Three months before Sarah Mitton earned a medal at the World Athletics Championships, in 2023, she was explaining her financial challenges on YouTube. The 27-year-old grew up in a tiny town in Nova Scotia and was traveling the world to compete in shotput. “Our travel expenses are very, very high,” she said. “Women’s shotput is a little under-represented on the sponsorship side, so I’ve been struggling in other ways to find ways to make up the difference.” Mitton is in Paris for the 2024 Olympics, competing alongside dozens – maybe hundreds – of Canadian athletes who also struggle financially. Here, reporter Catherine Morrison explores how Canada funds its athletes, and how that funding can fall so short.
How do Canadian athletes make money?
Canadian taxpayers pay part of their bill, but before you call your Member of Parliament, it is important to know that does not mean they fly first-class. For most, it is scarcely enough to cover the bills domestically, before they can even think of international travel.
When an athlete gets a card through the government’s Athlete Assistance Program (AAP), they become entitled to a monthly allowance of between $1,060 and $1,765, depending on their status.
Tuition and supplementary financial support is also available to some athletes approved for carding by Sport Canada. An extra living and training allowance of up to $500 a month is also available to athletes who have medaled at the most recent Olympic/Paralympic Games or world championships.
According to Sport Canada’s 2019-20 Status of the High Performance Athlete report, 75 per cent of athletes said the AAP is their most prevalent source of financial support. That was also the case in 2014 and 2009 and is followed, the report says, by a reliance on family and/or provincial programs.
Jane Roos is the founder of CAN Fund, and for the last 20 years, her organization has been working to get funds directly into the hands of Canada’s elite amateur athletes. If you can name a Canadian Olympian, they have likely received money from Roos.
Earlier this year, as part of their funding application at CAN Fund, 905 athletes also filled out a survey. The results? The average annual net income of 65 summer sport athletes ranged from -$23,142 to $5,260.
How do they survive on that?
In addition to federal carding, athletes can seek out other sources of funding that are either at arms-length or independent from the government – such as CAN Fund and the Canadian Olympic Committee, which works with 37 marketing partners in the private sector.
David Shoemaker, chief executive of the COC, said his organization reinvests over 70 per cent of its revenue back into the sports system. He said the high-profile athletes – sprinter Andre De Grasse might be one example — have endorsement deals.
Some athletes, such as diver Margo Erlam and hurdler Mariam Abdul-Rashid, have turned to crowdfunding campaigns on websites such as GoFundMe. Abdul-Rashid has said that donations would help with everything from travel to gear, and from entry fees to food.
Roos, who has funded over 8,000 athletes – including 80 per cent of Canadians in Paris — said only a handful don’t need the $8,000 Can Fund offers out twice a year.
“Most of the athletes get carding but they’re paying for the majority of their things,” she said. “The challenge of being a Canadian athlete is you know you’re gonna go into major debt to wear the red and white on the world stage.”
What do athletes have to pay for?
Travel to competition. Equipment. Physiotherapy. Nutrition. Extra baggage fees for their gear when they fly. Roos said most athletes also pay a fee to their sports federation to be on the team, which can vary from $2,000 to $20,000.
Is anyone talking about improving this situation?
“When I first started the fund, I thought maybe there would be a day we wouldn’t be needed,” said Roos. “I think now the sports system is worse than it’s ever been and we’re needed more than we’ve ever been needed.”
Roos said athletes go into tens of thousands of dollars in debt to represent Canada.
Has the government recently announced more funding to support athletes?
In April, the federal government announced it would boost support of Canada’s athletes by more than $50 million. That number was not for annual distribution: It was for $35 million over five years, beginning in 2024-25, and $7 million ongoing to support the AAP.
That’s the first adjustment the program has seen since 2017, according to AthletesCAN.
The COC said more money would be needed to ease the challenges for athletes, noting it fell “well-short” of the $104 million budget request it had made to address “the needs of National Sport Organizations (NSOs) to advance their respective sports and deliver a sport system that is safe, inclusive, and accessible for all Canadians.”
