Olympic Athletes' Surprising Day Jobs, From Birthday Party Clown to Engineer

If Olympic athletes are lucky, their sport is their day job.

But for every Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, Noah Lyles and member of the U.S. men's basketball team (any one of whom could finance an entire women's water polo squad), there are exponentially more who worked for a shot at a medal from the 2024 Olympics in Paris while busily toiling at something else. 

Not least because, even if they're considered elite competitors, it costs money to train, travel and be competition-ready on any stage, let alone the world's biggest.

Not everyone can swing a nine-to-five, of course. And many are students of middling means—after seeing Veronica Fraley's post about her plight on X, Alexis Ohanian and Flavor Flav are going halfsies on the Vanderbilt student-athlete's rent so she can focus on discus throwing—while others are constantly fund-raising or seeking that life-changing sponsorship.

But some athletes who've been competing—and making the podium—in Paris have full-on jobs to go back to when the Games are done. 

And not all because they need one, either. Many are also looking ahead at life after they hang up their Speedos, cleats, gis, foils, paddles and pistols.

"It's kind of a group effort in the pool," electrical engineer Nic Fink, the reigning 100-meter breast stroke world champion heading into Paris, told the Associated Press of balancing his two careers. "And then obviously in work, they know that I’ll get my stuff done, and my hours may be a little different than other people's. I've definitely answered texts like, 'Hey, can I get this back to you in like an hour or so?' And they are like, 'No rush, you do you.'"

Nice work if you can get it. But the two-time Olympian has credited having this entirely different thing to focus on outside of the pool for his ongoing success, which included making his first podium when he took the silver (in a rare tie with Great Britain's Adam Peaty) July 29 in the 100m breast stroke.

"I think having the job really helps me compartmentalize," he explained to ESPN. "And if you have a bad day in the pool, it really takes your mind off things and kind of keeps you focused on other things in life."

Of which there are so many. Find out more about the Olympic athletes with relatable jobs outside their sport:

After making his Olympics debut in Tokyo, swimmer Nic Fink got his master's degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Georgia Tech, completing the program in December 2022 and then starting work at Quanta Utility Engineering. 

Grateful to have a flexible remote work schedule back home in Dallas, the expectant first-time dad (with wife and fellow Olympic swimmer Melanie Margalis Fink) made it to his first podium in Paris.

"I was ready to move on to other stages while still trying to keep a high level in swimming," Nic told ESPN after taking silver in the 100-meter breast stroke. "I think having the job really helps me compartmentalize everything."

If it's possible to be one of the fastest women in the world and help save it at the same time, it'll be sprinter Gabby Thomas pulling double duty.

The Harvard grad, who also has a master's in public health and epidemiology from University of Texas, volunteers at a clinic for uninsured patients in Austin and punched her ticket to the 2024 Olympics as the gold medal favorite in the 200 meters.

Though she competed for the Crimson in college, she assumed her future was in health care. "Track was not a sure thing," Gabby, who earned a 200m bronze and 4x100m silver in Tokyo, told E! News after qualifying for Paris. "There's no guarantee that you're going to be on the Olympic team."

But eventually, she continued, "I came to a point where you think, Do I have to make a choice? And I thought, No, I've always been able to pursue exactly what I wanted to do and I've always been able to do it all. So I told myself, 'I'm gonna do it all!'" 

Armed with degrees in physics and nuclear engineering, Canyon Barry works as a systems engineer at L3 Harris Technologies, a defense and space contractor. And all systems were a go for the 6-foot-5 athlete's debut with the U.S. 3x3 basketball team in Paris.

Having "a career that you're passionate a career that you're passionate about and can kind of have an identity outside of sports means a lot to me," Canyon, who's the son of NBA Hall of Famer Rick Barry, told the Associated Press. "Because now, when the ball does stop bouncing, I know that I have a passion and a job that I can go back to that I find fulfillment in and can really enjoy that for the rest of my life."

That being said, he added, "I would love nothing more than to come back to that office with a gold medal and let all of them feel it and take pictures with it."

From the age of 17, boxer Morelle McCane has toughed it out as a birthday party clown, daycare supervisor and mailroom worker to fund her dream of being an Olympian, and in 2024 she became the first female fighter from Cleveland to qualify for the Games.

