By most measures, the U.S. sport climbing team had a successful showing at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. There were four Americans in the competition—no nation had more—and Team USA brought home one of the six medals awarded, a silver won by Nathaniel Coleman in the men’s combined event.
This year in Paris, however, expectations are higher. The U.S. was the only nation to fill all eight qualifying slots, and many of those climbers are ranked in the global top 10 in their disciplines. There are also double the medal opportunities—instead of just two events at the sport’s Olympic debut in Tokyo, there will be four in Paris. Team USA envisions more than one medal.
To match those expectations, USA Climbing also has more money. The national governing body (NGB) received $841,000 from Team USA in the two years prior to the Tokyo Games; that number jumped to $1.7 million in 2022 and 2023 combined. The bulk of those funds comes via Team USA’s high-performance grant system, a pool of roughly $50-$60 million annually that the organization distributes to NGBs with one main goal in mind: maximizing its Olympic medal haul.
It’s a critical part of America’s historic Olympics success. The U.S. has topped the medal count at each of the last seven Summer Games, despite being one of the few major national teams that relies almost entirely on private funding. Instead, Team USA distributes its revenue via roughly a dozen grants aimed at supporting athletes and individual sport NGBs. Think of Team USA like an investment fund manager, but instead of financial returns, the ROI is medals and pipeline development.
The process has become more data-driven over the years. The group now looks at medal expectancy in each sport, performance in international events over the past five or six years, current athletes and those in development, and how the Olympic program is changing.
“We want to be the difference maker, that’s our goal with our funding,” Rocky Harris, Team USA’s chief of sport and athlete services, said in an interview in April. “Not just to be somewhat additive or complementary, it’s to focus on how we make the biggest impact. In some sports, if an athlete has already risen to the top, we may not put as many resources to that NGB as the NGB with seven athletes who could.”
The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC), known more colloquially as Team USA, reported $1.24 billion in revenue in the four years from 2020-2023, a stretch that included the COVID pandemic and the delayed Tokyo Games, according to annual tax filings. The bulk of that revenue comes from sponsorships, licensing and broadcast payments, with additional funds from donations and investments.
To receive a share of that money, every NGB puts together a formal proposal each year detailing its Olympic aspirations, the talent on its roster and how the money might be used. The last two decades of USOPC payments details how the funds flow—or dry up—depending on Team USA’s medal opportunities.
The U.S. gymnastics team has consistently succeeded over the past five Olympics. After a strong showing at the 2004 Games that yielded nine medals, including two golds, the U.S. has won at least six medals and at least two golds at each of the subsequent Summer Games this century.
The funding received by USA Gymnastics has steadily increased as the NGB has proven its worth, with the team’s allowance increasing from $9.2 million in the 2008 Olympic cycle to $10.2 million the following cycle to $11.1 million the one after that (all figures are inflation-adjusted). Overall, Team USA has distributed more money to gymnastics over the past 20 years than any summer sport other than track & field and swimming, which award 144 and 105 medals, respectively. (Gymnastics, for reference, awards 42).
Weightlifting’s funding has not always been high but has recently been on the rise. The U.S. did not medal in 2004, 2008 or 2012, and the sport’s distribution from Team USA hit rock bottom at just more than $1 million for the entire 2016 Olympic cycle. On the heels of a bronze in Rio and another bronze and silver in Tokyo, however, USA Weightlifting now takes in roughly double the money annually that it received a decade ago.
This, interestingly, is true despite a decrease in the number of weight classes, and therefore number of medals available in Paris. But the American squad has a plethora of prospects, including 21-year-old phenom Olivia Reeves, who delivered one of the United States’ three medals at the 2023 World Championships.
Sailing is an example of a sport that has gone in the opposite direction, as the U.S. put up a bagel in the 2020 Olympics and now has just one bronze since 2008. The $2.1 million that the United States Sailing Association was granted over the past two years is far less than the $3.1 million from the two years leading up to Tokyo.
Then there are the sports that Team USA simply has no faith in at all. Team handball, for instance—a sport in which the U.S. hasn’t even fielded an Olympic team since 1996, when it automatically qualified as the host country—is among the least-funded sports, along with badminton, table tennis and pentathlon.
Many of these funds are spent on access to elite training facilities. No summer NGB has seen a bigger jump in high-performance funding in the last few years than USA Rugby, which saw $4.5 million come its way during 2022 and 2023 combined, up from $1.9 million across the two previous years. The bulk of that increase is related to the Chula Vista Elite Athlete Training Center in California, headquarters for the U.S. men’s and women’s rugby sevens teams, according to USA Rugby CFO Todd Sowl.
The USOPC owned the facility until 2017, and for a while paid for USA Rugby’s residency out of its own funds. Starting a few years ago, however, Team USA began budgeting that money directly to the NGB, Sowl said, and USA Rugby now negotiates individually with the facility.
There are nearly a dozen other grants beyond the high-performance money, and they cover business needs such as marketing, communications, international relations and administrative operations. For the past few cycles, requests and approval for those grants happened at different times of the year and by different people at Team USA, a muddled format that left many NGBs frustrated about the constant overlapping processes, the inability to look at all the grants in aggregate and the lack of transparency from Team USA about its decisions.
Harris was once one of those frustrated NGB heads. Before he was hired by Team USA in August 2022, he spent five years as CEO of USA Triathlon and served on the NGB Council, which pushed for reform. When he joined Team USA, USOPC boss Sarah Hirshland put him in charge of overhauling the resource allocation process, which formally began this year.
Moving forward, Harris said, NGBs will request all their grants at the same time—separated by Summer and Winter NGBs—and Team USA will inform them of their distributions at the same time. The decisions will also be explained to each NGB in person. The new process, however, won’t change the basic goal of Olympic success.
“Now,” Harris said, “we’ve brought all that together into one team that is going to focus on investing in national governing bodies like it’s a portfolio of investments, versus 11 different grants being provided without them having awareness of it.”
