Olympic boost for refugee athletes as IOC increase grants
By PA Sport
Last Updated: 10/11/16 10:07pm
The International Olympic Committee will hand over more than £400m so athletes from poorer nations can compete on the world stage, as well as increasing funding for the refugee team initiative it launched in Rio.
The new four-year Olympic solidarity plan, which is funded by the sale of broadcast rights for Rio 2016 and PyeongChang 2018, runs from 2017 to 2020 and is a 16 per cent increase on the last four-year cycle.
IOC director of Olympic solidarity Pere Miro said: "This increase shows that the athletes remain at the heart of all our activity.
"The huge worldwide success of Rio 2016...enables us to distribute more than half a billion dollars over the next four years to the national Olympic committees."
The solidarity programme helps nations "with the greatest needs" by funding programmes to develop administrators, athletes and coaches.
Among the 21 different programmes for this four-year plan are two new ones: "refugee athlete support" and "athletes' career transition".
The latter will focus on educating athletes to prepare them for life after their sports careers are over, while the former will build on the positive impact made by the Refugee Olympic Team in Rio.
That 10-strong team, made up of refugees from Congo, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Syria, competed in three different sports.
The new programme will help national Olympic committees identify talented refugees living in their countries and prepare them for international competition.
The IOC's solidarity programmes have been successful in recent years, with 815 recipients of Olympic scholarships, representing 171 different countries, combining to win 101 medals in Rio.
