After weeks of celebrating the remarkable strengths and talents of all those beautiful young Olympic athletes, the party's finally over. And what a disappointment it must be for those athletes to go from worldwide adulation to a world of financial uncertainty. After all, coaches and sports equipment don't come cheap and it's hard to hold down a normal job while also training for several hours every day. Sure, the handful of big names will go home from the games with sweet endorsement deals, but everyone else? Their future might not be quite so shiny.
Ryan Lochte may have big plans for getting work on a reality TV show, but we'll see if that's enough to help his parents stave off foreclosure on their Florida home, and Gabby Douglas may end up spending the majority of her endorsement money bailing her mother out of the substantial debt which forced her to declare bankruptcy earlier this year. On Average, five of the top ten American athletes in their event make less than $15,000 a year from the sport. Just two of the top ten earn more than $50,000 annually from their sport. And if you're not in the top ten? Except for a few runners, you probably make next to nothing.
But what about the winners of those Olympic medals? The gold medal comes with a $25,000 prize, the silver comes with $15,000 and the bronze will bring you $10,000. Although these amounts are taxable, if your income was only $15,000 and then you earned another $10,000 from the Olympics, probably taxes aren't your biggest problem. Dinner is. And so is health insurance!
With the kind of lean, muscular bodies most of us only dream of ever having, the Olympic athletes may appear to be the paragons of good health and vitality, but try getting enough health insurance to cover massively expensive sports injuries, especially if you have pre-existing conditions from past injuries. Blue Cross /Blue Shield sponsors the Elite Athlete Health Insurance program (EAHI), but very few can qualify to receive it. There are only 1,000 such policies available, and each sport gets a specified number of them (150 for track & field; 5 for badminton, for example). But these policies are for the small stuff, like office visits, and they don't cover catastrophic injuries. So athletes generally stay on their parents' plan as long as possible (age 26 now with the Affordable Care Act), or get on a spouse's policy, or take out additional coverage individually.
But all that struggling is worth it if you win one of those shiny gold discs, right? Well, actually, it just looks like gold. It's 93% silver and 6% copper. Just 1.34% gold. Sorry. If you melt it down, the raw materials would be worth about $650 at today's prices. The price of the silver and copper in the silver Olympic medal is worth about $335, and the mostly copper Bronze medal is worth about $5, so you might as well keep those for sentimental value. However, some medals have gone for a lot higher prices at auction, like the gold medal won by Mark Wells of the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" U.S. hockey team, which recently sold for $310,700 at auction. The better the story, the higher the price.
Same goes for endorsement deals, really. Clearly, champs like Usain Bolt and Allyson Felix will get big endorsement deals, but what about that inspirational Oscar Pistorius, the double amputee who just raced against the best sprinters in the world on his crazy looking artificial blades? Can't you just picture that face of inspiration on your Wheaties box? Yeah, I'm sure General Mills can too, and you know that tape the athletes seemed to all have on their bodies? It's called Kinesio tape and I just saw a picture of Kerri Walsh on the box of Kenesio tape that was for sale at a high end sports equipment store. Do you think she's on that box just because she likes the tape? Hey, tape won't cure everything so she needs to pay for that health insurance (besides feeding her 2 kids and her 6'3" self).
Kerri will be glad to know that women make more money on endorsements than men do. And to be fair, who's more likely to convince you to buy something, those pretty little gymnasts or big oafy Michael Phelps? Sorry Michael. Also, you have to be in a popular sport to make good money off endorsements. No matter how good you are at handball, no one outside of the ten people who follow handball knows who you are, and McDonald's probably won't decide that paying you to tell people you eat their food is going to sell more Big Macs.
So just remember, to turn your Olympic glory into some real money, you should be a really cute female, preferably the best at a really popular sport, and have a compelling personal story, like having overcome a tragedy or other adversity. If you can arrange for all of that, you have the potential to pull in the kind of deals that will pay off the financial disasters in your family's past and avert those which might lay ahead, especially as a result of not having enough health insurance.
My friend Izzy played a boxer in the Kaiser Permanente ad they were running during the Olympic coverage, and that got me to thinking, what if an athlete could get an endorsement from a health insurance company? Maybe instead of the insurer paying the athlete, they could work out a trade, and just simplify everything. Maybe the insurer could also throw in a policy for the athlete's broke parents, who've been paying for billions of gymnastics lessons and world travel? Forget Wheaties! Maybe if Ryan Lochte did an add for Bank of America, that little foreclosure problem could just go away. I'm just thinking creatively here, and wondering what the tax implications of this kind of trade would be…
Anyway, start negotiating, kids! Now that you're done playing volleyball, it's time to start playing HARDBALL!
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