There is a particular kind of silence that settles over an elite athlete’s life that the public never sees. It is not the silence of the training pool at 5 a.m., or the stillness before a starting gun. It is the silence of financial uncertainty — the kind that follows a young swimmer or cyclist or track athlete home from a national championship and sits with them over a meal they cannot quite afford, in a city getting more expensive around them every month.

According to the Australian Sports Foundation’s Running on Empty report, 46 per cent of Australia’s elite athletes over the age of 18 earn annual incomes that total less than $23,000 — placing them below the poverty line. This is not a footnote. It is the defining structural reality against which every conversation about Brisbane 2032 must be set. Queensland is investing billions in stadiums, transport corridors and athlete villages. The 2032 Delivery Plan outlines how a $7.1 billion venue capital works program will allow the Games to reach beyond Brisbane. That is an enormous commitment. But the athletes those venues are being built for are, right now, working second jobs, deferring university study, and — in the most concerning cases — walking away from their sports entirely.

Two in three elite Australian athletes aged between 18 and 34 have considered quitting their sport. One in two athletes aiming to compete in the 2026 Commonwealth Games have weighed up leaving their sport, as have 43 per cent of those working towards the 2032 Olympic Games in Brisbane. The Games are six years away. The athletes who will represent Queensland and Australia in them are being forged right now, in training sessions and qualifying meets and early-morning gym sessions across the state. And many of them are doing it on the edge of financial collapse.

This is what the conversation about Brisbane 2032 tends to miss. The focus is almost entirely on what will be ready for the world when it arrives — the stadiums, the precincts, the opening ceremony. Much less attention is paid to what needs to be ready for the athletes before that. Not after the medal ceremony. Not after the closing ceremony. Before the opening one.

THE FINANCIAL FLOOR THAT ISN'T THERE.

Elite sport in Australia has never operated on a model of reliable income for its athletes. Unlike major professional codes — the NRL, AFL, Super Rugby — Olympic and Paralympic sports offer no guaranteed salaries, no long-term contracts, no collective bargaining agreements. Athletes in these sports exist in a kind of perpetual financial precarity, dependent on a patchwork of government grants, sponsorship deals, medal bonuses, and whatever paid work they can fit around a training schedule that would exhaust any full-time professional.

The reality for most of Australia’s elite athletes is a low-income lifestyle that depends heavily on unreliable and unpredictable sources of income to make ends meet. While more traditional jobs pay a predetermined salary, athletes are largely reliant on sponsorship deals and podium placements to reap the rewards of their hard work. This model punishes consistency and rewards spectacle. An athlete who finishes fourth in consecutive World Championship finals — a genuinely elite result — may walk away with less financial support than an athlete who wins once and never medals again. The system measures peaks, not the decade of work that produces them.

More than 40 per cent of elite athletes were financially worse off than a year ago, and more than one in four experienced a decline in their mental health in the past 12 months, according to the Australian Sports Foundation’s survey. These are not abstract statistics. They describe the actual conditions under which Queensland’s future Olympians are attempting to prepare for the most significant sporting event ever held on Australian soil.

Some recent responses have been meaningful. The previous federal government delivered what was described as the largest ever investment in Olympic and Paralympic sports, with a record $283 million in new money flowing to elite athletes, coaches and support staff over two years. Investment in Paralympic athletes and sports more than doubled, with $54.9 million in additional funding — the biggest ever Paralympic spend by an Australian Government. The Australian Olympic Committee, for its part, launched the Olympian Futures Fund in late 2025. The fund is powered by the legacy of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games and the Australian Olympic Foundation, which was established in 1996. The AOF received a capital injection of $88 million from Sydney 2000, and in the 25 years since, total distributions to the AOC reached $195 million by 31 December 2025.

These are genuine steps. But they address symptoms more than causes, and they often arrive too late — after careers have stalled, families have been placed under strain, and talented athletes have already quietly decided that the sacrifice is no longer sustainable.

THE QUEENSLAND SYSTEM AND ITS REACH.

Queensland has built one of the more comprehensive athlete development systems in Australia. The Queensland Academy of Sport, which sits within the state’s sport infrastructure, describes its goal plainly: to provide world-class support, in particular expert Performance Services, to Queensland’s pre-elite and elite athletes. The QAS currently supports over 450 athletes ranging from talented juniors through to Olympic, Paralympic and World Championships medallists.

At the talent identification end, the YouFor2032 program — one of the more visible initiatives associated with the Brisbane bid — has been designed specifically to widen the pipeline. The goal is to give all young Queenslanders, no matter where they live or what experience they have, the opportunity to discover their athletic potential and pursue a future in high-performance sport. Athletes aged 8–23 for Olympic sports, or 13–30 for Paralympic sports, are eligible for the program. In February 2025, Queensland deepened its investment in the Paralympic end of that pipeline. The Queensland Government, in partnership with the Australian Institute of Sport and Paralympics Australia, launched a new Para-Unit to double the pipeline of Para athletes ahead of Brisbane 2032.

