Courtney Sarault sat at a picnic table in the sun at the Olympic Village, her latest medal — a silver in women’s short track 1,000 metres, to join the silver and bronze she’d already won in Milan — gleaming beside her. She had put four years of hard work and hope into Monday morning’s race. Her prize, by the most basic of measures, was a surprisingly heavy chunk of metal on a ribbon.
As Canada’s most decorated athlete so far, she will also collect $55,000 when she gets home: $15,000 for each of her silvers, $10,000 for her bronze, and an additional $5,000 for each medal from the foundation established by Sanjay Malaviya, a health-care technology entrepreneur.
Sarault knew, the way all Canadian athletes know, that winning has its financial rewards. She was surprised when she was told the exact figure.
“Okay, there’s some cash flow,” she said. “Thanks for letting me know. When I’m back in my condo paying my bills, that will be nice to have.”
But if she were Italian, she’d be receiving a cheque for about $389,000. If she were Polish, she’d be coming home to about $211,000, as well as a furnished apartment, a car, and a collection of gifts that might include artwork or jewelry.
And if she were Singaporean, she could look forward to finding about $1,350,000 in the bank.
The host Italians, racking up medals in record numbers, have been especially vocal about their windfalls. “When you hear that,” Sarault said, “you’re definitely like, Oh, wow, okay. Good for you guys!”
What Canada’s medallists receive is part of the wider conversation about funding that happens every Olympic year.
The money for medals — a gold is worth $20,000 — isn’t from taxpayers. It comes out of the Canadian Olympic Committee’s Excellence Fund, which funnels corporate sponsorship dollars to our most successful high-performance athletes.
Adam van Koeverden, the secretary of state for sport and a former Olympic kayaker, said in a recent interview that there are no plans for the federal government to pay athletes directly for winning medals.
Neither, for comparison’s sake, does Norway or Great Britain, whose medallists don’t receive financial bonuses.
“We do more on the upstream,” van Koeverden said. “My goal is to invest in athletes and the ecosystem so it’s possible to win more medals. That’s our governmental responsibility.”
National-team athletes earn a monthly stipend of about $2,100.
But van Koeverden recognizes the value of rewarding medallists: He was a leading voice in the fight for money for medals when he was paddling. “I competed before, during, and after the conversation,” he said.
He didn’t receive money for his first three Olympic medals in 2004 or 2008. His last medal, a silver in 2012, came with $15,000.
For him, that money represented a kind of equalization payment. (Officially, medal bonuses count as employment income and are taxed.) Corporate sponsors might value certain athletes and sports more than others, but every medal counts on medal tables, and every athlete who stands on a podium has earned his or her place on it.
“We believed it was just, because it’s marketing money, and all of those sponsors benefit when any athlete wins,” van Koeverden said. “I think of it less as a reward and more as justice.”
Kelsey Mitchell, who won a gold medal in sprint cycling in Tokyo, is competing again for Canada as a bobsledder in Milano Cortina. She’s seen up close the uncomfortable calculus that sometimes comes with making a career in amateur athletics, where every taxpayer dollar might have also been spent on education, healthcare, or infrastructure.
“There’s enough incentive to medal,” she said. “No athlete in Canada does it for the money. But to get $20,000 in your pocket is phenomenal. Any money matters.”
Coincidentally, the $20,000 she earned for her cycling medal is the same amount the struggling bobsleigh team, which is using German sleds from 2018, charges its athletes to be part of it. A new sled would cost about what Italy pays for a bronze.
“I think we have to decide, where do we want to put our money?” Mitchell said. “Is it in high performance, so people can look up and see Canadians achieving great things and try to pursue that? Or should we put it in grassroots, and get more people in sports? I don’t know where it’s more beneficial. These are decisions I wouldn’t know how to make.”
For Sarault, who has two more chances to medal, it’s not a debate she’ll be having the next time she’s in her starting position, waiting for the race of her life to begin.
“It doesn’t enter my mind when I skate, when I’m on the ice,” she said. “The look in my eyes isn’t for money. It’s for my love of the sport, my love of competition.”
But for Canadians, the question remains: What’s that love worth?
