How Much Money Do Olympians Make? | London 2012

How much money do Olympians make? It depends on the allowance they receive from their government, their incentives when they win a medal, and whether they have sponsorships as well as financial support from private entities.

We mentioned earlier that Nader Al Masri gets financial support consisting of $100 per month from the Palestinian Athletics Federation.

Azerbaijan, as we stated here, allocated the following medal incentives to its athletes during the 2004 Athens Olympiad:

Gold: AZN 100,000 and NOC–AZN 50,000
Silver: AZN 50,000 and NOC AZN 30,000
Bronze: AZN 25,000 and AZN 20,000

Reports have it that these amounts will be increased in Beijing but we don’t know by how much. By the way, for those of you who must know, AZN 100,000 is equal to USD 120,700.06 according to this currency converter.

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Do you think the good folks at the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) will wave their protest banners once again now that China is planning to kill mosquitoes?

OMG! It will be a mosquito genocide. The horror. The horror. Those Chinese. They really have no respect for animal rights. Hurry, PETA folks, save the mosquitoes. Animals have the right to live.

Don’t look now but there’s a mini-controversy going on after the Olympic torch made its run in Malaysia.

No it isn’t about pro-Tibet activists protesting against China although there was some of that. It’s about how former Olympians were ignored by the torch relay organizers.

Isthiaq Mubarak, who represented Malaysia in Mexico, Munich, and Montreal shares his feeling about the matter:

“There were so many torch bearers who were not even part of the Olympics but were included while people like me who has been inducted into the Hall of Fame was not even considered. Where is the Olympism?”

Ahh, we gotta feel for Isthiaq. And he is not alone. Here’s Asian Games bronze medalist Rajemah Sheikh Ahmad and the wife of former Olympian Kamaruddin Maidin:
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Whoo. This is juicy news. But disturbing too. Who would think of drugging Olympic gold medalist Pasha Gishuk with GHB, “a predatory drug that can be mixed with alcohol to reduce resistance from a victim before a sexual assault?” Could it be the butler? The waiter? The candlestick maker? Whoever s/he was, we hope that the police is running after his or her ass.

Associated Press: Former Olympic ice dancer Pasha Grishuk was drugged with GHB, a common date rape drug, during a business meeting at a ritzy Orange County hotel, a sheriff’s spokesman said Tuesday.

Grishuk, who won Olympic gold medals for Russia in ice dancing in 1994 and 1998, was attending a business meeting at the St. Regis Monarch Beach on April 12 when she began to feel ill and numb, sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino said.

While eating dinner, she spotted a partially dissolved pill in the bottom of her drink. Investigators later found another dissolved pill in the bottom of a drink she ordered in the hotel’s lounge.

Amormino says toxicology tests that came back Tuesday were positive for GHB, but it wasn’t immediately clear how the pills got in Grishuk’s drinks or who put them there.

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Remember Luciano Barra? In case you forgot about him already, Luciano is the Italian sports official who predicted that the United States will retain its overall championship crown during the Beijing Olympiad. In fact he crunched out the numbers for the top three nations: United States: 98 medals (47 gold); China: 89 medals (38 gold); and Russia: 88 medals (32 gold).

As we noted here, Barra based his projection on the performance of athletes in international competitions.

Anyhow, while we are in this Olympic crystal ball-gazing mode, here’s the take of a Filipino writer named Manolo Inigo who believes that China looms “as the heavy favorite to rule the 29th Olympic Games in Beijing”.

He thinks that China can win a) because of its crowd support advantage and b) because it consistently made “big strides in past Olympics”.

I’m not sure if those are good enough predictors but let’s see how China’s medal haul improved from the 1988 Seoul Olympics to the 2004 Athen Games:
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