Gymnastics Gets Boost in Olympic Revenue

May 30, 2013 by Anne Phillips

Photo: LOCOG

Everyone loves Olympic dreams, glory, and pure competition. But deep down, the Olympics is all about MONEY. And lucky for us, gymnastics is about to get more of it.

The IOC announced Wednesday that gymnastics and swimming will be given a boost in a new revenue-sharing ranking of Olympic sports.

Yahoo sports notes that prior to this, track and field "ranked alone in the highest of four groups and received the biggest share of the hundreds of millions of dollars generated from television rights and other deals from each Summer Games."

With the new ranking system, each Olympic sport was ranked in groups based on their revenue impact at the Olympic Games. Now, the international federations for both gymnastics (FIG) and swimming will join track and field in the very top of five groups.

The FIG points out that gymnastics owes its new ranking to "impressive popularity and audience ratings at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and London 2012, notably."

Next, it will be up to the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations to determine how to divide up the money for the 2016 Rio Games. And it will be big. The revenue from the London Games totaled $520 million.