IDK, to me there’s a difference between “not full-time employed as an athlete” and “not helped with expenses for participating in the Olympics”

Expenses could be orders of magnitude more than an individual's fulltime salary. Just think of the equestrian disciplines, for example, where it's pretty obvious that being independently wealthy with millions to spend on your campaign with zero hope of making that money back is just what it takes to participate. You're spending those millions and devoting your life to athletics, in preference to any pursuit that's actually, you know, productive, to compete with other similarly-positioned people for what, within the circles you travel in, passes as the ultimate status symbol.

Even as things currently are, it absolutely infuriates me, that my money is taken from me involuntarily (as an involuntary license payer for public broadcasting in Germany) and given to the IOC to line the pockets of corrupt officials and further aims that I disapprove of, like overtourism and everything that surrounds the building of an olympic village etc. Every single cent's worth of transfer from my pocket to Isabel Werth's is just adding insult to injury.