These Olympians Are Moonlighting as Influencers to Pay the Bills
Starting this week, close to 3 million people will descend on Paris for the 2024 Olympic games. But when some elite athletes step off the field — or lane, or pool, or field — and into the village, they won’t just be experiencing a monumental life experience. They’ll be clocking into their day jobs: content creation.
While most people think of the medals, attention, and national pride Olympic athletes receive during competition, underneath the praise is a grueling infrastructure that requires competitors to put up hours of practice and tens of thousands of dollars to get the chance to compete. Put frankly, taking an athlete from good to Olympic level requires more than skill. It requires cash.
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Mainstream athletes like Michael Phelps, Simone Biles, and Sha’Carri Richardson can make millions from sponsorship deals with apparel or lifestyle companies, which can be used to keep them in competitive shape. But most Olympians don’t get these kinds of offers. In 2020, a survey of 500 Olympic-level athletes across 48 countries found that 58 percent didn’t consider themselves “financially stable.” Olympian athletes who participate in national and international competitions can practice anywhere from 12 to 55 hours a week, leaving little room for additional nine-to-five careers. There’s also no specific prize money awarded to every medaling Olympian. Instead, it’s up to individual countries and the governing bodies of their sports to determine prize money, if any. For Team USA, the prize money for Olympic gold medalists is $37,500, with silver and bronze medalists receiving $22,500 and $15,000 respectively, but that’s only if you win.
Enter influencing. In the past eight years, content creation has gone from an oddball way for athletes to build a brand to one of the go-to side hustles for Olympic hopefuls. On TikTok and YouTube, popular accounts that participate in creator programs can earn upwards of $6,000 every month through views alone — which doesn’t include brand deals. Rolling Stone spoke to some of the most popular Olympian influencers who say they started their content-creation careers to get audiences excited about their sports. But as the creator economy expands, these elite athletes are carving a new path for how Olympians can do what they love and make money at the same time.
Before Tara Davis-Woodhall was a two-time Team USA long jumper, she was a collegiate athlete with a popular Instagram account. But when she met and began dating her now-husband, Paralympic athlete Hunter Woodhall, the two realized there was rabid online interest in their day-to-day lives. Their first significant check from YouTube was $3,200 — a shock for their college bank accounts. (We were like, ‘We’re dropping out of school,” Woodhall laughs. “We thought we could live life with that,” Davis-Woodhall says.) Now the 25-year-olds run individual TikTok accounts in addition to a YouTube vlogging channel with over 700,000 subscribers — and consider their accounts their full-time jobs.
“I’m a Paralympian, and Tara is a female long jumper, and neither of those are high-grossing events in the sport of track and field,” Woodhall says. “We love track and field, and we knew that doing track and field on our own would not give us the life that we wanted. Genuinely, [content creation] has changed everything.”
“It honestly has changed our lives,” Davis-Woodhall adds. “We can buy the best nutrition, we can buy the best doctors, and pay our coaches. I’m able to put everything I can on the line without having to worry about the stress of money.”
Some Olympians have discovered success as content creators far later in their journeys. When Team USA rugby player Ilona Maher made her Olympic debut at the 2020 Tokyo Games in 2021, she gained lightning-speed fame for her humorous dispatches inside the Olympic Village. Now with 1.1 million followers on TikTok, the Olympian and creator spends all year bringing her followers behind the scenes with Team USA Rugby. Maher declined to comment for this story as she is preparing for the 2024 Olympics but told NBC Sports in 2023 that her success on TikTok transformed her life and career.
“My main goal going into it was to get more eyes on my sport,” she said. “People say you can go into the Olympics and come out a completely different person. I didn’t come out as a different person but I gained so many followers, I gained some more notoriety. It definitely transformed myself, even my career, how I make money now and my influence.”
Dani Ramirez has long understood that few people are well-versed in the world of artistic swimming. The sport, which used to be called synchronized swimming, only had its Olympic debut 40 years ago. But in 2023, Ramirez started pushing to close that information gap. Now, she’s an Olympic hopeful in the pool, and online she’s an ASMR star, with over 400,000 followers. Artistic swimmers use Knox gelatin powder to achieve their slick, performance hairstyles, and close to half a million people tune to Ramirez’s page to watch her peel and scratch the hardened substance out of her hair.
Ramirez knows that her content is unique, but she tells Rolling Stone that she considers her ASMR videos a gateway to learning more about artistic swimming. “The part that captivates people is it can be extremely confusing upon first glance,” she says. “Then when you learn what it’s really for, you fall down this rabbit hole of a sport that you’ve either never seen before. It’s an amazing blessing that I have the opportunity to introduce my sport to so many people even if it’s through our extreme hairstyle.”
Awareness about a sport can seem trivial but all of the athletes who spoke to Rolling Stone emphasized just how much audience interest changes the way athletes are paid. Just look at women’s basketball. In 2024, the WNBA had its highest attendance in 26 years — selling out arena after arena due to increased fan interest, making players like A’ja Wilson and Caitlin Clark household names, and banking them million-dollar endorsement deals in the process. So when cameras capture every aspect of the 2024 Olympics in a few weeks, a few faithful million will be glued to the behind-the-scenes coverage creators like the Woodhalls, Ramirez, and Maher can give.
“It feels so mundane to all of us because we do it every single day. But the schedules that we’re on, the training that we do, the way that we live our lives, is so interesting, and people want to pay attention to it,” Woodhall says. “And I think that’s just validating that this is really something that the world wants to see and wants to know about, and everyone can win from that.”
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