Watching an Olympic swimmer touch the wall, set a world record then stealthily return to a life where paying the rent is still a real concern is a unique form of irony. It doesn’t fit the current drama. That’s closer to reality than most people would realize for the majority of elite swimmers.
When you sit with the numbers, they are subtly startling. The average NFL professional football player makes about $3.26 million annually. The median salary for NBA players is closer to $8 million. In the meantime, Australia’s top swimmers earn about $30,000 a year, which is respectable by swimming standards, according to four-time Olympic gold medallist Emily Seebohm.
A swimmer who wins an Olympic gold medal in the United States receives a bonus of about $20,000. In one year, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo earned a combined $209 million. These categories are not comparable. They hardly belong in the same discussion.
The fact that swimming is not a specialized sport adds to this discomfort. It is always the most watched Olympic event in the world. Approximately one-third of American sports fans follow competitive swimming; comparable figures are found in Germany and the UK.
Every four years, millions watch to take in the suspense of relay races and the spectacle of a lone swimmer breaking a record by a hundredth of a second. None of that viewership results in a productive professional ecosystem. There are no fantasy leagues, ticket sales, or merchandise aisles that provide revenue to the athletes.
The structural explanation is fairly simple: swimming has a devoted fan base that supports it year-round, but it lacks a true professional league. Baseball, basketball football are all driven by sustained commercial interest. Every Olympiad, swimming receives a lot of attention before going mostly unnoticed by the general public.
By offering $13 million in prize money for 2022, the International Swimming League attempted to alter that. Due to financial issues, the season was canceled. For the 2020 season, many athletes were also unpaid.
It’s possible that swimming hasn’t yet discovered a format that would make it interesting on a typical Tuesday night in October. That discovery is still a long way off.
Currently, the majority of professional swimmers combine multiple sources of income. Athletes in the world’s top sixteen are offered approximately $40,000 a year by USA Swimming’s partnership agreements, which is an extremely exclusive sum.
Some supplement with coaching clinics, where the highest-paying sessions range from $1,000 to $3,000. Some have found that social media pays better than anything the pool has to offer; one Olympic artistic swimmer reported that her income from content creation was five times higher than her earnings from athletics.
As usual, the exceptions are not representative but instructive. Over his career, Michael Phelps amassed a net worth of about $100 million, of which only about $1.9 million came from swimming. The remainder was based on endorsement deals during his post-Beijing commercial peak, when he was arguably the most well-known athlete in the world.
With a total value of $7 million, Katie Ledecky’s six-year contract with TYR swimwear is regarded as the most lucrative in the history of the sport. Caeleb Dressel used his five gold medals from Tokyo to form alliances with Toyota and Omega. There are probably two dozen of these exceptional cases in the world of swimming.
It seems that, unlike football, the sport has quietly come to terms with its own financial ceiling. It hardly makes the news anymore when a Premier League team spends $100 million on a single acquisition. Peers would consider an Olympic swimmer who makes $100,000 a year to be financially secure.
Perhaps the most startling statistic is that, despite having a median income of less than $20,000, the majority of Olympic hopefuls spend between $25,000 and $40,000 annually on travel gear and coaching. In a very literal accounting sense, they are paying for the right to compete. It’s difficult to ignore the contrast between that reality and the festivities that greet them as they stand on the podium the flags, the anthem, the moment that appears to be arrival from the outside.