Now set for September in Russia. At the Olympics: win a medal. Friendship Games: win, get paid. The number one complaint athletes have about the Olympic movement is that they can’t make money.
Meet the International Olympic Committee-disapproved Friendship Games taking place in Russia this September: 36 sports, 21 venues, 17 in Moscow, four in Ekaterinburg (including athletics from 18-22 September).
Total prize money, across all sports: $100 million. Winners get $40,000. Second place, $25,000. Third, $17,000. No ‘Olympic Village.’ Instead, you’ll be welcome in three or four-star hotels.
Push, meet shove – brought to the world in a significant measure by Umar Kremlev, arguably one of the most provocative and interesting figures in world sport in 2024.
These details and more about the 2024 World Friendship Games and the creation of the ‘International Friendship Association’ have been widely circulating in recent days – confirming what some see as a ploy by an isolated Russia or, more likely, an existential threat to the IOC, now in its third century, and what the IOC stands for.
READ ALSO: Saudi football to soft pedal on transfer spending.
Since 1896, the Olympic world has operated on the notion of an aspirational ideal – the promotion of world peace by bringing the athletes of the world together in the hope that one-to-one exchange can reveal that we are all, in the end, more alike than different.
That’s not what the IFA – to be based in Abu Dhabi – is about.
“The World Friendship Games is an international commercial multi-sport tournament held under the auspices of the International Friendship Association,” the details proclaim.
“The purpose of the Games is to create an effective platform for high-performance sports, to ensure the non-discriminatory access to international sports activities for athletes from all countries and sports organisations, and to develop new formats for international sports cooperation,” it continues.
“The World Friendship Games honours the human right to participate in sport without political interference. The only criterion for participation in the Games is the sporting merit of the athletes, who will be invited individually on the basis of the recommendations of national sports federations and international athletic ratings,” it concluded.
Quarrel, if you will, with all of this, especially the part about “without political interference.”
The workaround is “individually invited .” And the part about getting paid – that’s very real. If you’re on a team, you get paid – that’s real too.
