It’s a long fall from the Olympic podium to financial ruin — but it’s not an uncommon path. Some of the golden girls and guys that nabbed medals, headlines and hearts years ago are now strapped for cash, selling their medals and even their bodies for money.
“People spend the better part of a decade trying to make an Olympic game or two. And when they finally decide to hang it up, they are behind their friends who entered the workforce a decade ago,” Tom Jackovic, CEO of the USA Track and Field Foundation, told The Post. “It’s always a struggle.”
Ryan Lochte competed in four summer games — 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016 — and became one of the most decorated swimmers in Olympic history, winning six gold medals, three silver and three bronze.
But, last month, the 41-year-old sold three of his golds at auction for a combined $385,520. He defended the move to fans on Instagram.
“I never swam for the gold medals,” he wrote on Instagram. “They were just the cherry on top of an incredible journey.”
The sale would seem to just be the latest troubled chapter for Lochte. In 2019, he told CNBC that he’d gone from making “well over $1 million” per year to just $75,000 from one sponsor and was living paycheck to paycheck.
In 2022, he sold his silver and bronze medals for $122,000. Last year, amidst his divorce from wife Kayla Reid, it was revealed that the couple were nearly $270,000 in debt.
Olympic diver Greg Louganis can relate. In 2025, he revealed that he had sold three of his five medals — two golds and one silver — for $437,000. He also said he’d sold his house because he “needed the money” and was moving to Panama.
“If I had proper management, I might not have been in that position,” Louganis, considered by many to be the greatest diver of all time, said.
Debi Thomas, now 58, initially had bright prospects after winning the bronze in figure skating in 1988 — following the epic “Battle of the Carmens” with East Germany’s Katarina Witt. She finished her undergrad at Stanford, went on to medical school at Northwestern, married a lawyer and became an orthopedic surgeon.
But her life fell apart amidst personal and internal struggles. By 2015, she was living in a bug-infested trailer after two divorces. She’d let her medical license lapse and lost her medal to bankruptcy.
“They can take away the medal, but they can’t take away the fact that I won it,” Thomas, the first African American to win a medal in the Winter Olympics, told The Post in 2018.
Selling a medal isn’t always a huge payday.
Hockey player Mark Wells, who was part of the historic 1980 “Miracle on Ice” team, offloaded his medal for just $40,000 in 2010 to pay for medical expenses. Later that year, the private buyer auctioned it off for $310,000.
In 2014, basketball player Vin Baker. got just over $67k for his medal.
Even when former Olympians don’t have to sell their precious medals, they can still face extreme hardship.
In 2024, American-sweetheart Mary Lou Retton — who won gold in gymnastics in 1984, when she was just 16 — contracted a rare form of pneumonia but lacked insurance to pay the hospital bills. Her daughters pushed out a fundraising campaign that brought in more than $459,000 to help the one-time queen of the bars.
Things bottomed out last year when Retton, 58, whose smiling face once adorned Wheaties boxes, was arrested for driving under the influence. As reported in The Post, she incoherently berated officers but later took full responsibility for the incident.
World-class rower Daniel Walsh, 46, won a bronze medal in 2008, and slept on people’s couches for a stretch of time after the Olympics. But, he told The Post, it could have been worse: “One of my teammates, who was on the boat that won a gold medal, he had to sleep underneath a pool table because he couldn’t afford rent.”
Walsh said he had credit card debt “in the tens of thousands of dollars” after he left the US team and had no clue about how to live in the real world and manage money.
“There was no fiscal literacy,” said the rower, who now hosts the podcast “Fast Friends.” “Funding that I received came through as a 1099. I didn’t realize that I owed taxes on it and I didn’t write anything off.”
He added that, “There is an ego imbalance where everybody wants to support you on the way up and be attached to that success. But then, when you come away and look for a job, the first thing you hear is, ‘Well, you don’t have any experience.’”
Another issue is that big success at the Olympics doesn’t always translate to big endorsement deals.
Rulon Gardner was a heroic wrestler. In 2000, he took down a previously undefeated beast of a Russian named Aleksandr “The Russian Bear” Karelin to win gold.
It was a major moment in wrestling, dubbed “the miracle on the mat,” but it didn’t translate to a big pay day.
He got a few endorsement deals that paid around $5,000 each, which didn’t do much for the $70,000 in credit card debt he had, some due to having to pay for food and travel while competing. Fortunately for Gardner, he was able to score speaking engagements to defray money owed.
He was also defrauded by a woman, whom he said took advantage of him and his money. In 2012, he had to declare bankruptcy.
“I had a huge loan and they were coming after me to pay it off,” Gardner told The Post. Now 54, he’s selling insurance and has mostly turned things around for himself.
Others are still struggling. As covered in The Post last year, 1994 Olympic gold medalist Oksana Baiul, 48, had to sell her $1.2 million mansion in Louisiana. It was reported that the world-class figure skater said she “can’t make a living.”
She also, according to The Post, lost custody of her daughter in a “tumultuous” divorce battle.
Klete Keller, 42, won five Olympic gold medals in swimming events at the 2000, 2004 and 2008 games.
But, years later after a divorce, he fell into a “deep depression,” he told USA Swimming.
Financial insecurity and homelessness followed. “I was paying child support for my kids and couldn’t afford a place, so I lived in my car for almost a year,” Keller told the outlet. “I had a Ford Fusion at the time, so at 6-foot-6, it was challenging to make the room to sleep. But I made it work.”
He went on to be involved in the January 6 Capitol riot, plead guilty and get pardoned by Trump. “I know my actions really angered and caused hurt to millions of Americans,” he said after the pardon.
Sometimes, the path to insolvency is a slow burn. In 1976, Dorothy Hamill, 69, won gold for figure skating and fame for wedge hairdo.
Years later she bought the Ice Capades and took what she characterized to CNBC as faulty investment advice from her husband. In 1996 she filed for bankruptcy, one year after divorcing her husband. She has since remarried and recently hosted a figure skating show near her current hometown of Indian Wells, Calif.
Current-day Olympians and hopefuls find themselves with their own challenges.
Veronica Fraley, 25, a discus thrower who achieved a personal best during the 2024 Olympics in Paris, had trouble paying her rent during the run-up to the games. (The unlikely pair of Flavor Flav and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian ultimately picked up the tab.)
Others depend on side gigs.
Jessica Ramsey, a 34-year-old shot putter, is an assistant manager at a Memphis bakery who plans to compete in the 2028 games.
“It’s very difficult for a [shot putter],” Ramsey, who won a bronze at the 2019 Pan American games but fouled at the 2021 Olympics, told The Post. “Maybe the crowd doesn’t see it as exciting. Maybe we’re not entertaining.”
But, she notes the struggle is universal for top athletes.
“If it doesn’t happen for you, what do you fall back on?” asked the mother of a 2-year-old daughter hopes to compete in Los Angeles in 2028. “Some people fall into depression because they don’t know who they are outside of the sport.”
German bobsledder Lisa Buckwitz has taken to OnlyFans to fund her dreams — and she’s hardly the only Olympian to do so.
Buckwitz, who won gold in 2018 and is Milano Cortino bound, recently told a German outlet that being on the racy site is “the best thing that could have happened to me.”
The athlete offers various subscriptions, from $59.98 for three months to $194.92 for 12 months.
“It’s a bit sad that I can’t just focus on my competitive sport,” she said. “Sure, I’m an Olympic champion. But nobody’s interested in Lisa Buckwitz just because of the gold medal.”