"You just have to find what you can for the moment sometimes," Morelle, 29, told the Houston Chronicle. "Because the good-paying jobs, they want you around for a long time, so you just have to find something that you can get, get quick and keep that income coming in."

And her plan was always Paris.

"When I get in the ring, it is my time to shine," the welterweight, who's competing in the 66kg division, told USA Boxing. "When I get in there, I give it my all, and all of me includes my personality. And it is more fun that way. When I’m having fun, I am at my best because the intensity is there, the focus is there, but the relaxation that you need is there as well."

Beach volleyball player Zachery Schubert runs a cricket farm on his family's property in his native Australia called Schubugs Cricket Farm—and he walks the walk, munching on the insects for a protein-packed snack.

But "it's not like we're pushing people to eat insects in every single meal," he told the Sydney Morning Herald. "It's more an add-on to get extra protein in your diet. It’s not like I'm a crazy bug person."

Usually his dad watches the crickets while he's away, but the elder Schubert is in Paris watching his son make his Olympics debut, so a friend is minding the farm instead.

Rower Robbie Manson made a few waves when he mentioned he supplements his income with an OnlyFans account, but he takes a practical approach.

"I get more than double what I would be on otherwise as an athlete—read into that what you will, but I am making more from OnlyFans than I am from rowing at this stage," the New Zealander, who came out of retirement to compete in his third Olympics, told Reuters. "I thought, if I'm going to do it, you have to tell everyone, be really open and I think you need to feel that any publicity is good publicity."

The double sculls specialist knows it's not for everyone, but "for other athletes, there's definitely an opportunity there."

Ellen Geddes was an avid equestrienne before being paralyzed in a car accident in 2012 when she was 23. Later that same year she tried wheelchair fencing for the first time and in 2013 she competed in her first Wheelchair World Championships.

Now the owner of two horse farms, Maplewood Farm and Bridlewood Farm, in Aiken, S.C., and a breeding director at Magnolia Sport Horses, she's hoping to make a podium when the Paris Paralympics kick off Aug. 28.

"It was absolutely incredible to qualify for my first Paralympics [in 2021], but I certainly had higher hopes and aspirations than what I achieved," she told the Lexington County Chronicle, "which is why we are running it back again for 2024." And admittedly the foils have been getting more attention than the foals lately.

"I definitely struggle with balance," Ellen said. "Right now, I'm focusing a lot more on the fencing than I am on the horses and the farms."

We already would have felt we were in extremely good hands if an Australian firefighter named Alyssa "Aly" Bull came and rescued us—and it turns out she's an Olympic canoeist, as well!

Having already competed in the 2016 Rio Olympics, Aly joined the Queensland Fire and Rescue Service in 2018, soon realizing that balancing work and training would, as she told her country's ABC, take "a lot of juggling."

"When we're down in the trenches," she said in 2023, "it's two day shifts, two night shifts and then four days off." Aly credited Australian women's sprint kayak coach Rene Olsen for "how supportive he is to come out on the water with me at 4 a.m. on my day shifts."

But Aly finds that the importance of teamwork follows wherever she goes.

"Whether they're sitting in a boat in front or behind you, or whether they're sitting in the back seat about to go to an incident," she explained, "you've got to fully trust that their skills and capabilities are really up to scratch. Whether that's to help someone out of a car prang using the tools and communicating, or whether it's paddling together in complete unison to get to the finish line."

Maria Liana Mutia never stops processing information, whether it's about her next para judo opponent or her work as a software analyst for Comcast.

A typical day involves getting up at 6 a.m. to exercise, working from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and then training for two hours.

“I am not very strong, and I am not very aggressive. I'm just an intelligent fighter,” the returning Paralympian told TeamUSA.com. "I'm only ever looking for the correct reaction to whatever counterreaction of my opponent."

Maria was already competing in wrestling and judo for the visually impaired when she started to lose her sight completely, and it never occurred to her to quit.

"Any grappling sport, judo, it’s all based in touch," she said. "I never had any worries that I would have to stop."

