Why the greatest athletes don't get paid like it

You will only make money if there's a mass of people willing to spend money to see you, and they need to be able to do that regularly. Brands will only sponsor you if you show up on the news wearing their brand often. I don't think there's a lot of triathlon events around and people willing to pay good money to watch them. And those events usually have minor media coverage.

I think that the only solution here is to focus on those sports which people actually want to watch. Unless your priority is not to give people something to enjoy but to get medals and international reputation, in which case yeah, the Government should cover the bill, not sure if that's what this article is trying to get at?

I still don't quite get what the exact limits on who can compete are.

I was reading the Olympic rulebook, and there are a bunch of very strict rules on who can't compete, based on the general principle that the competitors be amateurs.

But just preceding those rules there is a paragraph saying (paraphrased) "these rules can be ignored by the officials so long as the spirit of only amateurs is preserved".

Yet, it turns out that tennis was not part of the Olympics for years because the International Tennis Federation was against the rules regarding amateurs. So in 1988 they brought it back with absolutely zero restrictions, meaning any tennis player in the world can play at the Olympics, including professionals.

Does anyone happen to have a list of which sports in the Olympics totally ignore this rule, in addition to tennis?

It's true that most Olympic athletes are paid nothing, barely make ends meet at home, and are largely ignored by sponsors/advertisers.

The OP argues that the reason for this is that the Olympic Committee doesn't do more for athletes. As the OP puts it, "everybody is sort of left to their own device."

I'm not so sure. A more plausible explanation is that audiences care more about some sports than others, so income will always flow to the stars in those sports.

Fun topic reading from afar. Here very few olympic athletes get sponsors. And even sponsored ones frequently still have to work for a living. But then still compete with sponsored athletes from US and sometimes even win. Sponsorship ain’t a silver bullet.

Like everything, the 80-20 rule applies. The top 20 percent earn 80% of the income

I mean, at the end of the day despite their enormous athletic achievements it's hard not to view nearly all traditional Olympic sports as a hobby. They're typically quite mundane things, and they're never going to attract a regular audience of any real size.

Things like basketball and tennis are successful outside of the Olympics because people like watching them, but its pretty hard to get excited about watching someone throwing an object exactly one, or running for 11 seconds once every 4 years.