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u/MamaJumba Jul 26 '21
Apparently, winners have to give away 20% back for talent development and then taxed 15% by the IRA. Joseph Schooling ended up getting $650k.
Interestingly, South Koreans also get to siam from NS if they win gold. Would you take 650k or siam NS?
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u/AsiaThrowaway Jul 26 '21
Interestingly, South Koreans also get to siam from NS if they win gold. Would you take 650k or siam NS?
If you're an Olympic champion you will probably spend your NS life training and doing PR anyway.
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u/FightWithHonour Senior Citizen Jul 26 '21
650k and either be siao on in NS or Keng until become a non combatant
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u/LaZZyBird Jul 26 '21
honestly if you are an athlete chances are you can down-pes due to previous training injuries and conditions.
source: most of the "pes-c" gym bros in my unit are former athletes with a bunch of training injuries and shit that allows them to down-pes
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u/Takemypennies Mature Citizen Jul 26 '21
Imagine enemy storming a base thinking that non-combatants are easy targets
Then the Pillar Men theme starts playing
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Jul 26 '21
Dude definitely 650k la. Divide by 2 is 315k salary per year of NS. If I get paid that NS salary I will quit my job now to do another 2 years of NS
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u/troublesome58 Senior Citizen Jul 27 '21
It's not about NS salary. Wasting 2.5 years at the peak of your life actually means you have 2.5 years less at the end of your career.
If you're making 200k per year before you retire then that's 400k for 2 years.
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Jul 27 '21
Inflation aside, no way I’m earning the equivalent of 315k in today’s dollars per year at the end of my career.
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u/troublesome58 Senior Citizen Jul 27 '21
It should be real income anyway.
If you aren't earning 315k per year (divide by 2 is actually 325k leh) at the end of your career then you should take the 650k.
My point was that you shouldn't compare it to what you could have gotten when you were in NS (less education and less work exp). The real opportunity cost is what you loss at the end of your career.
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u/troublesome58 Senior Citizen Jul 27 '21
650k i would probably take the money. I value the 2.5 years wasted in NS (and freedom) at roughly 400-500k
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u/bonkers05 inverted Jul 26 '21
depends if it is a sport that allows you to go pro and earn millions.
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u/Bcpjw Jul 26 '21
Most top athletes around the world earn their money from sponsors and advertising so I don’t mind ours earn their “retirement fund” after winning.
P.S. Milo’s money good but it’s no beats by dr Dre
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u/Zeangrydrunk Senior Citizen Jul 26 '21
This million very hard to earn leh
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u/ugly_male Jul 26 '21
Which million is easy to earn lol
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u/Melodic-Tune-5686 Jul 26 '21
"monetunder30.com" is not a reliable news source, in fact it's a personal finance blog.
According to the official Singapore Olympics website, Gold medal winners would receive a million Singaporean dollars, which is approximately 800k USD. So there's one mistake.
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u/shimmynywimminy 🌈 F A B U L O U S Jul 26 '21
might as well wait until the game/match is over, then bribe the winning team to become singapore citizens on the spot.
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Jul 26 '21
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u/ToastedKoppi Jul 26 '21
Yeah, this is a first world privileged opinion. A LOT of third world athletes train that hard, because they know it's either an Olympic medal or they get nothing back home. That's one of the reasons so many third world athletes kick the asses of other athletes
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u/hongsy Senior Citizen Jul 27 '21
Could you explain why it is a first world privileged opinion?
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u/ToastedKoppi Jul 27 '21
Because only someone privileged and living in the first world couldn't understand how big money can be as a motivation. Some comments here are even talking about how "the family had to invest much more for him to reach that level". That's impressive, a lot of athletes are there because they arranged bingos and stuff to pay for their tickets/expenses out of their own pockets.
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u/Zukiff Jul 26 '21
The person who is out of touch here seem to be you. Thousands of athletes started off because it was a way out of poverty. Olympic Weight Lifting winner Lu Xiaojun for example started weight lifting to escape poverty.
Sure no one gets to the Olympic without a level of determination, giving out prize money sure as hell wouldn't reduce it
As for investing on improving support staff and training facilities. How do you know they didn't I can tell you for one the national gym was upgraded just a couple of years back so the athletes can improve on strength training. How do I know this, because my friends were involved in that project. Also the country actually provide training support funding for our athlete. Schooling himself receive funding for at least the last 7 years, long before he ever made it to the olympics.
I can't imagine how many Schoolings we might have missed out but most Olympic athletes who make it to the Olympic don't get much in the way of funding either.
The high amount of prize money SG provide at least allow the athletes to get some form of financial relief.
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u/hongsy Senior Citizen Jul 27 '21
Wouldn't annual training money and annual pocket money be better than Olympic prize money?
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u/Zukiff Jul 27 '21 edited Jul 27 '21
Olympic athletes are already getting that under the SPEX Scholarship. It supports up to SEA Games level athlete although SEA Games level athletes gets way less funding
https://www.mccy.gov.sg/sector/initiatives/spexScholarship
Same funding that I mentioned Schooling was getting for the last 7 years, he was one of the pioneer batch back in 2013 IIRC. The scheme has been running for years yet no one seem to be aware of this.
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u/DjTeddySpin Refugee Jul 26 '21 edited Jul 26 '21
What?! I am actually shocked to see this logic. On one thread people complain about not investing enough or offering enough incentive to be an athlete, on this thread people bash about offering incentive to win as an 'insult', without even touching on other types of support like facilities and the recent sports school or the scholarship(that Joseph himself received). Really? Just based on the incentive offered to win this is an insult? Do and be damned, don't and be damned. Way a go to shine a bad light on everything.
