How Much It Takes To Win A Gold Medal

The 2012 London Olympic Games is coming to an end. Some countries like Great Britain and Korea did surprisingly well, breaking records and exceeding expectations. While some countries just falling behind the packing order of the list of sporting powerhouses. But, just how much a country invests to win a gold medal? Here, I would like to share some facts and figures to show that government’s investment and a good system plays a very important role in producing world champions. Statistics shows that you may have the best talent, but without good training the talent can’t be grown as a world champion.

How much it takes to win one of this?

Jamaica dominates the sprint event in recent years despite having a total population of 2.8 million. 58 out of 59 medals won by Jamaica athletics in the Olympics are from athletics event. Most notable athletic from Jamaica is 100m world record holder and double Olympic Gold medalist, Usain Bolt. The heart of the country’s track-and-field programme is the Boys’ and Girls' Inter-Secondary Championships. Coupled with Champs is a raft of track-and-field meets from primary to the tertiary level, organized in every nook and cranny of Jamaica, on an annual basis, under the jurisdiction of the Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association (JAAA). Sport in Jamaica, and track and field in particular, is largely carried on the backs of volunteers. It is these athletic meets which give our young athletes early exposure to what competition is all about. The 2nd important aspect is coaching. The advent of the G.C. Foster College of Physical Education and Sport revolutionized coaching and increased the proliferation of trained coaches in Jamaica. The country established track clubs which includes MVP Track Club and Racers Track Club which has trained top class sprinters including Bolt, Asafa Powell, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Yohan Blake. Apart from that, Jamaica’s top track and field administrators, Teddy McCook lobbied the IAAF to place one of their high-performance centers in Jamaica in 2001. This center acted as an incubator and exposing athletes to the finest coaching Jamaica has to offer. In the fiscal year 2009-10, approximately $400 million was allocated to sport. Of this amount, $20 million was allocated to national sporting organizations, including the JAAA, and the support of athlete welfare, nearly $7 million. There has also been an increase in allocation by a number of private-sector companies towards sponsorship of sporting events. 35 of the leading private-sector sport sponsorship companies in Jamaica, it was discovered that more than $500 million was allocated to sports, of which approximately $125 million went to track and field.

The Jamaica relay team celebrating their victory at the 2011 World Championships at Daegu, Korea. 

Another great example, the South Korea Archery team. The team has never failed to win a gold medal since the 1984 Los Angeles Games. Apart from the 1984 games, the Korean team manages to win 2 or 3 gold medals at every game including the recent London games where the team won 3 out of 4 gold medals awarded. What are the secrets behind their success? Archery is being introduced at the primary school in Korea, where the talented archers will receive up to 2 hours of training per day. When these young archers grow up, the very best are hired as adults by the company teams run by organizations such as car manufacturer Hyundai. 30% of the Korean Archery Association's (KAA) budget comes from the country's Olympic Committee, but the main financial strength of the system is from these 33 company teams who provide a wage and a pension to archers employed solely to compete for them. Most professional Korean archers will continue to receive payment despite not getting anywhere near the national team. The system shows its success as Korea has up to 147 archers eligible to compete in the London 2012 games. During the 2008 Beijing Games, Korea even builds an exact replica of a 5,000 seated Olympic Green Archery Field- the venue used in Beijing, for their archers to train on more than a year in advance of the competition's start.

South Korean archer Im Dong Hyun setting a new world record of 699 out of 72 arrows at the London 2012 Olympic Games.

The Great Britain Cycling team is yet another great example. The country’s recent success includes Chris Hoy, 4-times Olympic Champion and double Olympic Winner in the Keirin event and Bradley Wiggins, the country’s first Tour de France winner and winner of 4 gold medals at 3 Olympic Games. Team GB also wins 7 Gold Medals (out of 9 Gold Medals) in the cycling track event, setting 3 new world records in the process at the London 2012 Games. How did the British become a dominant force in cycling? British cycling went to schools to look out for young people with promising talent because of the limited number of track available in Britain. This enabled an exponential increase in the number of potential world class athletes. It is no co-incidence that the women’s track pursuit team had an average age of 20-22. – All products of British Cycling talent spotting. The talent spotting doesn’t just involve numbers, but also the attitude of the cyclist. The British cycling team adopts some special training methods in their training. For example, they train in blocks of three days. This means that cyclist’s training is concentrated into blocks of three hard days, followed by one day of recovery, then another three days hard training. Tour de France winner Bradley Wiggins spent several weeks at a training camp in Tenerife which gave him the opportunity to repeatedly climb long high climbs, to replicate climbs in the Tour de France. In his pre-tour training, Wiggins aimed at 100,000 metres of climbing to adapt his body to the toughest Tour de France stages where he might climb 4,000 metres during a 5-6 hour stage. The total budget allocated by UK Sport to British Cycling's elite programme is £26.39m (USD$41.3m) spread over the four years from 2009 – 2013. The British government allocated up to £250 million (including cycling) in hope of excelling well in the London 2012 Olympics. It hopes to provide British athletics excellent coaching, top-class facilities and enough funding for competitions and equipment. The plan is a five years plan which includes the building of 4,000 clubs across the UK for football, rugby, cricket, tennis to nurture young talents.

Chris Hoy, Britain's most successful cyclists, winning 6 gold medals in 3 Olympic Games. 

How much it takes to produce an Olympic Champion? It requires a good combination of all aspects which includes good funding, world class training and coaches, top-class facilities and also not to forget, young and excellent talents. So, for those countries who might want to be sporting powerhouses, perhaps some of the example stated above can be taken as a reference. There’s no short-cut to success, efforts and hard work need to be done.

By,
Zhe Xu

8/7/2012