Mike Coppola/Getty Images; Steph Chambers/Getty Images; Mike Coppola/Getty Images
Starting this week, nearly three million people will converge on Paris for the 2024 Olympic Games. But when some of the world's top athletes leave the field (or lane, or pool, or field) and enter the Olympic Village, they won't just be having the most monumental experience of their lives: They'll be getting their day job: creating content.
Most people think of Olympic athletes for the medals, attention, and national pride they receive while competing, but behind the accolades is a rigorous infrastructure that requires athletes to put in hours of practice and tens of thousands of dollars to even have a chance to compete. Frankly, it takes more than skill to take an athlete from elite to Olympic level: it takes money, too.
Mainstream athletes like Michael Phelps, Simone Biles, and Shacarie Richardson can make millions of dollars in sponsorship deals with apparel and lifestyle companies, which they can use to stay competitive. But most Olympians don't get these offers. A 2020 survey of 500 Olympic-level athletes in 48 countries found that 58% don't consider themselves “financially stable.” Olympians who compete in national and international competitions may practice 12 to 55 hours a week, and can barely afford to work an additional 9-to-5 job. There is also no specific prize money awarded to all Olympic athletes who win a medal. Instead, it is left to individual countries and the governing bodies of each sport to decide whether there is a prize money. For Team USA, the prize money for Olympic gold medalists is $37,500, and silver and bronze medalists are $22,500 and $15,000, respectively, but only if they win.
That's where influencers come in. Over the past eight years, content creation has gone from an exotic way for athletes to build their brands to a side hustle for Olympic hopefuls. On TikTok and YouTube, popular accounts who join their creator programs can earn more than $6,000 a month from views alone, and that doesn't include brand deals. Rolling Stone When we spoke to some of the most popular Olympians, they told us they started their content creation careers to get audiences excited about their sports. But as the creator economy expands, these elite athletes are blazing a new trail so Olympians can earn money while doing what they love.
Before Tara Davis-Woodhall was a two-time USA long jumper, she was a college athlete with a popular Instagram account. But when she met and started dating her now-husband, Paralympian Hunter Woodhall, the couple found themselves stoked online interest in their daily lives. Their first paycheck from YouTube was $3,200, a jolt to their college bank account. (“I was like, I'm dropping out of school,” Woodhall laughs. “I thought I could survive on that,” Davis-Woodhall says.) Now, both 25, they run a YouTube vlog channel with more than 700,000 subscribers, plus separate TikTok accounts, which they consider theirs full-time jobs.
“I'm a Paralympian and Tara is a long jumper, neither of which are high-revenue events in athletics,” Woodhall says. “We both love athletics and we knew that doing it on our own wouldn't give us the life we wanted. [content creation] It changed everything.”
“Honestly, it has changed our lives,” Davis-Woodhall adds. “We can buy the best nutrition, we can hire the best doctors, we can pay our coaches. We can give it our all without having to worry about money.”
Some Olympians have found success as content creators much later in their careers. USA Rugby player Ilona Maher made her Olympic debut in 2021 at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and quickly gained fame for her humorous streams from inside the Olympic Village. Now with 1.1 million followers on TikTok, the Olympian and creator gives her followers a year-round look behind the scenes at USA Rugby. Maher declined to comment on the subject as she is preparing for the 2024 Olympics, but told NBC Sports in 2023 that her success on TikTok has changed her life and career.
“My main goal going into the Olympics was to bring attention to my sport,” she said. “People say that when you go to the Olympics, you become a completely different person. I didn't become a different person, but I gained a lot more followers and more recognition. The Olympics definitely changed me. It changed my career, how I make money now, and even the influence I have.”
Dani Ramirez has long understood that few people are familiar with the world of artistic swimming. The sport, once called synchronized swimming, first made it into the Olympics just 40 years ago. But in 2023, Ramirez is working to bridge that information gap. Now she's an Olympic hopeful in the pool and an ASMR star with more than 400,000 followers online. Artistic swimmers use Knox gelatin powder to achieve sleek hairstyles for their performances, and about half a million people have tuned into Ramirez's video page to watch her peel and scrape the caked substance out of her hair.
Ramirez knows his content is unique, Rolling Stone She sees the ASMR videos as a gateway to learning more about artistic swimming. “The part that fascinates people is that it can be very confusing at first glance,” she says. “Then once you find out what it's actually about, you fall down a rabbit hole of a sport you've never seen before. Having the opportunity to introduce my sport to so many people, even if only through our extreme hairstyles, is an incredible blessing.”
Sports awareness may seem like a small thing, but Rolling Stone He highlighted how audience interest will change the compensation structure for athletes. Take women's basketball, for example. In 2024, the WNBA recorded its highest attendance in 26 years. The surge in fan interest has sold out arenas and helped players like A'ja Wilson and Caitlin Clark become household names, earning multimillion-dollar endorsement deals in the process. So when cameras capture every aspect of the 2024 Olympics in the coming weeks, millions of loyal fans will be glued to behind-the-scenes reporters like Woodhall, Ramirez and Maher.
“It seems mundane to us because we do it every day, but our schedule, the training we do, the lifestyle we live is so interesting that people want to pay attention to it,” Woodhall says, “and I think it just proves that this is really something the world wants to see and know about, and that everyone can benefit from.”
