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t costs Avery Poppinga about $50,000 a year to be a professional beach volleyball player. Coaching, flights, hotels, gear — nearly all of it out of pocket, because USA Volleyball stipends go to only its top four teams. For most of her career she worked a remote job just to stay in the sport. Then she signed a sponsorship deal with OnlyFans, left the remote job, and had what she told Front Office Sports was “the most fulfilling year I’ve ever had in the sport.”
She is one of roughly 285 professional athletes now on the platform — speedskaters, cliff divers, ultrarunners, tennis players — in a sponsorship program OnlyFans has been quietly expanding since 2022. The roster includes Belgian Olympic gold medalist Bart Swings, who posts entirely SFW injury recovery content and calls the deal a “really a meaningful part” of his income. It includes British Olympic diver Jack Laugher, who said on the eve of the Paris 2024 Games that his OnlyFans account had “saved his life.” And it includes ATP player Alexandre Müller, currently ranked around No. 50 in the world, who said the deal covers coaches and a personal physio at tournaments — expenses tennis players outside the top tier pay entirely themselves.
Then there are the Rozentals brothers, Latvian-British canoe slalom competitors who joined OnlyFans to cover the six-figure cost of a four-year Olympic cycle — and who have been considerably less coy about what kind of content they make, joking publicly about their “sugar daddies” and side careers as “mattress actors.” Kurts earned £100,000 in five months and then got banned for two years by Paddle UK and removed from the national lottery-funded World Class Programme. His brother left Team GB for Team Latvia as a precaution. Last month, both posted behind-the-scenes clips of a shirtless photo shoot for their new sponsor. The sponsor was OnlyFans.
Some European sports press has called the whole athlete push sportswashing — a porn platform using Olympic credentials to rehabilitate its image. It’s not an entirely wrong read. OnlyFans is absolutely getting something out of these deals, and that something is press coverage where its name appears next to “Olympian” instead of other words. But the sportswashing frame only works if you accept that adult content is a stain requiring removal, which is a mainstream media assumption, not an industry one. The platform succeeded because sex workers built real businesses on it. The athletes being paid to fund careers their governing bodies have chronically underfunded are not cover for that — they’re just the latest proof that OnlyFans will write a check when nobody else will.
The UCI classifies the OnlyFans logo alongside tobacco and alcohol and has threatened to bar athletes from competition for displaying it, per Singletracks. Paddle UK suspended its own Olympic-track athletes over it. Meanwhile, the platform keeps adding names to the roster and, per The Village Voice, offers deals with no morality clauses (something that brands like Adidas and HOKA cannot say). The governing bodies have decided that a subscription content platform is where they draw the line, apparently unbothered by the fact that they never drew one around chronic underfunding, unpaid training costs, or athletes working construction to afford the Olympics. The organizations protecting the “integrity” of their sports from platforms built on sex work never got around to protecting their athletes from poverty. That oversight is now OnlyFans’s opportunity.
Sources:
Source reporting: Front Office Sports, Hilary George-Parkin, May 2026
