the country wants consistent Olympic podium results. The question is can T&T afford the required investment?
Countries are investing billions of dollars in high performance. Some used failure as an impetus. For example, Australian athletes returned from the 1976 Olympics 32nd in the medal tally behind North Korea, Belgium and T&T.
The idea for an Australian institute of sports took inspiration from the United States, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, but the Montreal failure and subsequent national angst was the catalyst for political impetus and money. The AIS (Australian Institute of Sport) was opened on Australia Day in 1981, and then-Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser declared that it would “carry Australia’s name high”.
Almost every medal won by an Australian at the Games since then has had a link to the AIS’s campus in Canberra – whether through the athletes residing there, visiting during training camps or making use of the AIS’s sports scientists.
The advent of the National Lottery in 1994, and the decision of John Major's government to allocate significant streams of its revenue to elite Olympic sport, transformed Great Britain (GB) from "also rans" to a World sports superpower in 20 years.
One publication put it this way: Public money has transformed the 'dedicated amateurs' of Atlanta (1996) into an ultra-professional outfit.
At the Atlanta Games, Team GB managed one gold medal, won by Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent, and finished 36th in the medal table behind Ireland, New Zealand, Bulgaria and Cuba. The UK won the same number of medals (15) as Belarus and only finished above them by winning more silvers.
From just £5m per year before Atlanta, UK Sport's spending increased to £54m by Sydney 2000, where Britain won 28 medals to move to tenth on the medal table. By London 2012 - third in the medal table, 65 medals - from £264m invested. Between 2013 and 2017, almost £350m in public funds was spent on Olympic and Paralympic sports.
In the case of New Zealand: High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ) invested $131 million directly into National Sporting Organisations (NSOs) at an average of $43.7 million per annum. The investments were announced under HPSNZ’s new Targeted Investment Framework, a key element of its Paris 2024 Strategy. Another aspect of the New Zealand approach is two distinct groups – Podium Sports and what they call, Aspirational Sports.
"More than 10,000 athletes from around the world will compete in the Olympics. All have the same dream, to win a gold medal. But not all dreams are equal. Athletic training costs money, so athletes from rich nations will most likely win more medals than those from poor countries. How a country funds its Olympic programme is not only an indicator of likely success, it also reflects each nation's social and political values." – An excerpt from a 2009 Voice of America (VOA) story by Brian Padden.