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China’s Olympic gold medals pay-off

Beijing: Talent and hard work may have no substitute in the making of an Olympics champion, but nor are they enough on their own to ensure a gold medal at the Games. Money is an increasingly vital part of any analysis of the final medals tally and this year’s Beijing Olympics were no exception.

China made a sweep of the gold medal tally with 51 medals, but the cost of each of these has been revealed to be at least around 15.7 million yuan ($2.3 million) a year. This back-of-the-envelope calculation was arrived at by Sports Minister Liu Peng on the basis of the fact that the government invests some 800 million yuan ($117 million) annually on Olympics sports. It must be kept in mind, however, that this amount is then supplemented by a roughly equal figure raised through government-run sports lotteries.

China’s gold medallists would also receive a hefty tax-free bonus of 3,50,000 yuan ($51,000) this year, almost double of what gold winners were awarded after the 2004 Athens Games. Champion athletes were paid a mere 6,000 yuan after the 1984 Los Angeles Games, in which China participated after a decades-long gap, but nonetheless won 15 gold medals. Experts say the return on investment is particularly high at the initial stages of developing a nation’s sporting system and tends to taper off once a country’s sport is sufficiently well developed.

India’s total allocated sports budget for 2008-09 stands at Rs. 1,111.81 crore ($280 million).

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