Many of the athletes who will be headed to Paris for the Olympics this month received much of their coaching and experience playing sports on American campuses, which for decades have been a major training ground for elite fencers, gymnasts, and sprinters worldwide.
But that model is under threat. That’s because the same athletic departments that sponsor many elite Olympic programs are poised to allocate more money directly to athletes. Division I institutions will be expected to contribute to a $2.75-billion settlement in a recent antitrust case, if a judge approves the terms, and a portion of those colleges will start paying current athletes in revenue-generating sports such as football and basketball as part of the same settlement.
This raises the possibility that sports like swimming, tennis, and field hockey may be on the chopping block — a possibility athletics leaders have long cited as a potential consequence of paying players. If that happens, the college-to-Olympics pipeline could look very different in 2026 and beyond.
But cutting college sports programs is notoriously hard to do. Recent attempts to do so at places like Stanford and Eastern Michigan Universities have ended after alumni protests and legal action.
Plus there is a large, sometimes intangible benefit to funding a competitive program that sends athletes to the Olympics every four years. So experts and others in college athletics believe that colleges must find another way to fund them.
The will is there, the money is not. So it’s going to take creativity.
“The will is there, the money is not,” said Jack Swarbrick, the recently retired vice president and director of athletics at the University of Notre Dame, which sponsors some two dozen sports. “So it’s going to take creativity.”
National athletic organizations could work with collegiate conferences and associations to share the costs of development camps for athletes and championships, Swarbrick said. He cited the recent news, reported by Sportico, that USA Gymnastics and the National Collegiate Athletic Association are in talks to coordinate major events, personnel, and partnerships for men’s gymnastics. That partnership could serve as a model for other sports.
Victoria Jackson, a sports historian and clinical associate professor at Arizona State University, sees the potential for universities to work with local and state governments to develop sports programs. “If we open up facilities to communities,” Jackson said, “there’s a greater chance for support for mixed public and private development in sports infrastructure.”
She imagines a field or track on a campus that hosts youth leagues, a college team, and an Olympic team. The high-level teams would have designated times to play, and more security would be needed, she said. But there might also be more community buy-in and financial support.
We’re asking so much of these football players: Sell higher education, woo donors, put on a good show, pay for the world’s Olympic development.
“It would mean facilities that are not locked, that are public assets,” she said.
Jackson emphasized that Olympic sports at institutions in the richest conferences have relied too heavily on football revenue for decades. A course correction spurred by the need to pay those players is appropriate, she said.
“We’re asking so much of these football players: Sell higher education, woo donors, put on a good show, pay for the world’s Olympic development,” she said.
Thanks to TV revenue from football games, those colleges have been able to build some of the world’s best athletic and medical facilities and to hire top coaches not just in football, but in the Olympic sports. Thanks to Title IX, the law that prohibited sex-based discrimination in education, football money has also led to the development of large programs for women’s sports because they are needed to balance football rosters, which can exceed 100 players.
In many sports, athletic infrastructure at American colleges is the best in the world, attracting elite athletes from across the globe. That dynamic is good for U.S. colleges and should be preserved, Jackson argues, because it allows American athletes to compete with the best on a daily basis, and it’s an effective tool for recruiting foreign students.
As a result, hundreds of college athletes vie for Olympic medals every couple of years. More than 1,000 current and former college students competed in the Olympics and Paralympics in 2020, according to the NCAA. They represented more than 100 countries. On the U.S. team, three out of every four athletes had competed for a NCAA institution.
“The business model will change dramatically if we treat college football as the professional sport it is,” Jackson said. “This is on us to do this change now.”
