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What Different Countries Pay Athletes for Olympic Gold Medals

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The value of a medal from the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics depends a lot on what country you represent. While all the medals have the same value when it comes to the precious metals that are in the medals (Gold: $566, Silver: $325, Bronze: $3), the cash rewards that different countries give their athletes who win varies by tens of thousands of dollars.

The Top 5 Bonuses By Country

The country that offers the biggest reward for an Olympic gold medal is Singapore. Any Singaporean who is able to win gold will be $800,000 richer. This, however, won’t happen in Sochi because there are no Singaporeans competing in the 2014 winter Olympic games. Malaysia offers a gold bar worth $600,000 for a gold medal, but like Singapore, doesn’t have any athletes competing in the Sochi winter games.

The country offering the biggest bonus for an Olympic medal in Sochi is Azerbaijan which will pay any athlete who wins a gold medal more than half a million dollars ($510,000). A silver medal is worth just over a quarter million dollars ($255,000) while a bronze medal would receive a $130,000 bonus. While these numbers are huge, the chances are that Azerbaijan won’t have to pay any of the bonus cash out. No athlete won an Olympic gold in the previous Vancouver winter games. This year, the country has only four athletes competing in the games, and none of them are expected to win a medal.

The next highest payout comes from Kazakhstan which actually did have a medal winner in the Vancouver games. Their athletes will receive a quarter of a million dollars for a gold medal, $150,000 for a silver medal and $75,000 for a bronze medal. In fact, athletes from Kazakhstan who don’t even medal have a chance to win a cash reward. Any athlete who finishes fourth, fifth or sixth will also get a $75,000 cash bonus.

There are plenty of other countries that offer six figures to there athletes for being on top of the podium. Latvia offers $192,000 for a gold medal with Italy right behind offering $191,000.

There are two countries that tie for fifth when it comes to payouts to their athletes for winning Sochi Olympic medals. Belarus and Ukraine both will shell out $150,000 for a gold, $75,000 for a silver and $50,000 for a bronze during the games. Ukraine failed to win any medals in the last Olympic games, but the athletes from Belarus came away with three.

The country which pays the seventh highest amount is Australia which gives $126,000 to Aussie athletes winning gold. It’s followed by the host country with Russian athletes gaining $113,000 for a gold medal, $71,000 for a silver medal and $42,000 for a bronze medal. Russia won fifteen different medals in Vancouver, including three golds. Russia is expected to win even more as the host country this year.

The Bottom Of The List

By comparison, the US bonuses seem downright stingy. A gold medal for a US athlete will mean a $25,000 bonus, while a silver will bring in $15,000 and a bronze will net $10,000. Unlike many other countries, the US taxes these bonuses which can mean that as much as 39.6% will end up going back to the IRS.

All the above athletes fair better than those from Croatia, Great Britain, Norway and Sweden which don’t give out any type of bonus to any athletes who win medals in the Sochi games.

Of course, the cash bonuses can be only a small fraction of the actual worth of an Olympic medal won, especially a gold medal. Gold (as well as silver and bronze) can often mean lucrative endorsement and advertising deals that can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more. Much of this depends on the country and in what event the medal comes, but it’s often these deals that bring the most money from winning an Olympic medal.

But more than what they make is what we can learn from these athletes, with everything they do, all the work they do. What an amazing feet it is for them to win the gold.

Sochi Olympic Gold Medals Aren’t Gold

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Sochi Olympics gold silver and bronze medals

When gold medals are handed out at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, in February, athletes will receive silver medals plated with gold. The last time the Olympic Games awarded solid gold medals was more than a century ago at the 1912 Summer Games in Stockholm, Sweden. This year’s silver medals, produced by Russian jeweler Adamas, are sterling silver while the bronze is made of an alloy of copper and zinc.

Olympic gold medals were all gold for only eight years, starting in 1904 when they were introduced at the games held in St. Louis.

That’s because gold became costly over the decades, especially in recent years. “Gold rallied more than fourfold from 2004 to 2011, when it reached $1,895 an ounce,” says Terry Hanlon, president of international precious metals dealer Dillon Gage Metals in Dallas. And though the price has recently declined, the yellow metal remains too pricey to make Olympic gold medals solid. New York gold closed on February 4, 2014 at $1,252.10 an ounce.

Likewise, silver prices surged in 2011 and then retreated. “But at $19.42 an ounce, silver is certainly more affordable for use in medals than gold,” Hanlon adds.

This year’s Olympic gold medals weigh one pound each while the silver and bronze awards are slightly heavier. The gold medal contains 525 grams of silver and 6 grams of gold. The 2014 silver medal is made of 525 grams of silver. Each award is 0.4 inches thick and 4 inches in diameter. They’re the largest and heaviest Olympic medals ever produced. Jewelers used nearly seven pounds of gold to plate the mostly-silver gold medals.

Adamas, one of Russia’s top jewelry companies, is the official supplier of medals for the 2014 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

The front of the 2014 medals depicts the Olympic rings while the reverse side has the Sochi 2014 emblem and the competition’s name in English. On the medals’ edges, the official name of the games is inscribed in Russian, English and French.

The 2014 Olympic and Paralympic medals feature a Patchwork Quilt — a mosaic of national designs from the cultures and ethnicities of the Russian Federation. A combination of metal and glass imbue the design with light. The medals show the Sochi landscape, with the sun’s rays reflecting through snowy mountain tops onto sandy beaches on the Black Sea coast. It took workers about 18 man hours to produce each medal.

Olympic gold winners will be given a medal on Feb. 15 that includes a piece of the meteorite that struck the Russian city of Chelyabinsk a year earlier, injuring 1,600 people.

A record 1,300 medals were made for the 2014 Olympics, thanks to 12 new events this year — women’s ski jumping, a figure skating team event, a luge relay, a biathlon mixed relay, a snowboard and ski slope-style event, a ski half-pipe and a snowboard parallel special slalom.

Sochi was selected as the host city in July 2007. The 2014 games are the Russian Federation’s first Olympics since the breakup of the USSR in 1991, and they’re slated to be the most expensive ever. In total, 98 events in 15 winter sport disciplines will be held. More than 30 years ago, the USSR was the host for the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.

Hanlon is looking forward to watching American athletes ski, play hockey and figure skate. “The competition will be fierce, and we’ll be cheering our athletes on to bring home the gold!” he says.

Although Olympic gold medals are mostly silver, some other medals — including the Congressional Gold Medal and the Nobel Prize medals — are all gold. Before 1980, Nobel Prize medals were 23-karat gold but newer Nobel medals are 18-karat green gold, plated with 24-karat gold.