75% of U.S. Olympians Played in College; Future of Games Hinges on NCAA Athlete Payouts

PARIS (AP) — Three-quarters of the nearly 600 American athletes competing in the Paris Olympics honed their skills playing college sports in the United States.

It’s a shocking number that puts the future of the Olympics themselves in sharp focus as the NCAA and its major universities set priorities for when they will start paying college athletes who spent decades playing only on scholarships.

“I think everybody’s going to have to make a choice,” NCAA President Charlie Baker told The Associated Press in an interview hours before the opening ceremony. He planned to attend field hockey, volleyball, swimming and gymnastics classes while in Paris.

Baker’s mere presence in Paris on the same day that attorneys filed details of a multibillion-dollar settlement that will change the course of the NCAA speaks volumes about the important but rarely discussed link between colleges’ biggest moneymakers—football and basketball—and the sports they sponsor, many of which are played over the course of 17 days at the Summer Olympics.

According to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, 21 of the U.S. teams competing in Paris have at least 80 percent college players. The women’s 5-on-5 and 3-on-3 basketball teams are two of 15 teams that are made up entirely of NCAA talent. Some of the most famous U.S. Olympians — Sha’Carri Richardson, Steph Curry and Suni Lee, to name a few — competed in college.

The mustache extends beyond Team USA. More than 800 NCAA athletes will compete in other countries in Paris. In total, more than 1 in 10 of the 10,500 athletes at these Games played college sports in the U.S.

If the United States comes close to matching its performance at the last Summer Olympics, more than 80% of the medals won will go to athletes with collegiate experience.

None of this comes cheaply. It’s estimated that NCAA schools spend more than $5 billion a year on so-called non-revenue, or Olympic, sports.

Most of their bills are paid by what football and basketball produce. But it’s likely that by 2025, the long-awaited cash flow from schools in the NCAA’s five largest conferences to players will begin in earnest as part of a revenue-sharing agreement that emerged from three antitrust lawsuits against the NCAA.

Under the proposed agreement, schools could eventually split nearly 50-50 revenue from television, ticketing and sponsorships with players. New television deals, namely a $7.8 billion deal with ESPN to broadcast the college football playoffs, would certainly add money to the equation.

However, the still unresolved mystery of what will remain after the revenue-sharing issue is resolved will determine how many Olympic and non-revenue-producing sports may be affected by the elimination.

“This is incredibly important to us,” said Sarah Hirshland, executive director of the USOPC, which has had working groups for years trying to define the contours of what will emerge from the new arrangements. “We will be watching closely the programs that are going to be cut and even the ones that are being talked about being cut.”

Four years ago, as the COVID-19 pandemic upended the financial landscape of college sports, Stanford surprised the Olympic world by announcing it would close nine Olympic sports programs in an athletic department that itself would have finished 11th in the medal count at the 2016 Games.

A revolt ensued, and the school eventually scrapped the plans. The very thought of it was a chilling wake-up call—and a reminder of how integral college programs are to the Olympic ecosphere, especially in America, where government money doesn’t fund training.

The changes resulting from the lawsuits do not include a separate legal proceeding to recognize athletes as actual university employees, which could cost billions and create even more turmoil in the Olympic space.

Additionally, Baker himself has floated the idea of ​​having schools in major conferences contribute $30,000 to an “educational trust fund” for each eligible athlete, as another way to get more money to players.

In light of the proposals floated earlier this year, Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne said he expected player salaries to be in the eight-figure range, “and those are resources and revenues that don’t exist.”

“The impact it could have on Olympic sports, the number of sports on offer and the level of those sports – I’ve heard colleagues say, ‘Well, we’ll just reduce what we offer,’” he said.

Hirshland and the USOPC office staff hope that won’t happen.

“We will do everything in our power to help save this system because it works brilliantly for us and, frankly, the whole world envies it,” she said.

Baker sounded optimistic in his interview with the AP when he said there are a lot of schools “that build a lot of branding” around Olympic sports because they mean a lot to alumni and the academic community. He also said that some schools that weren’t players in the Olympic sports system might “decide this is where they have a chance at a future.”

But he offers no guarantees and says there is no way to avoid the larger issue of paying football and basketball players whose efforts help keep the other sports going.

“There are going to be a lot of open questions in this case,” Baker said.

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AP Summer Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games