Obscure athletes face financial challenges

LONDON – Over his remarkable career, Michael Phelps has struck sponsorship deals with Speedo, Subway, Under Armour athletic wear, Omega watches and Procter & Gamble.

But not everyone at the London Games can be showered with corporate largesse like the most decorated Olympian of all time. Most work one, two, even seven jobs while finding time to train to face fully funded pros.

In this battle of haves and have-nots at the London Games, the have-nots include a dentist and a disc jockey, a Buddhist monk and a one-time brothel owner.

Irish boxer Darren O’Neill quit his job teaching at Holy Trinity Primary School in Dublin to train full-time for the Olympics – and isn’t sure he’ll get the job back when he goes home.

“I enjoyed the teaching as a release from boxing, too, and took a risk in leaving,” he said.

O’Neill lost last week in his second bout, to Stefan Hartel of Germany, but he’ll go back to find a hand-painted banner on the school roof that says “GOOD LUCK MR. O’NEILL.”

Mark Adams, a spokesman for the International Olympic Committee, said the IOC distributes more than 90 percent of its revenue from TV rights and sponsorship deals to national Olympic committees, in part to ease the burden on athletes.

“We have a responsibility to balance an elite games with sport for all,” Adams said. “We try to make it as level a playing field as possible.”

That is more possible when national Olympic committees and sport federations receive government money.

When they don’t, or when there isn’t enough money to go around, athletes have little choice but to go it alone – eking out a living and scrambling for sponsorship deals when they can get them.

That includes the United States. The U.S. Olympic Committee is a nonprofit that gets no help from the federal government.

Nick Symmonds, a four-time U.S. outdoor track champion in the 800-meter, auctioned a spot on his shoulder on eBay for $11,100 for a temporary tattoo with the name of the highest bidder.

Hanson Dodge Creative made the winning bid, but Symmonds had to cover the shoulder because of IOC rules preventing athletes from hawking their brands during the Olympics.

Japanese equestrian rider Kenki Sato has one of the more unusual full-time jobs: He’s a monk at his family’s Buddhist temple near Nagano, the site of the 1998 Winter Games.

Sato acknowledged he was probably the only Olympian with such a profession but said the discipline of his day job – he sometimes spends 19 hours a day sitting and meditating – helps him while he’s riding.

Logan Campbell’s extracurricular job has perhaps raised the most eyebrows this Olympics season. The New Zealand taekwondo fighter opened a high-end brothel in 2009 in Auckland to finance his training and travel schedule ahead of the Olympics so his family wouldn’t have to bear the burden. Prostitution is legal in New Zealand.

“At the time, taekwondo wasn’t getting any funding at all,” Campbell said earlier this year. “So it was pretty much to get good at the sport, you had to get international competition, and there wasn’t any funding for us.”

Campbell, who competes Thursday, sold the brothel in 2010 after he was criticized by Taekwondo New Zealand and the national Olympic committee – and, more importantly, after sponsors started funding the sport.

Phelps started building his brand early, when he signed a sponsorship agreement with Speedo in 2001. Now he makes $5 million to $10 million a year. After the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where Phelps won eight gold medals, his agent, Peter Carlisle, predicted Phelps would make $100 million over his lifetime.

Phelps returned the favor Sunday, his first official day of retirement after becoming the most decorated Olympian of all time.

He likened sponsor support to having “a family away from home” and said it gave him “the freedom to train 100 percent and focus on what I needed to do. That’s something I’ve been very fortunate to have.”

He said it at a press event sponsored by Visa.