When the Olympic Games wrap up, it can be difficult to sustain a career as an athlete if you’re in a niche sport.
Tennis players, basketball stars and gymnasts often have endorsement deals and pro contracts waiting when they get home. To make a living, artistic swimmers, breakdancers and other niche athletes often take on extra gigs, which they balance with hours of training each day. Marketplace spoke to several of these niche athletes to find out how they’ve made ends meet.
American athletes across all sports receive a nice cash prize if they medal. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee awards athletes $37,500 for each gold they win, $22,500 for silver and $15,000 for bronze.
The U.S. artistic swimming team nabbed the silver in Paris, earning its first Olympic medal since 2004. Training with a decorated, Olympic-level national team is a full-time gig in and of itself, said Anita Alvarez, a member of this year’s team and a three-time Olympian.
Members get a stipend from the U.S. committee, which helps. When Alvarez joined the national team, she was getting $200 to $300 a month.
“Now, based on how many Olympics you’ve been to, how many world championships, things like that, you’ll get more,” she said. She’s currently getting about $2,000 a month.
Artistic swimmers can also make money through competitions like the 2024 World Aquatics Championships. First-place winners receive $20,000 in solo and duet events.
But while Alvarez has to work less than she used to, allowing her to focus more on training, swimmers like her still have to find other ways to make money. Alvarez moved from New York to California when she was 16 so she could train full time with the national team. Supporting herself has been a challenge over the years, especially living in California, which has some of the highest housing costs in the nation.
“For example, I do some coaching within the sport,” Alvarez said. Coaches might charge $30 an hour if they’re teaching a club team, but then can set their own rate if they’re doing private lessons, she said.
Artistic swimmers have also found alternative revenue streams thanks to the popularity of platforms like Instagram and TikTok. For example, Alvarez’s teammate Daniella Ramirez made TikTok videos about how artistic swimmers manage their hair.
“She, since then, has been making a living, basically, off of her TikTok and Instagram reels,” Alvarez said. The popularity of those videos has not only been “huge for her,” but “huge for the sport,” she added.
There are also opportunities in the entertainment industry, Alvarez said. “We have so much skill and talent in the water in general that anything water-based is doable for us,” she said.
Swimmers can get hired for work parties, music videos, commercials, movies, weddings and Cirque du Soleil shows. Alvarez can earn $300 for one-off shows if she’s referred through the entertainment company she works for, while a commercial or film work can net her $10,000.
“A couple years ago, I got hired for ‘[Black Panther:] Wakanda Forever,’ the movie, for an underwater stunt,” Alvarez said.
But it can be tough to juggle jobs. You have to find “little pockets” of time to earn an income, Alvarez said.
“I was working at a sporting goods store for probably three years after my first Olympics. And I would work late nights. I would go from the pool straight to the store and work until closing,” Alvarez said.
Janet Redwine, a member of the 2008 U.S. Olympic artistic swimming team, said she and most of her teammates were fortunate to have financial support from their families as they trained in California for the Games.
After artistic swimmers are done with the competitive circuit, they can stay involved in the sport by coaching, as Redwine did for a while.
“I just felt this really great desire to give back what I had been given,” said Redwine, who’s now director of program success at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business.
Alvarez said she thinks more people are starting to understand how challenging artistic swimming is and gaining greater respect for the sport.
During this year’s Olympics, the team moonwalked to Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.”
“That was kind of everywhere throughout the Olympics, which was cool, and people posted about how impressive and hard it was,” Alvarez said.
Alvarez hopes artistic swimming becomes more mainstream. While she’s done short-term collaborations with companies, she’s aiming to develop longer partnerships.
“There’s so much potential for us as athletes, as artists, as performers and entertainers. There’s so much that comes with our sport and what we do,” Alvarez said.
Read more about how table tennis players and breakdancers make a living.
Defend your splurge with Josh Gondelman
Money messes with all our lives, but the right purchase at the right time can make things a little better. Tell us how you’ve treated yourself lately by replying to this email, and we’ll include the best stories in our newsletter!
This week’s splurge comes from writer and comedian Josh Gondelman. We love his stand-up special “People Pleaser” and his Substack full of great pep talks, like this one for tomatoes. Here’s Josh:
There’s an old saying about how time is money. It goes: “Time is money.” But what we don’t talk about as much is that money can be time. I started dating my (now) wife immediately after I got my first job that paid a real adult salary. Soon after that, the mutual friend who introduced us invited us to her wedding across the country. In true early-relationship mode (aka pretending to be someone I am absolutely not), I quickly began looking for plane tickets. My wife now knows that I’d book tickets on the way to the airport if I could, but that’s beside the point.
The flight I selected necessitated a pre-6 a.m. wakeup to catch a connecting flight somewhere in the Midwest, getting us into town juuuuust before the festivities began. Maris (that’s my wife’s name) looked at the listings and pointed to the next option down. For $40 each, we could hop on a direct flight from New York to Seattle that didn’t leave until 10 a.m. and landed by 1 p.m. After crunching the numbers, I realized that I was in possession of $80, and I booked those tickets instead. For the cost of dinner and drinks at Applebee’s, I’d purchased two hours of sleep, and an extra half day of regular, non-airport life for the two of us. Maris opened up my mind to a new way of living, and I’ve never looked back. As long as it only costs $40.
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