At the employment end, the QAS has built the Dream Twice program — a direct response to the financial double-bind facing elite athletes. The QAS Dream Twice Program continued to gain momentum, securing additional partnerships with Queensland businesses. This initiative creates flexible, paid employment opportunities for QAS-supported athletes, enabling them to balance their sporting and professional aspirations. The program acknowledges what many policy frameworks have been slow to accept: that an athlete who cannot pay rent is not in an optimal position to chase a world record. Stability and performance are not in tension. They are, for most athletes, prerequisites to each other.

The challenge is that these programs — however well-designed — reach only a portion of the athletes Queensland will need. YouFor2032 is not the only way for Queensland athletes to get to the Olympic or Paralympic Games. There are already great talent pathways operating at the local, regional and state levels where athletes identified are given opportunities through the respective sporting organisations. But those local and regional pathways vary enormously in quality and resourcing, and the athletes who fall outside the QAS umbrella often fall between the gaps of the support system entirely.

THE IDENTITY PROBLEM NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT.

Beyond the immediate financial pressures, there is a deeper structural issue that the approaching Games make more urgent: the absence of durable civic and professional identity for Queensland’s athletes.

Sport careers, even successful ones, are short. As Paris 2024 and LA28 Australian Olympic Team Chef de Mission Anna Meares noted, 70 per cent of Summer Olympians only go to one Games. It is not easy to be an Olympian, and it is even harder to have longevity as an Olympian. An athlete who competes in Brisbane 2032 will likely be in their mid-to-late twenties. They will have spent a decade or more preparing for that moment. And when it passes — whether they medal or do not, whether they retire that year or compete for another cycle — they will need to build a life beyond elite sport with very little institutional scaffolding beneath them.

In the era of social media-driven personal branding for athletes, the significance of aligning athlete brand identity with consumer perceptions is paramount. This alignment underscores the need for athletes to actively manage their online presence, influencing endorsements, salaries, and post-athletic career opportunities. Research has consistently found that strong personal brands offer enduring benefits, facilitating career transitions and post-retirement opportunities. Yet the infrastructure to build that kind of identity — and to anchor it to something permanent, something that does not disappear when a sponsorship deal expires or a social media platform changes its algorithm — is not something athletes receive as a matter of course.

The strategic challenge for any athlete in this environment becomes one of narrative sovereignty: how to retain authorship of their own story when the platforms through which that story is told are owned by others. An athlete whose entire digital presence exists on third-party platforms has no permanent address — no place that is unambiguously theirs, that cannot be deplatformed, algorithmically suppressed, or simply lost when a company changes its terms of service.

This is not a trivial concern in the context of Brisbane 2032. Queensland is about to become one of the most-watched places on earth. The athletes who represent it — in the pool, on the track, in the velodrome, on the water — will carry Queensland’s name into billions of homes. The question is whether they will have anything permanent to come back to when the cameras move on.

WHAT THE SYSTEM GETS RIGHT — AND WHERE THE GAPS REMAIN.

It is worth being precise about where the existing athlete support architecture performs well, because precision matters here more than polemic. The QAS provides genuine services: sports science, physiotherapy, nutritional advice, psychological support, and increasingly, career transition assistance through the Athlete Wellbeing and Engagement team. The Queensland Academy of Sport supports the integrated holistic development of athletes that encompasses physical, emotional, mental and social requirements, to achieve sustained success as a person and in their athletic pursuits.

The QAS partnership with Queensland University of Technology, for example, offers a direct and practical response to the tension between full-time training and the need for qualifications. QAS-supported athletes have the chance to pursue university studies at QUT through a scholarship partnership. Five athletes enrolled or commencing study at QUT are selected for $10,000 scholarships paid over two years, with the program aimed at helping athletes balance training with study by alleviating some of the financial burden, as well as providing extra personal and professional support. These are meaningful structures.

But they are structures designed for the QAS’s supported athlete cohort — a group that, while significant, represents only the uppermost tier of Queensland’s elite sport ecosystem. The athletes who are not yet on the QAS radar, the ones competing in regional centres or emerging in less-funded sports, the para-athletes still building their pathways — these athletes exist in a landscape that is far less structured and far more precarious.

There is a danger, noted in The Conversation’s analysis of the new fundraising model, that athletes best skilled in marketing and public relations will receive more funding under philanthropy-based support models. This is a real structural risk. The athletes most capable of leveraging their own identity to attract donations are, by definition, those who are already more visible, more commercially capable, and more resourced. The quieter athlete — the regional rower, the emerging para-thrower from Cairns, the teenage decathlete who has no media profile yet — may fall further behind not because their talent is lesser, but because their platform is smaller.

THE DECADE-LONG PREPARATION WINDOW.

From the 2021 selection of Brisbane as host city, Queensland has eleven years to prepare for the Games. In practical terms, for the athletes who will actually compete in 2032, that preparation window is even shorter. A swimmer who is seventeen in 2026 and peaking at twenty-three in 2032 has six years to build the kind of career — and the kind of financial and civic foundation — that will sustain them through and beyond the Games.

