Olympians turn to OnlyFans to fund dreams due to 'broken' finance system (2024)

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> I’d love to see that energy and drive applied to something that mattered.

>> I'd love to see that energy and drive rewarded and respected by society like self-actualization mattered, not just the next paycheck.

FTFY.

Let's not be condescending to athletic pursuit. Is that drive and passion really any different to the fuel of many a start-up hustler who, when their funding ran out, didn't really manage to change the world, with neither disruptive business model nor novel technical developments to show for it? Are they really so different from publish-or-perish academics toiling on some obscure edge of human knowledge which is more likely to either be a dead end or a small brick on which a cathedral of a grand discovery will be built upon rather than being THE paradigm-shifting, theory-unifying, revolutionary thesis?

Let's not be condescending to athletic pursuit because it's "just" entertainment. For a lot of people that struggle for faster, higher, stronger is inspiration, just as the early days of AirBnB/Facebook/Google is spoken of in hallowed tones in all-hands meetings, start-up mixers, and conferences, as motivation. Yeah, the ethics of the hustle might be questionable but fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, we all need heroes to look up to to some extent.

If code can be poetry then surely so can a gutsy maneuver, a clever tactic, or a sonofabitching Hail Mary of an opportunistic play. Sports---just as science, math, business, or literature---are narratives of struggle, human ingenuity, and achievement.

> Criticizing a system built mostly on government handouts

This was not what I was criticising. It was about turning someone’s life into entertainment and, in this extreme GoFundMe example, the right to life becoming a function of how entertaining one is.

> (by definition a socialist or communist structure)

Socialism and communism are not about government handouts. Both are about controlling the means of production (industries, farms) by the people (implying democratic representation). You might correctly argue that the Soviet Union was not a shining beacon of how to implement it, and this is what details almost every discussion on the subject.

When the Greeks invented the games the competitors were all buck naked and oiled up.

You ever think we should just cut out the middlemen? Skip the governments, the international organizations, the television networks, and get back to the basic principle of fit naked people doing fit naked things in front of an admiring audience.

At Strigil (YC '25) we're disrupting the Olympic market by combining best-of-breed athletic performance, carbon-neutral plant-based olive oil, and blockchain-enabled generative AI into a powerful democratized platform for distributing nudes of greased up hardbodies.

Our proprietary deep learning model has been trained on the world's largest corpus of ancient Greek horticulture texts and over one hundred million data points of Twitter users thirsting over Olympic athletes in order to select the optimal oil characteristics for each athlete to maximize viewer engagement during each competition.

Olives are harvested by our fleet of autonomous drones and pressed to order in our bespoke IoT oil presses (designed by Teenage Engineering) and delivered to athletes in amphora made of up to 20% recycled ocean plastic.

Athletes sign up for competitions via our mobile app (iOS only, Android coming soon). Though our partnerships with UberEats and DoorDash, world-class athletes are able to earn additional income by delivering burritos and hard seltzer to sedentary WfH software developers on their way to the games.

Each of our events is held in modern athletic facilities crowdsourced from areas of town your mother told you not to drive through at night, and streamed to viewers via our unnecessarily custom scalable streaming architecture written in Rust.

Viewers that do not wish to view sweaty naked bodies flexing and gyrating can purchase skins in the point shop or choose an ad-supported plan. Our real-time 3D vision model ensconces the rippling flesh of top athletes with ray-traced cloth simulation at resultions up to 4k, ensuring there is no nothing between you and pure athletic expression except a screen and message from one of our 937 advertising partners.

As part of our sustainability pledge, we've replaced the traditional Olympic medal made from non-renewable materials with fully digital NFT medals, allowing the victors to show off their accomplishments in their virtual trophy case in the metaverse. Launching Q3, athletes will even be able sell their valuable medals on the bustling NFT marketplace to when they're inevitably driven into crushing medical debt.

When parents and athletes decide to embark on this journey, it is well known that being an Olympian doesn't pay for many sports, similar to choosing your degree in college.

Maybe parents should rethink spending hundreds of thousands in coaching, training, travel, competitions, etc. from 12-18. I always chuckle when I read about an athlete getting a college scholarship, when it is clear that they already spent 4 times that on their development to get that scholarship.