The Olympics brings in billions of dollars in ticketing, sponsorships, and broadcast revenue, yet individual athletes see very little of it. While no comprehensive studies exist, surveys of track-and-field athletes suggest that top-10 contenders make less than $16,000 per year. A recent Washington Postinvestigation reported that “most U.S. Olympic athletes cannot earn enough from their sports to make a living."
"We realized there's this huge fundraising problem in sports at the youth level, and then a very sorely needed revenue stream for pretty much every elite athlete except for the 1-percenters," says Dreamfuel founder Emily White. "So they have flocked to us, without much recruitment."
For White, Dreamfuel was a melding of her two passions: water sports and rock and roll. The daughter and granddaughter of swim coaches, she was a state champion in high school and attended Northeastern University on a swimming scholarship. But then she found herself on a different path—tour-managing a local punk-cabaret act called the Dresden Dolls. A decade later, having founded her own company managing rock stars, she happened across a swimmer who, it seemed, was already a rock star.
More than a decade earlier, in 2000, Anthony Ervin had won Olympic gold at the age of 19. Then he left the sport for a decade—to play in bands and wander the world and take recreational drugs—only to reemerge, in 2012, when he once again made the Olympic team. He wasn’t just good; he was cool. Cool enough to land a Rolling Stone profile. His social-media numbers were through the roof.
White found Ervin on Twitter and noticed he was a big music fan. Being in the music business, the bands—or their managers, or their social media folks—were people she knew. Soon, the Smashing Pumpkins and Alabama Shakes were tweeting “Good luck” at him. After his London games, White cold-e-mailed him, hoping to become his manager, and they met up in New York.
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