What Happens to Olympians After They Win Gold?

I am fascinated by what Olympians do, per se, after they win gold medals. Or moreover, after they win no medals! Or, really, what does any person do after great success? Lucky for me we have an entire profile on Shaun White a.k.a. The Flying Tomato — a name he no longer appreciates, by the way — who is apparently a two-time snowboarding Olympic gold medalist who will be heading to Sochi for more Olympics stuff in February (okay I kind of knew that already but now I definitely know). In his time since the last Olympics he has apparently he has been, um, buying a lot of stuff with his buckets of money:

After the Games, White spent a few weeks sitting in his girlfriend’s living room, watching Disney movies. By the time he got up off the couch, he was making buckets of money.

Emphasis mine because why would you tell a reporter that and also what movies were they?

Before Turin, White already had sponsorship deals with Mountain Dew, T-Mobile and PlayStation. White refused to give me financial details, coyly stating only that “winning the gold medal just elevated those relationships.” In 2006 ESPN the Magazine described him as “one of the richest nonheir teenagers in the world.” But money has a way of amplifying things. White wasn’t happy. He became less so. “After the Olympics, if you imagine it was sugarcoated and rainbows, it wasn’t,” he says. White made some rookie nouveau-rich errors. He bought a multimillion-dollar house that he never really lived in. He wasn’t mature about dealing with his social life either. “I was in L.A., and it was so many people, and I was like, ‘Oh, God!’ I couldn’t remember names. You know those social skills you build over time? I didn’t really have those.” White made some halfhearted attempts to become more responsible, but, he says: “I was in my 20s, so I was like: I don’t want to do this — I want to have fun. I want to buy a sports car and [expletive] drive.”

Fair, I guess.

Photo: John Lemieux

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