Let's start with a question you've been dying to ask.
Just how much money do these athletes make?
At the top end of Olympic sports,
a relatively small number of big names
earn substantial amounts in endorsement
and appearance contracts.
Out on his own is sprint champ Usain Bolt,
who earns a small fortune per year
and a big fortune in an Olympic year.
And the Jamaican's earnings are matched or surpassed by some of
the sport's professionals
who join in every four years.
The team events are awash
with fat salaries.
The Canadian ice hockey team,
which won gold at Sochi 2014,
had a combined annual income of $150 million US.
While the US basketball squad for Rio 2016 is maybe
the wealthiest group of athletes ever assembled.
So how much do athletes actually get paid
for winning a medal at the Olympic Games?
The answer is...
nothing.
Zero. No win bonus. No appearance fee.
No cash prize.
You get your travel expenses, food and lodging, some kit,
and that's about it.
For the Olympics, you don't get paid to play -
an idea that goes back to
the amateur tradition of the 19th century.
It's the spirit of gentlemanly conduct
that so seduced Pierre, Baron de Coubertin,
the Frenchman
who founded the modern Olympic movement in 1896.
His beliefs were typical of his time and his class.
Sport was no place
for professionals.
A gentlemen seeks no reward for his success
on the playing field.
While there was much to admire about these principles,
there is another way of looking at the amateur code
as more than a touch self-interested.
Only gentlemen could be amateurs
because only gentlemen could afford to be amateurs.
Those who couldn't leave their jobs for months at a time
were not considered worthy of these Olympic values.
Even those who earnt a modest living
by coaching sports like fencing
or skiing were barred from participation.
It wasn't until 1992
that professional athletes
were openly welcomed into the Olympic Games.
But not before sports administrators had,
over several decades,
tied themselves in knots trying to defend the principles
of amateurism.
At times, it led to some decisions
we would today consider a bit strange.
Take the great decathlete Jim Thorpe,
born on a Native American reservation in Oklahoma
in 1887.
Thorpe grew up without any of
the privileges enjoyed by the gentlemen amateurs.
He was an exceptionally gifted all-round athlete.
At the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm,
he won the decathlon and pentathlon gold medals,
earning a fine tribute from King Gustav of Sweden.
The following year, it emerged that Thorpe, 25,
had played semi-professional baseball as a teenager.
The US Amateur Athletic Union
immediately stripped Thorpe of his gold medals.
For the sake of $2 a day, Thorpe was publicly humiliated
and barred from future participation
in the Olympic Games.
Excluded from athletics,
Thorpe tried his hand at the new sports craze
in the United States,
playing in a competition known today as the NFL.
Just a few years later,
footballers from all over the world
were looking forward to travelling
to the Olympic Games at Amsterdam.
The 1924 football tournament in Paris
had been an enormously popular, generating tons of cash.
The football associations asked
for a small share of that income
to help pay their costs for travel and accommodation -
expensive for a footballer travelling to Europe
from, say, Uruguay.
They weren't asking for prize money or appearance money,
yet the IOC said no.
"Any contribution to cost would,"
they said, "breach the amateur code."
England's Football Association was so appalled by the request
they withdrew their Olympic football team.
The conflict led to football being banned from
the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games altogether.
Disappointed by this exclusion,
the international football associations went on
to form their own football event,
a competition we know today as the Fifa World Cup.
Today, no-one really argues about
the professional versus amateur issue.
Allowing professionals to take part in the Olympics
has not damaged the competition's popularity
or its integrity.
The ideals which de Coubertin thought exclusive to
the amateur code are now shared throughout Olympic sport.
The lack of prize money remains an important symbol of
the amateur ideal.
As for Jim Thorpe, he died penniless in 1953.
30 years later, Thorpe's two surviving children
were awarded a commemorative Olympic medal
in honour of their father's achievement.
It was a symbolic gesture which would eventually lead to
the acceptance of professional athletes at the Olympic Games.
So when you see athletes on the podium,
you can be sure they're not thinking about the prize money
because there isn't any.
They're thinking about their family, friends,
team-mates, coaches
and the honour of representing their country
at the Olympic Games.