FIFA will splurge $1.3b on World Cup prizemoney. It’s time Olympic athletes were paid fairly, too

In humble Australian dollar terms, there is $1.3 billion in prizemoney riding on this month’s FIFA World Cup. Should a team get past US Immigration and ICE unscathed then promptly lose all three group games, their national federation will still trouser a guaranteed $13 million.

Touring New Zealand last week, the new(ish) president of the IOC, Kirsty Coventry, declared flatly that she didn’t believe in paying athletes competing at the Games. Pressed, she noted that athletes get to stay in beautiful villages, compete at beautiful venues and, overall, enjoy a beautiful experience – and all of that manifest beauty comes from money the IOC raises.

To grasp how we arrived at such a contrast, you need to understand that Olympic amateurism was never the noble abstraction it was presented as. It was a class weapon. When Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived the Games in 1896, he imported the ethos of the Victorian gentleman amateur – a code engineered, quite deliberately, to exclude the working man.

A “gentleman” could compete for nothing because the gentry had access to a private income; the miner and the bricklayer didn’t. The most infamous manifestation of the rule came in 1912, when Jim Thorpe – perhaps the finest all-round athlete the Games has produced – was stripped of his gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon for once being paid ashtray change to play minor league baseball.

It took the IOC seven decades to hand them back, by which time Thorpe had been dead 30 years.

Around 1981 the word “amateur” was quietly deleted from the Olympic Charter. The gates then swung open to professionals – such as tennis players and, in 1992, the United States “Dream Team” of NBA millionaires. Those ideals for which Thorpe was crucified were abandoned once it became commercially inconvenient.

And the result is perverse. The IOC dismantled amateurism for the athletes who least needed protection, and effectively preserved poverty for the ones who embody the Games. The NBA basketballer sets up camp in the village already a multimillionaire; the race-walker, the judoka, the modern pentathlete arrives having remortgaged a future they may never recover.

The Charter’s “fundamental principles” speak solemnly of the dignity of the athlete and charge the IOC with supporting them. The IOC answers by gesturing at redistribution – some 90 per cent of its income, it says, returned to the Movement, more than $2.8 billion annually.

That’s a genuinely large number, but money that reaches a national Olympic committee’s administration, officials and venues isn’t money in the hand of t