Similarly, the Canadian Paralympic Committee said in a statement that it welcomed the federal funding, but that the absence of more core funding for NSOs was “a significant oversight.”
Shoemaker, the COC CEO, said the committee has been advocating for around five years for the government to provide more funding for the 62 NSOs that are federally-funded, seeing as they haven’t seen an increase in their core funding since 2005.
According to Statistics Canada, the inflation rate was exactly 2 per cent in July 2005. That’s compared to 2.7 per cent in June 2024 and an average of 3.9 per cent in 2023. Inflation in Canada hit a 40-year high of 6.8 per cent in 2022.
Said Shoemaker: “They’re still not heeding the call to invest critically in the national sports organizations.”
How well are athletes funded in Canada compared to other countries?
Compared to other countries that often dominate the medal table, Shoemaker said “regrettably” Canada doesn’t do well.
“The eye-watering budgets that the United States has for its athletes and its Olympic team are not a fair comparison,” he said. “But Australia outspends us by two times, Great Britain by three times and that’s alarming.”
Roos said that while there are lots of different statistics available, it’s evident that Canada is about 10 years behind other countries. David Larose, a spokesperson for Canadian Heritage said the government couldn’t provide a comparison to funding in other countries as “various countries allocate funding to athletes through a variety of different mechanisms.”
How does the lack of funding hinder athletes?
Shoemaker said Canadian athletes feel the pressure and the need to find alternate sources of income because even the AAP is not enough.
“The whole idea of the funding model was developed at a time when we thought of athletes as being part-time Olympic rower and therefore had the other half of their time to have a part time job,” he said. “The reality is that the every single Canadian athlete, to be competitive, it’s more than a full time job.”
Roos said athletes who get CAN Fund will share that it allows them to stay in sport longer and to recover faster because they can afford more nutrition and physio.
“To be the best in the world, it costs money,” she said. “The more resources and opportunities you have in anything in life, the better you’re gonna fare.”
In 2022, Canadian ski jumper Alexandria Loutitt told Postmedia she had been self-funding since being named to the national team, adding that “the higher level you are, you have to pay for more of your own stuff.” She was one of several athletes who trained in Europe as Canada lacked permanent, well-maintained facilities, and was on the team that won a bronze in the ski jump mixed team event at the Winter Olympics in China.
“The things other teams get, they are things they totally take for granted and it’s frustrating for us because we’re watching our equipment fall apart and duct taping it back together while these other teams are complaining that they only got three new pairs of skis,” said Loutitt, who said she received some support from Ski Jumping Canada provides, as well as from Calgary mortgage brokerage Builder’s Capital, a Slovenian car rental company that provided her with a vehicle, and grant money from Petro Canada and CAN Fund.
How does it impact future generations of Olympians and Paralympians?
Shoemaker said national sports organizations are being asked to do more with less, with some that are on the “brink of insolvency.”
According to TSN, organizations such as Cycling Canada and Climbing Canada laid off staff due to their financial situation.
“This will mean I think after Paris, people will lose their jobs — they’ll be cutting and scaling back of programs,” Shoemaker said. “At the end of the day, I think that what that means is Canada will have less participation in sport and it will become more expensive, less accessible.”
Do some sports get more federal funding than others?
National sports organizations are not all created equal, Shoemaker said, adding that some larger groups like Athletics Canada, Swimming Canada or Hockey Canada have commercial properties, like television rights to tournaments they run, and have the ability to sell sponsorships.
“Those organizations, by and large, aren’t suffering as much as a result of the lack of the increase in core funding as some of the other national sports organizations,” Shoemaker said, noting that Badminton Canada and Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton, and Field Hockey almost exclusively depend on federal funding.
“They haven’t had an increase in this funding since 2005, inflation alone has eroded the power of that investment power by nearly 50 per cent. That has a dramatic impact on their ability to deliver.”