As the Australian Institute of Sport has noted, in some sports it can take eight to twelve years to identify and develop a talented young athlete with potential through to being a contender for medals at major international events. It requires long-term planning, commitment and investment. The infrastructure that supports that long-term development is not just the training facility or the coaching program. It is the financial stability that allows an athlete to train without holding two jobs. It is the educational pathway that does not require an athlete to choose between their sport and their future. It is the professional identity that does not evaporate the moment competition ends.

Eight of the athletes identified through YouFor2032 have already been fast-tracked into a QAS Talent Support Program, designed to develop athletes considered genuine medal prospects in Los Angeles 2028 and leading into Brisbane 2032. That is encouraging. But the pipeline for Brisbane 2032 is not eight athletes or eighty. It is, by any honest accounting, hundreds — and the conditions under which those hundreds are currently preparing are, for too many of them, inadequate.

THE CIVIC DIMENSION OF ATHLETE IDENTITY.

There is a civic argument here that runs alongside the economic one, and it is worth making separately.

When Brisbane 2032 is spoken of as a legacy event — as something that will shape Queensland for a generation — the conversation tends to focus on infrastructure, tourism, and economic activation. These are legitimate concerns. But a Games leaves another kind of legacy too: the athletes who carry the host city’s name, who are claimed by that city as its own, who become — for a few weeks and for years afterward — ambassadors for a place and a way of life.

Brisbane 2032 aspires to be a Games where people can reach their full potential on and off the sporting field. That aspiration is worth taking seriously. Reaching full potential on the sporting field requires the structural conditions described above — financial support, educational access, stable career pathways. But reaching full potential off the field requires something else: a durable connection between the athlete and the place that shaped them. An identity that is not merely transactional — here for the Games, gone for the next sponsorship — but genuinely civic, genuinely placed, genuinely permanent.

The question of how that kind of civic identity gets encoded and preserved is one of the more interesting problems that the digital era has opened up for host cities. Athletes who compete at Brisbane 2032 will generate an enormous volume of digital presence — social media, news coverage, biographical records, performance data — in the weeks surrounding the Games. Most of that material will exist on platforms that are not controlled by Queensland, not governed by Queensland, and not permanently associated with Queensland in any meaningful sense. It will drift.

The namespace that Queensland.foundation operates — built around TLDs including .brisbane2032 — offers a civic counterpoint to this drift. An athlete associated with Brisbane 2032, whose contribution to the Games is anchored through a permanent, place-specific address, has something that a transient social media presence cannot provide: a fixed civic coordinate. Something like athletes.brisbane2032 or an athlete’s own permanently assigned identity within the Games namespace represents not a commercial product but a civic infrastructure decision — the same kind of decision that determines whether a stadium has a permanent name or one that expires with its sponsorship contract.

BEFORE THE CEREMONY — THE WORK THAT MATTERS MOST.

The opening ceremony of Brisbane 2032 is scheduled for 23 July 2032. That is six years from now. In the context of elite sport preparation, six years is simultaneously a long time and not nearly enough. It is long enough to develop a junior athlete into an Olympian. It is not long enough to build — from scratch — the financial security, educational foundation, career framework, and civic identity that those athletes will need to compete at their best and to have a life worth living after the flame goes out.

The argument of this essay is not that Queensland is failing its athletes. The QAS, the YouFor2032 program, the federal investment in high-performance sport, and the recent initiatives around the Olympian Futures Fund all represent genuine, sometimes substantial, commitments. Queensland’s 2032 Delivery Plan, according to the Minister for Sport, was designed to secure a legacy for both grassroots sports and high-performance sports, delivering facilities for athletes competing at an international level but also for Queenslanders of all ages, abilities and localities who play sport in their communities.

The argument is narrower than that, and more urgent. It is that the structures currently in place — however well-intentioned — do not fully address the precarity that defines the lived experience of most elite athletes in the years before a major Games. As the Australian Olympic Committee’s chief executive observed at the time of the ASF’s Running on Empty findings: “As we look to the future, particularly Brisbane 2032, we cannot afford to see these inspiring young athletes walk away from their dreams.” That is precisely right. And ensuring they do not walk away requires more than medal bonuses and talent identification programs, important as those are.

It requires financial structures that provide a floor — not just a ceiling. It requires educational partnerships that acknowledge that elite athletes are not students who also train, but people trying to hold two serious commitments together. It requires employment models, like the Dream Twice program, that recognise the value of an athlete’s non-sporting identity rather than treating it as a distraction from performance. And it requires — perhaps most importantly — a civic infrastructure that treats Queensland’s athletes not as temporary ambassadors whose relevance expires on the day of the closing ceremony, but as permanent contributors to the identity of a place.

The stadiums will be built. The ceremonies will be planned. The world will arrive in July 2032 and it will be extraordinary. What Queensland owes its athletes is not just a world-class venue on the day they compete. It is the conditions — financial, institutional, civic, and digital — that allow them to arrive at that day fully prepared, and to leave it with something lasting to show for the years they gave.

That work does not begin after the Games. It has to begin now — or, honestly, it had to begin some years ago, and the window between here and 2032 is what remains.