Team USA won more medals at the Paris Olympics than any other nation. And it did so with a totally different funding model.
While countries like China and France back their Olympic dreams with billions in government support, Team USA is almost entirely privately funded. In a recent explainer video, Sportico broke down the “high-performance grants” that Team USA distributes to its teams with one major goal in mind: maximizing its medal haul at the Olympics.
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Team USA executives have described the high-performance grants as an investment portfolio of sorts, where the ROI is measured in gold, silver and bronze. There is significant correlation between the number of medals Team USA wins in a sport, and the amount of funding that sport’s national governing body (NGB) receives. No sports win more Summer Olympic medals than track & field, swimming and gymnastics, and no NGBs receive more money than USA Track & Field, USA Swimming and USA Gymnastics.
Look more closely at the data and you see the granular changes. Consider, for example, sport climbing. The U.S. won one of the six medals awarded in sport climbing’s Olympic debut in Tokyo three years ago, but the team had a number of highly ranked athletes in the last few years and the Paris host committee doubled the number of medals up for grabs in 2024. As a result, USA Climbing’s support from Team USA more than doubled from 2020-21 to 2022-23.
Watch until the end of the video to see how well Team USA’s funding aligned with its medal success in Paris.
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