The IOC retains all the mind-share of the 'Olympic Spirit,' for lack of better terms. A curling competition on NBC will draw 0 viewers (and 0 money) ((estimating)). A curling event in the Olympics draws viewers because and only because it is 'The Olympics.' Take 'The Olympics' out of every esoteric event and you'll quickly see how little viewership it'll get.

If I make over $100k for sitting on my ass all day writing software, then certainly these people deserve far more than they're getting. They shouldn't need to depend on additional endorsements/advertising money. Just by making it to the Olympics, they should get a decent amount, and those bastards at the top can afford to get a little less...shaving a few $100k here and there and distribute it.

...

Gillian: "Don't tell me they don't use money in the 23rd century."

Kirk: "Well, we don't."

* Removal of energy scarcity - dilitium is mined off planets, by robots and provides cheap limitless energy

* Replicators - Controlling the atom to the point where we can make exact duplicates. If everyone can replicate a Rembrandt, the original no longer has its insane value. There's no wait to authenticate if something is "real" or "original" Some people prefer "real" food, even realizing the difference is pretty much all in their heads. All basic things can be copied and only the very complex can't be duplicated (like Lt Commander Data's brain).

So in such a universe, an athlete gets everything a regular earth citizen gets, and visa-versa. It doesn't matter if you're in Star Fleet or choose to bus tables in a restaurant, you get the same type of living accommodation, and you can live or work anywhere thanks to transporters and limitless energy. People choose the jobs they want. Star Fleet isn't a military operation and you can resign at any time. In this world, a lot of useless jobs would go away .. Olympic committee trademark enforces for example.

The whole thing breaks down terrible in some episodes. In DS9, Sisko's dad owns a restaurant with a bus boy. Someone chooses to be that bus boy .. for no money. Maybe if the writers used a robot bus boy?

But if consistency is your thing, you could retcon the whole thing by making the busboy an in-restaurant hologram. It would be like the emergency hologram doctor, except the hologram busboy would just be an artistic feature. In the Star Trek economy, you are paid in public appreciation for your talents. The richest person in the Federation is the one who has the most fans and followers.

So without scarcity, a lot of people would give away their holographic models and software, for the prestige of "holographic restaurant busboy reaches one million downloads!" It wouldn't really be any more complicated than visiting Nexusmods to get a modded Fallout or Skyrim NPC companion with full dialogue and bonus companion quest.

If the busboy is a character that also interacts outside the restaurant, that was just the guy who scanned his own likeness and programmed a facsimile of his own personality to make the busboy hologram. His real job isn't bussing tables, it's making it look like restaurant tables are being bussed instead of serviced remotely by transporter/replicator/hologram technology.

Does that make you feel better about the guy who does menial labor in a scarcity-free economy?

Also, at one point, there's mention of "teleporter credits" as an explanation of why going off to academy caused homesickness -- couldn't teleport on demand. Even in the Culture, citizens had to show their capability quite a bit to design a part of an orbital. They couldn't even get their own ships on demand.

Trademark enforcement would probably be one of the things kept in a post scarcity society, if there was any system of reputation left! Being an X(TM) athlete comes with prestige so you wouldn't want someone else to be able to endow that prestige at will.

The Starfleet holodecks are just scarce because the operating code and hardware has to be formally validated and certified as safe for use in Starfleet vessels and installations. It's like how a GPS device is really cheap, until you want one permanently installed in an aircraft cockpit. Even then, malicious code (Moriarty, if I recall correctly) could break out of the holodeck sandbox and compromise connected systems.

Now let's say that they give 50% of that to athletes. That's 2 billion US dollars @ 500 million US dollars per year. Split between the 10,200 people, that you quoted above, gives about $200k per 4 years, or about $50k per year.

So no, cutting the salary of a handful of executives is not going to help, but that's not really the whole story.

[1]the ones you are sure will make the team barring serious injury are probably the ones most likely to have a decent sponsorship deal and not need the money so badly [2]Not sure whether the Winter Olympians factor into the article's revenue numbers or what their competitor numbers are like, but they're surely even more expensive sports to properly train for...

I'm not sure the IOC should be responsible for any potential competitors vs actual competitors. Even if it's only limited to those actually competing in the games, and only given out after competing, then that's a lump sum of $200k which they weren't getting before.

As for the stipends given out by USOC for Team USA, those are specifically for the US, and there appears to be no information on how much of that stipend originates from the IOC as compared to sponsorships obtained by from the USOC directly. Even then, most countries do not pay stipends that come even close to $20k US dollars. In many places, if the athletes got a full $200k for participating in the games, it would set them up for a very long time (if not for life).

As for the cost of sports coaches, training locales, etc, there's a whole 50% of revenue left over specifically to help pay for those costs (on top of local OC's). As noted in the article, professional US-based organizations, such as the NFL, generally share 50% of the revenue with athletes. Those organizations also have many of the same types of costs, but still are able to maintain an approximate 50/50 ratio.

More to the point, "have you even looked at the economics?". Yes. The conclusion that I have is that there is huge gulf between, (and using the USOC specifically here), USOC's claimed 90% spending and the article's "6 percent in cash payments" to athletes. So it's not clear cut that direct benefits to athlete's couldn't be raised, and substantially.

Funnily enough, a good friend of my brother's did spend 6-8 years of his life dedicating himself to getting ready for his first Olympics, going into debt in order to do so. Upon gaining a bronze medal he used the sponsorship windfall to cancel his debts and buy a house. I suspect if I suggested to him that the British Olympic team should have cut back on facilities or charged him for training and pushed him deeper into debt in order to ensure there was a moderate-sized lump sum waiting for him in the year he finally started being able to get money from commercial sources, I'd get a very weird look.

By law, they are not required to answer that question, so we have no way of knowing. Other than not directly to the athletes.