These days, the strongest man in America can barely pick up a check.
That may sound like one of Shane Hamman’s late-night TV punch lines. After all, the two-time Olympian owns a stack of U.S. weightlifting records and biceps thicker than most thighs. Plus he’s a self-marketing master. The homespun ham made Jay Leno giggle – while hoisting the “Tonight Show” host over his head – and later lured Coca-Cola and other splashy sponsors.
But seven months after Athens, Hamman says he is going broke and is ready to quit. His U.S. Olympic Committee funding dried up. He lost his USOC health insurance. He lives off the money he earned last summer doing commercials for Coke and 24 Hour Fitness. And he talks nervously about paying the mortgage – not to mention the grocery bill for his 7,000-calories-a-day diet.
“I’m really considering retiring in June, because there’s just no money to be had anymore,” Hamman, 32, said. “As athletes, we’re getting less money. I don’t understand. I don’t know where the money’s going.”
According to the USOC, it’s going to “athletes first.” That’s the USOC’s mantra after reshaping its Olympic hub – the Colorado Springs-based outfit that will spend $116.6 million this year to groom athletes for the 2006 Winter Games in Turin and the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
After two years of layoffs, spending sobriety and a demolition of its old upper crust, USOC bosses say their once-floundering group will be formally reborn this weekend as a low-fat sports machine that invests more on athletes and winning medals.
Today in Phoenix, the USOC will convene what acting chief executive Jim Scherr calls “the final piece” of the makeover: an Olympic assembly. The advisory body of about 130 – including athletes and leaders of the sports governing bodies – will meet to air concerns and suggest ideas to the USOC’s board of directors.
The USOC, Scherr said, has finally reached the leaner version it envisioned in 2003 when board members voted to bulldoze the organization amid an ethics scandal. This, he added, is the USOC’s biggest day since 1978, when Congress passed the Amateur Sports Act that created the USOC.
“That was a watershed moment,” Scherr said. “But I really believe this was as sweeping, if not more, in (our) total remaking of the organization.”
The USOC says it now commits fewer dollars to its own bureaucracy (including marketing, executive salaries and legal costs) – $15.4 million this year, compared with $17.2 million in 2004.
But, like Hamman, some athletes say they’ve seen little positive impact on their own wallets despite the cuts in USOC overhead.
Some possible reasons: The USOC is trying to reduce its chronic habit of building budget deficits in non-Games years, and it is rewarding athletes with higher bonuses for winning medals instead of merely handing out checks no matter how well they perform. The USOC has made its potential winter Olympians a priority this year. Also, the organization is spending less money this year than it has in the past three.
And, even though the percentage of the USOC budget devoted to direct support for athletes and their sport’s national governing bodies has risen, the actual dollar amount has gone down. This year, the USOC will devote $45.8 million to “direct member support,” about $2 million less than it did in 2004 and about $1 million less than 2001, the year before the Salt Lake Winter Games.
Some athletes say they are feeling those changes.
“Sometimes I think I can’t afford to put gas in my truck,” said weightlifter Jackie Berube, who lives with her mother in Colorado Springs.
Like others in her sport, Berube has weathered a drop in monthly stipends from $1,100 to $500 – and those are paid only to nationally ranked lifters. USA Weightlifting says it decided this year to pay higher performance bonuses and smaller stipends, mirroring a trend across the organization. (When Hamman decided to skip a meet to rest his body, it cost him his national ranking, along with his monthly stipend and health insurance).
“A lot of our expenses come out of our own pockets, for airfare (to meets), for entry fees, hotel,” Berube said. “I was really struggling to come up with money, so you just put it on your credit card and pay for it later. Well, five, 10 years of that and the credit card starts getting up there.”
To help trim her own budget, Berube said she stopped paying rent money to her mother.
“You’re going to make it work no matter what,” Berube said. “You have to make it work.”
Other Olympians, like triathlete Hunter Kemper, praise their access to USOC services such as sports science, sports medicine, the weight room and dining hall – all provided free. Still, those have been in place for years.
“As far as seeing a trickle-down (from the reform), I think it will take some time,” Kemper said. “Are we getting more money as a federation? Are we getting better services? No, I haven’t seen it yet. I’m not sure you’ll find any athletes who say they have. A year from now, that’s a question to ask: Hey, all that money we saved, where are we seeing it?”
For now, most savings are being plowed back into the budget. That’s to help stop the USOC’s long practice of building deficits and living off of credit during non-Games years when TV revenues are dormant, Steve Roush, the USOC’s chief of sport performance, said.
“Once the ship is righted, instead of money being paid to interest, you now have more funds to get to the athletes,” Roush said. “The benefits to belt-tightening in ’05 are going to come out in leaps and bounds in ’06, ’07 and ’08.
“And we have gone above and beyond to ensure we show no wavering in our support for our (Turin) athletes,” Roush added. “They have taken front seat in the (2005) budget.”
Cold-weather star Apolo Ohno, a short-track skater who earned one gold and one silver medal at the Salt Lake City Games, still sleeps and eats at the training center in Colorado Springs and routinely hits the sports medicine clinic for massage therapy, exercise recovery and aid with any nagging injuries. It’s all central to his preparation for Turin, he said.
Athletes commit themselves to the Olympic movement not to get rich or appear on “The Tonight Show,” Ohno said, but to fulfill dreams and uplift their country.
“I don’t have some beach home in Miami that I go to. We may be flying to ‘The Tonight Show’ (after earning a medal), but then we are flying out right after, back to the dorm,” Ohno said last week, while palming an apple at a dining hall table. “I choose to live right here, just down the hall.”
Staff writer Bill Briggs can be reached at 303-820-1720 or bbriggs@denverpost.com.
