All Olympic athletes all have lucrative sponsorship deals, right? Wrong. Many have to take side jobs just to get by.
When Serena Williams takes to the court at the Rio Olympics this month, the US tennis star won’t really be alone. She will have arrived at the Games with an entourage of paid staffers, coaches and sponsors who’ve helped her every step of the way.
Worth an estimated US$150 million (S$201.57 million) in 2016 (more than any other female athlete, according to Forbes), Williams trains upwards of 30 hours per week, but has never had to work a second job to get by and pay her way in sport. She’s one of a small minority of Olympians.
More likely, walking through the athlete’s village in Rio, you’d find people like Canadian Donna Vakalis.
To compete in the modern pentathlon, she trains a minimum of 30 hours per week in fencing, shooting, swimming, horse riding and cross-country running.
AFP, Reuters, The Straits Times
6.jpg)
And when she’s not training, the 36-year-old is pursuing a PhD in civil engineering at the University of Toronto and juggling a handful of jobs just to support her Olympic dreams.
Vakalis estimates that it costs about CAD$50,000 ($39,000) a year to train and compete in the modern pentathlon.
Yet, because the sport barely registers with Canadian audiences (and has the International Olympic Committee’s lowest revenue ranking), there is a major funding gap between what she receives in government support – CAD$4,500 (US$3,450) last year – and what she needs to get by.
Vakalis says that the national team foots most of the bills for coaches and access to training facilities for many Olympic sports. Not so for pentathlon.
“We pay the coaches ourselves, we pay for the athletic centre access ourselves, we pay for the physio and the massage ourselves, and that means that there is a higher financial burden,” she says.
Read the full article here
