Sustaining Olympic Dreams: Inside the USOPC and NGB Funding Process

The Olympic and Paralympic Summer Games in Paris will be the quadrennial chance for athletes representing the United States to win medals on the biggest global stage possible — and it comes at a time where the ability to chase Olympic legend status can be hard financially, which has led to a revamping of how national governing bodies are allocated resources in the post-pandemic landscape.

Rocky Harris, chief of sport and athlete services at the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, detailed some of the streamlined processes earlier this year during the Team USA Olympic Media Summit ahead of the 2024 Games in Paris. This year’s revamped process was highlighted by 11 different grants that are provided by the USOPC to NGBs and in the past, they were requested at 11 different times to different people within the USOPC.

“Now we’ve brought all that together into one team,” Harris said. “It’s 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.”

Making sure athletes are compensated is also a main topic of discussion within the Olympic space after the announcement by World Athletics that it will pay $50,000 to gold medalists in Paris (relay teams will split $50,000 between their members). The USOPC runs “Project Gold,” which gives $37,500 for gold, $22,500 for silver and $15,000 for bronze.

Harris said the way the USOPC provides athlete stipends beyond the Games is the NGB requests it in its high-performance plans: “it’s really about supporting NGBs and the gaps that they can’t fill on their own with the resources that they have and so we look at who has the best potential to medal, but also who needs the best developmental support behind it.

“I think stipends have to keep growing,” he said. “It’s a percentage of our overall allocation and that’s something that we’ve committed to and we’re committed to again this year.”

One of the reasons for the change in high-performance grants and the process of awarding them was transparency and in other ways leveraging Harris’ familiarity with the NGB movement, having been chief executive officer of USA Triathlon for five years before moving into his current role in August 2022.

“I’m close with many of them — I also wasn’t afraid to speak up in the room of the National Governing Body council when I disagreed with something,” Harris said. “We have mutual respect and they know that I want what’s best for them. … I think that that clarity and the trust that we have with each other allows me to have difficult conversations that maybe an outsider wouldn’t be able to have.”

There will also be four other NGBs to work with post-Paris as the LA28 Games organizing gathers steam. While USA Baseball and USA Softball have been in the Olympic Games recently, the sports of cricket, lacrosse, squash and flag football will either be first-time sports in LA or in the Games for the first time in decades.

“We’re having lots of conversations with each of the new sports,” USOPC Chief Executive Officer Sarah Hirshland said, including a chat with USA Football Chief Executive Officer Scott Hallenbeck last week. “We’ve had all four in our headquarters in Colorado Springs, for a bit of a two-day orientation to what NGB certification means.”

Each of the sports will be officially Olympic sports in January 2025, Hirshland said, “so we actually feel a little bit ahead of the game in that we have really nice, successful, well-established national governing bodies, certainly in football. We see the same in lacrosse and squash, and even USA Cricket, who at the moment is seeing some nice success. … I think it will be a pretty nice, seamless process to integrate them into our community.”

One thing Harris said is not a major influencer of NGB funding, old or newly established within the Olympic movement, is commercial impact: “It’s really about performance, about setting up the sports and athletes to optimize success for them. I really don’t look at the commercial benefits.” All NGBs had to also make sure they had resources to pass audits, even lower-resourced NGBs, “and now I want to pivot those resources to help them be more commercially viable, to help them generate more resources for Team USA athletes,” Harris said.