Spain achieves equality: Olympic and Paralympic athletes to receive equal prizes
Yeray Vergara
July 4, 2024

The General Assembly of the Spanish Paralympic Committee has approved in its ordinary meeting on June 24 to equalize the medal awards that Spanish Paralympic athletes will receive for reaching the podium at the Paris Games with the amounts that their Olympic colleagues will receive.

The budget allocation for the extraordinary training and technification scholarships for winning medals at the Paralympic Games will be financed jointly by the Consejo Superior de Deportes and the Spanish Paralympic Committee. The joint work of both entities has made it possible that, for the first time in history, Spanish Olympic and Paralympic medalists will receive identical awards for the metals they win at the Paris 2024 Games.

It should be noted that other countries already do this, as in the case of the USA, where the Olympic and Paralympic Committees have committed to this and have already equalized the cash prizes of all athletes for Tokyo.

THE PRIZES

Thus, the amount of the extraordinary scholarship for training and technification for winning a gold medal in an individual event is set at 94,000 euros, silver at 48,000 euros and bronze at 30,000 euros. In the case of pairs or doubles (in tennis, table tennis, badminton and boccia; fencing and archery teams, and double rowing boats) the amounts will be 75,000 euros for first place, 37,000 for second place and 25,000 for third place, for each of the two participants.

And in events involving three or more athletes (basketball, soccer-5 for the blind, goalball, rugby, sitting volleyball, athletics and swimming relays, team events in cycling, boccia and equestrian, and rowing boat with coxswain), grants of 50,000 euros per person are established in the case of champions, 29,000 if they are runners-up and 18,000 for third place.

Bronze in Tokyo for Ricardo Ten, Pablo Jaramillo and Alfonso Cabello (Paulino Oribe / CPE)

The grants are cumulative, which means that for each medal the full amount will be received. In addition, support athletes (athletics and triathlon guides, tandem pilots, etc.) will receive the same amount as the disabled athlete they are accompanying. This program also provides for smaller financial grants for the coaching staff that plays such an important role in the preparation of the medalist.

36 PARALYMPIC MEDALS

This equalization between athletes with and without disabilities, long requested by the Paralympic movement, comes after several cycles of progressive increase. In Tokyo 2020, where 36 Paralympic medals were won for 17 Olympic medals, athletes with disabilities received 70,000 euros for gold, 35,000 for silver and 21,000 for bronze, while in Rio 2016 the amounts were 30,000, 15,000 and 9,000 euros, respectively. And going back a little further, the prizes at the London 2012 Games were 10,000 euros for the gold medal; 5,000 for the silver and 3,000 for the bronze, very similar in turn to those of Beijing 2008.

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