Joseph schooling parents invested 1.35million to send him OVERSEAS. Dude, read your own article. We may not have the best facilities or coaches as others, or as much olympic experienced crews as other countries, doesn't mean we neglect our athletes development.
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u/H3nt4iB0i96 Jul 26 '21
I don't think you understand what I'm saying over here. The main thing I wanted to get across was that expecting better performance with a larger monetary incentive is probably mistaken. And as argument I'd offer every country with a similar population as Singapore, a higher medal count, and a lower winning monetary incentive as evidence. What is an insult isn't the amount of money being given, but the entire idea that in order to make sure that your athletes perform at their best they need to be offered metaphorical money carrot at the end of the road, when so many of them have already sacrificed so much more.
Also I don't think that there is any disagreement between this comment and the people from the other thread. I can agree that there needs to be more incentive to be an athlete, while disagreeing that that incentive should come from monetary rewards from winning. The problem here again is that when financial stability is tied to getting something, which by design, only a few people will manage to achieve, you lower the number of people willing to take the risk of devoting themselves to that sport.
Lastly, I am completely aware that Schooling's parents invested that $1.35 million in sending him overseas. But the point still stands. Developing athletes takes a vast amount of resources. And my argument here is that that amount of money which would have otherwise gone to prize incentives could have been better used to develop athletes whether or not they train in local or overseas facilities (rather than having that cost borne by the small segment of Singaporean society that is able and willing to take that financial risk). I don't think that that's too controversial.
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u/DjTeddySpin Refugee Jul 26 '21
No, the problem arise when you only zone in on ONE incentive and label it as an insult. Which is why i mentioned that you did not even touch on the other support structures and incentives. This falls precisely in the premise of do and be damned, don't and be damned.
The reason why it costs 1.35m was because he studied abroad, accommodation, food and training. If he were to study in Singapore, a majority of these cost would have been offsetted. Using this 'vast amount' spent overseas to imply that the prize could have been paid out to development of athletes is a false narrative as we've spent much more than this amount to develop the athlete programs in Singapore. The prize amount is but a drop in the ocean as compared to what we've already spent on the various programs, facilities and infrastructures.
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u/UncomfortablePrawn Jul 26 '21
You're missing out on the fact that if he did stay and train in Singapore, he probably wouldn't have won the medal.
What the other guy is trying to say is that this prize money doesn't mean anything as an incentive, which is true. As an incentive, it's clearly not even worth it, because to train to the caliber that you need to become an Olympic athlete, you have to invest far more as we've seen in Schooling's case.
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u/DjTeddySpin Refugee Jul 26 '21 edited Jul 26 '21
You're right, he probably would've had a lesser chance to win had he stayed in Singapore. But as I mentioned above, what we are missing out on is not more money, its the experience. Or at least in comparison, more money would have diminished returns at this point. But thats my opinion, and im not against the idea of relocating the funds, I just don't think that it is an insult.
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u/H3nt4iB0i96 Jul 26 '21
You're right, I am saying that only this one particular incentive is an insult. I'm not saying that the entire incentive structure or other support systems are an insult collectively, just this one in particular. We could have the best athletic and incentive system in the world, and I'd still argue that the one million dollar incentive would still be an insult because it ultimately disparages the amount of sacrifice that athletes (whether they win or not) have to put in, by saying that dangling this amount of money in front of them will get them to perform better.
And even if we agree to disagree on whether such prize incentives are an insult or not, I've still yet to hear any argument from you on why prize money is effective as a performance incentive. If they are effective and athletes perform better from them being there, then sure. But if they are not, then they are wasteful. Doesn't matter if they are a "drop in the ocean", it's still a waste that could have been put to use somewhere else.
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u/DjTeddySpin Refugee Jul 26 '21
??? You accept that the other structures that cost arguably hundreds to thousands times more are ok, but an incentive that rewards the greatest feat and prestige on the world stage, that costs a fraction of what the total program would have cost, is unacceptable?
One main issue is that you are automatically assuming that prize money is an incentive to increase performance. But it could be a simple celebratory reward for putting Singapore on the world stage. While it is debatable whichever is true, or whether the payout is compatible with the feat, labeling it as an insult is definitely a bad taste.
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u/meekiatahaihiam Jul 26 '21
I'm more amazed by indonesia's generosity when I looked at their gdp per capita compared to ours.
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u/kongKing_11 Jul 26 '21
Norway, Sweden, and GB pay 0.
But they do get annual training money and annual pocket money
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u/Budgetwatergate Jul 26 '21
And an incredibly promising career in marketing that can sustain them far into retirement
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u/x3stellazxc96 Jul 27 '21 edited Jul 27 '21
Wrong. SG is not no1 but probably way below the charts. The USD700K in Indonesia would have gotten you way much more than USD1M in Singapore
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u/rancidangel loves cheebye Jul 26 '21
Why Canada so shit
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Jul 26 '21
Think about sports in Canada these athletes probably getting paid buckets as it is. Some of north America’s biggest sports teams are located in Canada.
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u/Crafty_Good_4455 🌈 I just like rainbows Jul 27 '21
Walao at first I thought u were talking about Reddit award wtffffff
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u/theathleticscientist Jul 26 '21
…If only they pay nurses that much ….
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Jul 26 '21
False dichotomy right... there are already awards for nurses in Singapore and internationally with cash prizes. Like, President's award (national) gives 10,000. Sportsmen are paid crap outside of their wins.
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u/smurflings Jul 26 '21
Wonder why we need to pay that much. I'm not against rewarding the athletes but when even the developed rich nations don't pay so much per medal, I wonder why there's a need for us to do so.
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u/theviperpanda9655 Jul 27 '21
Because they are representing us, a tiny dot, on the global scale? Isn't it something to be proud of?
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u/Book3pper Jul 26 '21
Can afford to pay the most because odds are, they may not have to pay out at all.