Princeton grad Kat Holmes didn't let her dream of becoming a doctor foil her fencing prowess, or vice versa. She competed in her third Olympics in Paris in team and individual epee and is in her third year at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai—a scheduling pile-up she "would not recommend" to anybody.

"It’s not fun training for the Olympics while being in medical school," she told CNBC Make It Ahead. "It’s objectively not an enjoyable experience. I would not recommend it, really, to anybody. I don’t like training all the time. Some days I hate it, objectively."

"However, at the end of the day," she added, "I love fencing. I really, really do. I just try to come back to that again and again. I want to win an Olympic medal, but I don’t think that alone would have been enough to get me through it."

Sport climbing made its Olympics debut in Tokyo, and Jesse Gruper was there for it. Well, not physically there, but the mechanical engineer who started climbing when he was 6 and competing at 11, has really found his footing since.

He won gold in men's combined at the 2023 Pan American Games to qualify for Paris and, in the meantime, he's an engineering research fellow at Harvard, specializing in rehabilitation and soft robotic educational technology. While on the World Cup circuit, he worked remotely part-time for the Harvard Biodesign Lab.

"Climbing and mechanical engineering definitely share a lot of general skills with one another," Jesse told Olympics.com. "I think they're both a puzzle. You start with this general idea or this general challenge, and you have to reach the end in whatever way that you can. It takes a lot of creativity. It takes a lot of hard work, and it takes a lot of dedication."

Australian water polo player Dani Jackovich (pictured above on the far right) is an operations coordinator for swimwear maker Delfina Sport and a data analyst for the water polo tech firm 6-8 Sports, so her mind has never been far from the pool since her days competing for Stanford.

"It's a surreal feeling," Dani told Go Stanford of making her Olympics debut in Paris. "My path to realizing this dream hasn't been the most conventional. There was a point where I believed the dream would never come true, but my love for the sport kept me playing and traveling the world. The journey I've taken to get to this point makes it all the more special that I can finally say my childhood dream has come true."

Having done a bunch of modeling, Anne Cebula had been to Paris before. But this was her first time as an Olympic fencer, the New Yorker having discovered the sport watching the 2008 Beijing Games and thinking it was beautiful. She was 10.

Comparing it to an opera, Anne told Access Daily, "People are ripping off their masks yelling and screaming, and you really only see that in most sports at the end of a match. But in fencing it's during the whole thing."

Her parents rejected her plea for lessons, saying they were too expensive. But five years later, she enrolled at the public Brooklyn Technical High School, which has a thriving fencing club.

Anne competed for Columbia University and made it to Paris as the second-ranked American in women's epee. She continued to model, but quit her day job as a receptionist so she could train five hours a day, five days a week.

"Fencing changed my life forever. I’ve had so many great things happen because of the sport," she told The City before the Games. “And there are probably so many kids out there that probably don’t have the means to get into this sport or even know it exists, and I really want to pass that on to kids in the city. There is so much untapped potential."

Now four-time Olympic rower Meghan "Moose" Musnicki (pictured at right) hung up her oars after Tokyo, got married and found herself her first real day job at 39—working in HR with a data infrastructure company in the Bay Area. But the siren song of the 2022 Henley Royal Regatta in Oxfordshire called and, while she entered for fun, she and her partner won.

"It showed I was competitive with the rest of the group that had been training full-time," the athlete told Women's Health, recalling her realization that she had another Olympics in her. "If I enjoy [training], if I can physiologically handle the stress of it, why not?"

Meghan's husband Skip Kielt happens to be a rowing coach, and she started training with his roster of mostly male athletes, while also keeping her full-time job. And she continued working remotely in between 7:15 a.m. and 4:15 p.m. workouts when, at the beginning of 2024, she moved back to the national team's training base of Princeton, N.J., in hopes of making the Paris crew.

And not that it wouldn't have been a couple's trip anyway—"He loves me and supports me and knew this was my dream"—but Skip is also making his Olympics debut as coach of the U.S. men's team.

"This is not a sport you do for the money," Meghan said. "This is not a sport you do for people to recognize you. You do it because you love it."

Watch the 2024 Paris Olympics daily on NBC and Peacock until the summer games end with the Closing Ceremony on Sunday, Aug. 11, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.