The Olympics may be the pinnacle of achievement for many athletes, but going for the gold is often a costly endeavor, which means that some of our finest sportspeople have pivoted to OnlyFans as a side hustle. Matthew Mitcham, the first out gay person to ever win an Olympic gold medal, recently came to the defense of athletes like him who are using the subscription-based site as an additional source of income.
In an op-ed for British daily newspaper The Telegraph, Mitcham, a retired Australian springboard diver, got candid about the economic realities of being a professional athlete. Responding to an article that The Telegraph had published earlier this week about a group of currently active younger professional athletes who are also posting content to OnlyFans, Mitcham wrote, “The world can be very prudish. It feels like people like to shame athletes who show off their bodies, even though there’s usually no full-frontal nudity involved.”
“My attitude – as a former Olympic Champion who has been posting content on OnlyFans for 18 months – is that it’s a useful way of supplementing income,” he wrote. “After all the hours and sacrifice we’ve put in, we athletes have more than earned the odd side-hustle.”
Mitcham added that since he retired from diving in 2016, his income has slowed down, and revenue from his OnlyFans has helped him make ends meet. But joining the site was a thoroughly thought-out decision that he approached with “an abundance of caution.” The former diver still hasn’t shown full-frontal nudity on his page, saying, “that’s when people can start taking issue, and it would almost certainly start to impact my mainstream opportunities.”
“The harsh truth of sport is that a small percentage of athletes make it big. Those people might be rewarded with lots of juicy sponsorships, but we’re talking about only the most beautiful and charismatic of Olympic champions,” he wrote. “A lot of brilliant performers get left behind.”
Mitcham pointed to British diver Jack Laugher, who became the country’s first Olympic diving champion in 2016, and who was among the first of a group of British divers to announce his OnlyFans debut recently. In a recent interview with The Daily Mail, the 30-year-old Laugher revealed that he only receives funding of £28,000 a year, or roughly $35,962 USD, and added that there are very few commercial opportunities for divers. In his op-ed Mitcham wrote that even that amount was “still better remuneration than what I remember us receiving in Australia.”
The amount of money that Olympians make varies between countries and events, but a recent Marketwatch analysis of a report from the Commission on the State of the U.S. Olympics & Paralympics found that a shocking 26.5% of current U.S. Olympic athletes earn less than $15,000 a year. And unlike other sporting events, Olympians don’t earn a salary for competing in the games; they rely on stipends from their home countries, with additional payouts if they win a medal.
To conclude his op-ed, Mitcham wrote that while there is an admitted “stigma attached to modelling on OnlyFans,” athletes can either “play safe and stay within the system, or you can decide to be a maverick – one of those people who steps outside the system and changes it.”
“There’s no logical reason why sharing tailored content with a specific group of supportive, liberal fans should affect an athlete’s ability to appeal to the mainstream,” he said. “Let’s hear it for the mavericks, I say.”
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