Wealth & Money Quote by Sergei Bubka

Bubka’s line lands like a quiet rebuke to the late-20th-century sports world that helped make him famous: the era when athletes became brands, events became content, and “growth” got measured in sponsorships and TV rights. Coming from a pole-vaulter who turned world records into a near-annual ritual, it’s not an anti-money rant so much as an insistence on proportion. He’s speaking as someone who benefited from sport’s commercialization and still wants to redraw its center of gravity.

The intent is managerial and moral at once: don’t mistake the engine for the destination. “Not enough” is doing heavy lifting here. He isn’t claiming money is irrelevant; he’s arguing it’s insufficient as a guiding principle. That framing is strategic, especially for an athlete who later operated inside sport’s institutions. It’s the language of reform that doesn’t alienate investors: keep the business, but stop letting it run the entire show.

The subtext is about legitimacy. When sport over-indexes on revenue, it risks hollowing out the very product that generates it: trust in competition, investment in athletes’ development, and a sense that greatness isn’t just a marketing campaign. Bubka’s credibility comes from his own discipline-heavy craft, where success is literally measured in centimeters. He’s implying that sport’s hardest things to quantify - purpose, fairness, long-term stewardship - are exactly what keep it from collapsing into entertainment with a scoreboard.