It’s an expensive business, qualifying for the Olympics.
It takes decades of training and discipline fueled by costs associated with coaches, trainers, equipment, uniforms, travel, competition fees, accommodation and much more.
Leading up to an Olympic year, athletes have to attend certain events, and do well enough at these events, to have a shot at qualifying for the Australian Olympic team.
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Some sports, like swimming, attract more funding and outside sponsorship than others, but for athletes who happen to excel at other sports, funding opportunities can be rarer and sponsorship deals almost unheard of.
Australian Sports Commission spokesman, Chris Wilson, told SBS News they were currently funding 620 athletes who received grants of up to $35,000 under the federal government-funded dAIS scheme.
In order to qualify they cannot earn more than $60,000 a year and must have achieved a podium result at a recent world championship-level event, or be expected to achieve such a result in the future.
Mr Wilson said more than 1100 athletes had had access to $41 million of ASC funding in the past four years.
But one of those athletes who have not received funding is Chinese-born table tennis athlete Chris Yan, who will be part of the Australian Rio Olympic team alongside his fiancée, fellow table tennis player Sally Zhang.
Rio Olympics bound table tennis players Chris Yan and Sally Zhang Source: SBS
The Sydney couple both work full-time jobs to fund the training and competitions needed to realise their Olympic dream.
“For now we train five or six times a week, about one or two hours per day,” Yan told SBS News.
“For a country like China or Japan, [a table tennis athlete] might train five or six hours a day, so if we could train like that it would maybe help us to compete better.
“But if we have to, maybe we will train that much [in the lead up to the Olympics].”
Yan said it could be difficult to fit training around their busy work lives, but they were happy to do it because, “the Olympics is our dream to chase”.
For more intensive sports, the balance between keeping up a grueling training and competition schedule and finding the money to pay for it is more of a challenge.
Brisbane rhythmic gymnast Danielle Prince took up the sport at age 11 and will be Australia’s only rhythmic gymnast at the Rio Olympics.
“At the moment I’m training around 30 hours a week and that’s just gymnastics,” she told SBS News.
Australian rhythmic gymnast Danielle Prince. Source: Federation of International Gymnastics
“Outside of gymnastics I will do around an additional 10 hours for things like strength and conditioning, pilates, ballet – all those extras. So at the moment it’s about 40 hours a week which is quite a hefty load for a sport.”
Prince, who won gold at the 2010 Dehli Commonwealth Games and is a three-time national all-round champion, said funding her sport was a constant struggle for her and her family.
“In the lead up to August I’ve been quite fortunate to receive some funding from my federation … in preparation for the Olympics,” she said.
“In the last four years, gymnastics as a whole is quite an expensive sport, and we have really struggled to get here.”
Prince’s mother works three jobs to help cover her daughter’s rhythmic gymnastics costs while Prince herself has a part-time job, on top of her exhausting training schedule.
She also turned to crowd funding to help her attend a training camp in Finland in April.
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She said many of her competitors, particularly from countries like Russia, were much better funded than Australian gymnasts due to the popularity of the sport in their home countries.
“In contrast, I guess, rhythmic gymnastics in Australia is really an amateur sport and I think that’s why going over there and just to compete is such a big deal for me,” she said.
But moments like being named the national champion or hopefully being selected for the Olympic team made it all worth it, Prince said.
RMIT senior economics lecturer and Athletics Australia pole vault coach, Mark Stewart, told SBS News athlete funding was based on what the athlete was likely to achieve at competitions.
An athlete’s future medal potential at an international event was important, he said.
“If you are genuinely right up there you will be looked after but, don’t expect to get rich from it,” Dr Stewart said.
“Those who finish in the top eight do scrape together a living and the ones who win medals make a reasonable amount of money.”
He said the Australia Sports Commission also considered the number of medals up for grabs in a sport and how many Australian athletes could realistically expect to win when it came to handing out funding.
“[A sport like] gymnastics has very few medals and a lot of people double up, whereas swimming has lots of medals,” Dr Stewart said.
“Hockey gets quite a lot of money because they always know if they fund it they will probably have a good chance of winning a medal.”
Figures from the ASC show swimming receives by far the most funding, with $11.1 million allocated to the sport for the 2015/16 year.
Other well-funded sports include cycling ($9.5 million), athletics ($8.5 million), sailing ($8.8 million) and rowing ($8.1 million).
In contrast, gymnastics receives $3.1 million, table tennis receives $845,000 and all winter sports combined receive $3.4 million.
Dr Stewart said following the 2012 London Olympics, both swimming and athletics received a cut to their funding as result of poorer than expected results.
The Olympic Winter Institute of Australia (OWIA) supports its athletes through a scholarship scheme that covers as much as possible of their training and competition costs.
OWIA accounts and administration manager Alex Drayton told SBS News the institute was supporting about 30 athletes at the moment in several sports including moguls, snowboard cross, various skiing disciplines and long track skating as well as individual athletes such as Sydney figure skater Brendan Kerry.
The institute also gives smaller grants to up-and-coming athletes who are yet to make a splash on the international stage.
Mrs Drayton said it was difficult for winter athletes in Australia to get sponsorship and they were often competing against much better funded competitors from the northern hemisphere.
“The level of our funding is still, compared to the rest of the world, incredibly low,” she said.
“Post-Rio is a crucial two-year lead up to the games, so we can ensure they have adequate support to be competitive at the [2018 Winter] Games.
“We make sure we use our funding effectively so our athletes don’t have to contribute themselves. They need to be full time athletes; they can’t be working jobs on the side.”
Kerry, who competed at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, now lives and trains in Los Angeles and has recently been competing in the 2015/16 world competition circuit.
Australian figure skater Brendan Kerry in competition. Source: Supplied
He told SBS News figure skating was financially “extremely difficult to keep on top of”, despite his OWIA scholarship.
“To try and help with all of the expenses I try to coach as much as I can after training or sometimes in-between my sessions,” he said.
“Other than that my grandmother has been a huge help.
“My mum … helps as much as she can, although it’s sometimes hard as one of my younger sisters, Chantelle, is also a high-level skater and my mum supports her skating as well.”
Kerry, whose mother Monica MacDonald was herself a Winter Olympic ice dancer in 1988, said his training and competing schedule was intense and he found the financial side stressful “all the time”.
“Knowing how much it costs and how much my family is paying for me to have the opportunity to train to try and reach all of my goals and dreams within my sport as a competitor is a hard truth to deal with,” he said.
“I won't always be physically able to do this, so as much as it is hard, I'm ok putting other aspects of my life on hold while I try to compete at another Olympic Games or two.”
