Scottie Scheffler has added – very slightly – to his 2024 Olympics earnings.
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After Sunday's thrilling tournament at the men's Olympic golf tournament, several players talked about how important the finish was despite “no money” being on the line.
“I still think the Ryder Cup is the best tournament we have in our game, the purest tournament, and I think this has the potential to be right up there,” Rory McIlroy said after completing his final round. “I think the way it shows how the game of golf is now and you think about two tournaments that could be the purest form of competition in our sport, we don't play for money in it.”
Jon Rahm echoed those sentiments.
“The two weeks that are important in my work are the two events where we don't make money,” he said. “And I've said that a million times, and I'll say it again because it's the Ryder Cup [the Olympics] there are.”
Their quotes circulated on social media, suggesting they tapped into widely shared sentiments; for several years it felt like money drove all the big decisions in professional golf, so there was something refreshing, pure, basic about the cashless Games where the best players in the world were fighting for the sole prize of an Olympic medal. .
But there is still quite a bit of money involved. How much?
How much did the awardees make?
McIlroy and Rahm were mostly good. Mostly. They finished T5 for the week and, as I understand it, no one was paid for their results. Compare that to Rahm's T7 finish at the Open Championship, which earned him $452,000, or McIlroy's runner-up finish at the US Open, which earned him $2.3 million. Going against this level of golfer usually pays off big time.
But Scottie Scheffler cashed in on the win. He was paid by the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee for his gold medal. There is a way to pay for the uniforms of athletes representing Team USA: $37,500 for gold medals, $22,500 for silver and $15,000 for bronze. Considering that Scheffler had already made more than $28 million in tuition by 2024, the fifth payday might not even register. But in 2023, the median annual salary for all US workers was $48,060; throw in the free Team USA gear the Schefflers got and you're pretty much there.
(Let's spend just a minute on Scheffler's 2024 earnings: he made $28,148,691 this year playing on the PGA Tour. And we haven't even gotten to the FedEx Cup's big money Playoffs. He's been playing great golf.)
Tommy Fleetwood shot a final round of 5-under 66; only a 17th-hole bogey kept him from the gold medal against Scheffler. But he didn't make a dime of his silver medal and he wouldn't have the gold either. Team Great Britain does not pay medal winners, preferring to spend on grants and training fees instead. (British Athletics, track-and-field's sponsoring scheme, reportedly pays for the medals out of government.) He didn't worry.
Hideki Matsuyama won bronze for Japan, an award he had been chasing since his arrival at his home Games in Tokyo. That ambition was not motivated by money, but Matsuyama reportedly earns $6,000 per bronze medal from the Japanese Olympic committee.
What did the award winners do last week?
Because the pay structure varies greatly from country to country, it is not uncommon for the lowest finisher to beat the top finisher on the results page. Actually, the last time CT Pan of Taiwan (the country that competes with “Chinese Taipei” in the Olympics) won the bronze in a 7-for-1 playoff. The National Olympic Committee has a goal of eliminating athletes by category and the bronze medal placed Pan in “First Class, Level 3,” so he won five million New Taiwan Dollars (NT), which changed to just $179,000. That was almost 5 times the award of gold medalist Xander Schauffele.
Will Olympic athletes get paid more in the future?
There is an ongoing movement to pay Olympic athletes more. This should not be surprising; there is a lot of money in these sports, after all the athletes see it as very little. Given the move toward player pay in college sports it's easy to imagine more established pay in the Olympics, too.
In the world of track and field, it has already begun. World Athletics, the international athletics federation, has promised to pay Olympic gold medalists $50,000 for their Paris win, while they will start paying silver and bronze medalists at the 2028 Games.
Golfers are among the least expensive Olympic competitors, but that doesn't mean they're unaware of the market forces at play. Just before McIlroy and Rahm's comments, Norway's Viktor Hovland was asked about golf's place in the Olympics.
“Well, I can say that the leaderboard is very good, if you look at the top, if you look at the names. But it's not up to me whether it should be in the Olympics or not,” he said. “I know the IOC makes a lot of money based on having golf there; so I'm sure they're happy about it. I don't know. That is for the people to decide.”
That wasn't a call for player pay, of course. Hovland won the FedEx Cup last year and made it clear that when it comes to extra millions, he doesn't really need them. But it was a reminder that when someone makes money, everyone around them will know.
What else do award winners get?
There's a cool release that comes with winning gold, too. One of the reasons some low-level pros salivate at the idea is that the Olympic winner gets entry into every major tournament in 2025 and the Players and, if the winner is a member of the PGA Tour, the Sentry.
Other awardees are often based on world-class scores; Fleetwood jumped from No. 14 to No. 11 and silver.
There are also a number of medals themselves. Gold medals are (bear with me) mostly made of silver, silver medals are made entirely of silver and bronze medals are made of copper, tin and zinc. One economist at Oxford Economics estimated a price of $1,027 for gold, $535 for silver and (sorry, Hideki) just $4.60 for copper.
Ask any golf agent and they'll tell you that any trophy has a certain value as they market players and negotiate new year contracts — and gold costs a lot more. A few years ago Xander Schauffele and Nelly Korda were presented as Olympic champions. In the next four years Scottie Scheffler will have that honor. It's a $37,500 honor. It's more important than that.
Mostly, though, it's precious.
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