Canadian Paralympians for the first time will receive financial rewards from the Canadian Paralympic Committee for medals. More significantly, those rewards will match the payouts given to their Olympic colleagues.
Canadian Paralympic Medal Rewards:
- Gold – $20,000 CAD ($14,800 USD)
- Silver – $15,000 CAD ($11,100 USD)
- Bronze – $10,000 CAD ($7,400 USD)
In Canada, the sports in the Paralympic movement are governed by a separate organization than those in the Olympic movement. Still, in many ways the sports have more ties than they do in the United States, where the USOPC jointly manages both groups.
For example, in swimming, the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic teams are chosen from the same meet.
Maybe more importantly, both movements receive direct public funding, which happens in most of the world but not the United States.
Canada traditionally earns a similar amount of medals at the Summer Paralympic Games as they do at the Summer Olympic Games. In Tokyo, for example, Canada scored 5 gold medals, 10 silver medals, and 6 bronze medals at the Paralympic Games, and 7 gold medals, 7 silver medals, and 10 bronze medals at the Olympic Games.
In general, though, far more medals are given out at the Paralympics than the Olympics. In Tokyo, there were 1,668 medals (counted by 1 set per event) given out at the Paralympics and 1,080 at the Olympics (which, thanks to team events, in both cases is smaller than the actual number of physical medals awarded).
The gap is driven in large part by sports like swimming and track & field with a large number of classifications, as compared to a sport like volleyball, which has only one event (sitting volleyball) per gender at the Paralympics, fewer than the two (beach and indoor) at the Olympics.
There are 141 medal events in swimming at the Paralympic Games in Paris, five fewer than were held in Tokyo. By comparison, there were only 37 medal events in swimming at the Paris Olympics.
8 of Canada’s 21 medals at the Tokyo Paralympics were won by swimmers. Notably, Aurelie Rivard won two gold, a silver, and two bronze medals.
“The first word that came out of my mouth was ‘finally.’ We’ve been pushing for this for a long time. I was so relieved and happy and also proud of my country, of my federation, of everybody that contributed to it,” she told CBC Sports.
“And I’m just excited also for the future generations that for them it’s just going to be normal. So it’s pretty exciting.”
The medal bonuses were made possible through an initial $8 million endowment created by the Paralympic Foundation of Canada, the CPC’s charitable arm. Sanjay Malaviya, a Canadian entrepreneur in healthcare technology, matched a $2 million investment from the federal government. His personal foundation also pledged to match up to $2 million in future contributions to the program to make up the $8 million.
Malaviya previously in March 2022 gave 130 Olympians and 53 Paralympians $5,000 each in direct payments for winning a medal at the Tokyo Summer Olympics and Paralympics and the Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics.
“We should have been doing this from the start. I’m a little bit surprised we haven’t been. And that’s okay. That’s all behind us,” Malaviya said. “So let’s turn this corner and let’s be the kind of nation and the kind of people that respects all of us as brothers and sisters. I think that’s a really good signal for us to send the rest of the world.”
The United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee has paid its Paralympic medalists for a long time, and in 2018 drastically increased the payout for Paralympians to match their Olympic counterparts. This money doesn’t include those extra rewards given by organizations like USA Swimming, which doesn’t oversee Paralympic swimming.
USOPC Medal Bonuses for Paralympians:
- 1st place – $37,500
- 2nd place – $22,500
- 3rd place – $15,000
