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Crowdfunding and the plight of the underappreciated Olympian

Jeremy Taiwo competes during the decathlon pole vault event at the 2016 U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials. (AP)
Jeremy Taiwo competes during the decathlon pole vault event at the 2016 U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials. (AP)

The Olympics are a big-name event, but most Olympians are not big names.

With over 550 athletes on the 2016 U.S. roster alone, many of the world’s most talented individuals find themselves without major endorsement deals and barely able to put together the money to train for and attend the Games.

Jeremy Taiwo, a fifth-year decathlete at the University of Washington in 2013, wanted to be noticed by shoe companies during his final collegiate season. He was the runner-up in the NCAA decathlon that year, notching the seventh-best total in collegiate history, before qualifying for the World Championships in Russia. A knee injury kept him from placing there.

Injury concerns aside, he was convinced he should be getting paid. And then reality hit.

“My agent at the time was like, ‘Yeah, man, you’re not really worth anything,'” Taiwo said.

In the cutthroat world of track and field endorsements, there are limited funds to go around. The most marketable athletes – often long distance runners, Taiwo said – get the corporate deals, and those who miss the cut early can easily be overlooked time and time again.

Taiwo, whose father was a two-time Olympian for Nigeria, was able to secure a sponsorship with a local yoga studio where he went for free once a week, but it wasn’t until January 2016 that he got his first deal with a shoe company, Brooks. He was in the middle of a major transition at that same time, returning home from the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California.

“Coming back to Seattle I knew I was going to face some challenges because money wasn’t there for my event,” Taiwo said. “I was going to have to hustle, grind, do what I could to make ends meet while I was living at my parents’ house and trying to figure out how to get ready for the Olympics.”

With little corporate backing, he turned to a solution that more athletes are turning to in the digital age: crowdsourcing.

Success stories, inspiring as they are, are not always common.

Seven months and over $50,000 later, Taiwo has become one of the greatest tales of community-based support – the poster child of a movement that is forced to fend for itself.

With the help of his mom, Taiwo began his fundraising journey in December 2015, long before he knew whether he would be competing in Rio. They started a GoFundMe page, setting an original goal of $15,000 that would primarily help pay for his transportation and equipment costs.

“My mom had that foresight,” Taiwo said. “She said there was a community that wanted to help. She knew how hard it was training and working, and she knew how unfair it was for a lot of it. So she said to get a jump on this and start it up now.”

By the end of it, GoFundMe itself had contributed an additional $10,000 to Taiwo as part of a competition it held in the early summer. He learned of the prize a week after qualifying for Rio at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials in early July.

“We saw a lot of need out there in the athletic community, especially at the highest level with these Olympic hopefuls,” said GoFundMe CEO Rob Solomon. “We decided it would make sense to bring a lot more attention to what they’re doing in the pursuit of their Olympic dreams, and to help them out as well.”

With the influx of money, Taiwo said he will finally be able to pay his personal coach, Atanas Atanassov, who is also a volunteer coach at UW.

“Almost everything I’ve earned this year has gone back to the coaches that have helped me out,” he said. “They invested in me, I invest in my community.”

As more Rio hopefuls began searching for help on GoFundMe over the past year, the crowdsourcing site dedicated an entire section to the Rio Games, which includes campaigns for both Olympic and Paralympic athletes internationally. With less than two weeks before the Opening Ceremony, nearly $700,000 has been raised for 142 campaigns.

Other companies have noticed the market, even creating crowdsourcing sites devoted solely to the realm of athletics. For companies like GoFundMe, though, its broad reach means that athletic causes are simply part of the overall equation.

“My hope is in a few short years we’re the world’s largest fundraising platform – bigger than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at that point, bigger than United Way and all the big charities that are out there – and we’re well on our way to making that happen,” Solomon said. “In pursuit of that goal, I want to do much more of this.”

But fundraising is inherently time consuming and risky. Taiwo said he doesn’t think the system that supports athletes like him now is the only solution.

“The power is in the people,” he said. “Right now – this year – it was crowdfunding and relying on a community to do that.”

For him, though, there’s a bigger systematic issue at play.

“The Olympics are one of the biggest stages, apart from the Super Bowl, for companies’ advertisements … so is that going to go to the athletes who are the walking poster children and billboards that these countries actually use?” Taiwo said. “The majority of the athletes who go to these meets are incredible – the best in the world – and they’re broke.”