Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Wednesday, February 25th.

Today on Forbes, many countries pay big bonuses for Olympic medals.

This one is on the hook for $7.8 million.

Italy spent billions of dollars preparing to host this year's Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina Dompezzo.

But now, after Sunday's closing ceremony and did two and a half weeks of heroics and heartbreak,

the country's tab is set to rise by another $7.8 million.

Ahead of the games, the Italian National Olympic Committee committed to paying a cash bonus

to any of the country's athletes who won a medal, roughly $213,000 for gold, $106,000 for silver,

and $71,000 for bronze.

Those figures were from the conversions to U.S. dollars at the exchange rate at the start of the Olympics.

And those rewards were generous. Among the 37 delegations that confirmed to Forbes

that they were offering financial incentives to Olympians who reached the podium, only Singapore,

Hong Kong, Poland, and Kazakhstan had plans for larger prizes. However, Singapore, offering roughly $78,000 for gold

in an individual sport, and Hong Kong, $768,000, were shut out of the medal table, as they have been

at every previous edition of the Winter Games, and Kazakhstan, $250,000, had a single top three performance,

Mikhail Shiderov's victory in men's figure skating over the heavily favored American

Ilya Malinin.

Poland, pledging a combined $355,000 for individual gold from its Olympic Committee and the

national government, fared better, with a total of four medals in ski jumping and speed skating.

Yet even that medal hall looks modest next to Italy, which automatically qualified for every

event as the Olympics host nation, and capitalized

by racking up 30 medals, the country's best ever result at a winter games, 10 medals better

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