Thanks to a donation from Sanjay Malaviya, a health-care technology entrepreneur from Hespeler, Ontario, Canadian athletes will now earn $25,000 (€22,900) for a gold medal, $20,000 (€18,300) for a silver, and $15,000 (€13,700) for a bronze.

Malaviya has renewed his grants of $5,000 (€4,500) per medal, which he also provided retroactively in 2022 to Canada’s 130 Olympic and 53 Paralympic medalists from the 2022 Beijing Winter Games and the 2021 Tokyo Summer Games.

"During COVID, I woke up and read the news early. It was during the last Olympic cycle and an Australian businessman had given $5,000 (€4,500) for every summer Olympic Australian athlete because he was just so happy that the team went to the Olympics and did so well," he told The Canadian Press. "I just wondered 'wow, who is doing that in Canada?'"

The continuation of his Team Canada Podium Awards for both the Paris Games and the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina, Italy, supplements the $20,000 (€18,300) for gold, $15,000 (€13,700) for silver, and $10,000 (€9,100) for bronze provided by the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Committees.

"I really wanted the dollars to go directly to the athletes," Malaviya continued. "I've had a lot of calls from Olympians and Paralympians who really appreciated the recognition and acknowledgment. I was overwhelmed by that. I didn't really expect that. It just showed it made a difference for them which in the bottom of my heart was really what I was trying to do."

In comparison, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee's "Project Gold" offers $37,500 (€34,400) for gold, $22,500 (€20,600) for silver, and $15,000 (€13,700) for bronze. Hailing from Hespeler, Ontario, Malaviya has played a significant role in the recent announcement that Canada's Paralympic medalists will receive financial rewards for the first time in Paris, matching the levels provided to Olympic athletes who have been receiving medal bonuses since 2006.

Malaviya has committed $4 million (€3.6m) to an $8 million (€7.3m) endowment fund aimed at ensuring sustained financial support for Paralympians in the future. As the 56-year-old founder and chief executive officer of RL Solutions, Malaviya has also renewed his $100,000 (€91,700) contribution to NextGen athletes.

"He really, really cares about helping Team Canada athletes on the path to the podium," said Jacqueline Ryan, chief executive officer of the Canadian Olympic Foundation. "He is a nation builder, he cares about the role that these athletes play, so he wants to help fund them and make sure that they have all the resources they need on the path to the podium because they inspire us all."

In 1997, Malaviya established RL Solutions in Toronto, focusing on developing healthcare software tailored for patient feedback, incident reporting, and risk management. Following a merger with a London-based company in 2018, RL Solutions became RL Datix. Despite this transition, Malaviya remains a board member of the company, which now boasts 3,000 clients and a workforce of 2,000 spread across 19 countries.

Combining his grants for medals and contributions to the Paralympic committee's foundation for medal rewards, Malaviya has dedicated over $6 million (€5.5m) to Canadian athletes since 2022. "When you think of the calibre of people who compete at that level on the world stage, there's just no other way to get there than to be resilient, than to be persistent, than to know how to deal with failure, than to get up when you get knocked down and start again," Malaviya added.

"There's just no other way to become an Olympian, and to medal on top of that, you have to be in my books, representing all the values that I think are important. I have kids and I have to talk to them about what I think is important. Just about every value that I try to highlight as timeless, critical and important is embodied by an Olympian.

"Anything that brings us together, gets us excited in a positive way, gets us to forget our differences and really just unite, it's something that I want to really get behind and show I think these are the best qualities we can have as human beings."