Go for gold, Aussie! But what is a gold medal worth – in earnings – to an Olympic athlete? Then short answer is: it depends.
One thing the sports and advertising industries could agree on this week, however, was swimmer Kyle Chalmers, who unexpectedly and wonderfully won the men's 100-metre freestyle, a glamour event, on Thursday.
"He will reinvigorate the interest from advertisers and sponsors in Olympic athletes," says Kirsty Muddle, an executive at advertising firm Cummins and Partners. "There's not an Australian who would not know his name right now."
Muddle has worked with soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo on a Castrol campaign and also works with the AFL and Tennis Australia. She says that because of Olympic athletes' relative invisibility they are generally not paid as much by corporate sponsors as AFL footballers.
"With footballers you see them every weekend in the season and as a player they have something current to say on the field every weekend. People are talking about them, they have a very active audience. Olympic athletes are less active. They have less reachability and less interaction with the community."
This is especially interesting for Kyle Chalmers, who came to swimming from football and was considered good enough to play at the highest level. His father said on Friday that he still might. Brett Chalmers played for the Adelaide Crows and Port Adelaide.
According to Professor Hans Westerbeek of Victoria University's College of Sport and Exercise Science, Chalmers will get rich quick from sponsors wanting to use him to sell products.
"He will be up for serious money because of the event he won and the manner in which he won it. He is young, he is seen as a long-term champion. People will want to invest in him."
If they do, they will need to wait. International Olympic Committee rules mean businesses can not talk to athletes during the Olympics unless they are an official Olympics sponsor. The rest have to wait until the Games are finished.
But Professor Westerbeek thinks corporates are in general more wary of the Olympics now because of all the noise around governance, corruption and doping. And he says gold medals have different values. "Winning a gold in the 10m air rifle has a different value to the 100m freestyle in the pool. A team medal is less valuable than an individual medal. A one-off medal is less value than a repeat medal."
He says in some sports the gold means next to nothing because professional athletes in sports such as golf, tennis and soccer can get more prestige and more money in non-Olympic events.
Kirsty Muddle says in her experience this is not always true. To her, as someone who chooses faces to sell products, a gold is a gold. Victorian trap shooter Catherine Skinner, she says, who won gold in Rio this week with her shotgun, is as great an Australian story as Chalmers.
"They are both worth a place in our national history, but some get more attention than others."
