Olympic medallist turns to OnlyFans to help support her career

Olympic pole vaulter Alysha Newman doesn’t pretend her career is funded by some fairy-tale sponsor money.

In a recent CBC Docs interview, journalist Susan Schafer reports that Newman’s path to an Olympic medal depended on something a lot more controversial and modern: a subscription page on OnlyFans.

Newman tells Schafer that without the revenue from the platform, her success “wouldn’t have been possible.”

For her, OnlyFans isn’t just a side hustle. It’s a business decision tied directly to training, travel, and the freedom to define who she is – on and off the runway.

The Financial Reality Behind An Olympic Medal

In the CBC Docs video, Susan Schafer explains that Newman is a three-time Olympian and the first Canadian woman ever to win an Olympic medal in pole vault, bringing home bronze from the 2024 Paris Games.

That’s a huge achievement, but the money behind it might surprise people.

Newman tells Schafer that as a Canadian athlete on the federal Athlete Assistance Program, she received just $21,000 a year.

That is supposed to help cover training, travel, and basic living expenses while competing at the highest level in the world.

She says that if she had an “off year,” major brands and even government funding could start to disappear.

In other words, one injury or one bad season could shake the whole foundation of her career.

So Newman started looking for ways to “monetize myself as an Olympic athlete,” as she puts it in the CBC interview.

That search eventually led her to OnlyFans.

Why Alysha Newman Chose OnlyFans

In the video, Newman explains that she launched her OnlyFans page in 2021.

She describes the platform in simple terms: a subscription-based site where creators post content directly to paying fans and can “convert it into quick cash.”

For her, the financial change was immediate and dramatic.

“With my OnlyFans, I started seeing a revenue that I’ve never seen,” she tells Schafer. “It’s like having really great sponsors.”

Instead of hoping a shoe company or a national brand would choose her, Newman effectively became her own sponsor.

She turned her existing audience – built through athletics, social media, and public appearances – into paying subscribers who help fund her training.

From a pure business perspective, it makes sense.

She already had visibility, a strong personal brand, and a global fan base. OnlyFans gave her a way to turn that attention into direct income instead of waiting for a marketing department somewhere to notice her.

Schafer frames this as part of a wider trend: more athletes, especially women and especially those outside the biggest sports, are turning to subscription platforms to make their careers sustainable.

Femininity, Performance, And A “Dual Personality”

Newman doesn’t just talk about money.

She tells Schafer she has always felt like she has a “dual personality”: “I’m an athlete at heart and a businesswoman by day.”

Growing up, she says her bedroom walls were covered with Marilyn Monroe posters.

What she admired most wasn’t just glamour – it was strategy.

Newman says Monroe “used her beauty as a weapon to get what she needed to get done,” and that idea clearly stuck.

She sees femininity and physical confidence as tools, not weaknesses.

In the CBC video, Newman recalls arriving at the 2024 Olympics in a highly emotional state after tearing “everything” in her ankle and hearing people doubt whether she’d even compete at a high level again.

When she ran down the runway, she not only broke a Canadian record, she ended up on the podium with a bronze medal.

Then came the moment that went viral: she pretended to tweak something, then broke into a twerk celebration on the runway.

Newman tells Schafer that was her just having fun and letting people see the “real version” of herself.

Some viewers criticized it; others loved it.

But in her mind, it was the perfect snapshot of who she is – serious enough to win a medal, free enough to dance in front of the world.

Owning Her Image, Even With The Stigma

Schafer notes that OnlyFans carries a heavy stigma because of its association with adult content.

Newman doesn’t deny that.

She tells CBC that “the adult entertainment kind of got really heavy into it,” and she knew going in that would make things difficult.

But she also says she understands the business and publicity side: “Any talk is great talk and I’m okay with it.”

Newman says people have always tried to put her in a box – either athlete or model, either “serious” or “feminine.”

Her decision, as she explains it, was to stop choosing.

“People have always tried to put me in a box… I decided I didn’t need to choose. I could define myself on my own terms,” she tells Schafer.

On that same line, Newman openly talks about being sexualized.

“I don’t mind having people sexualizing me. I’m okay with it. For me, it’s a sense of power,” she says.

To her, the old locker-room phrase “look good, feel good” isn’t just a cliché.

“If I’m on the runway and I’m confident, it’ll be hard to beat me,” she explains.

That idea – using appearance, style, and sexuality as part of a performance toolkit – makes some people uncomfortable, and she knows it.

But Newman insists it’s her choice, and the control over how and where she presents herself is exactly what makes it empowering.

From the outside, there’s a real tension here.

On one hand, critics of platforms like OnlyFans argue they reinforce the idea that women must package themselves for the male gaze to succeed.

On the other, Newman’s story is a real-world example of a woman taking that expectation, flipping it around, and using it to fund an elite career on her own terms.

Both things can be true at once, and that’s what makes her case so challenging – and interesting.

Independence, Trade-Offs, And What Comes Next

Schafer’s reporting suggests Newman sees OnlyFans less as a scandal and more as a structural fix for a broken system.

If national programs pay athletes barely above poverty-level incomes and sponsorships evaporate with one injury, it shouldn’t be shocking that athletes look elsewhere.

In that context, Newman’s decision looks less like a wild gamble and more like a rational response to a harsh financial reality.

She tells CBC that without “my beauty and my sponsorships,” she wouldn’t have had the resources to get to that Olympic medal.

OnlyFans, in her case, becomes part sponsor, part safety net, part megaphone.

There are obvious trade-offs.

She has to live with criticism, stereotypes, and the long shadow of a platform many people see as purely sexual.

She also risks turning off more traditional sponsors who might not want their brand next to OnlyFans headlines.

But Newman says she’s at peace with all of that because it comes down to ownership.

“I’ve learned I don’t have to hide either side of myself,” she says in the CBC piece. “I can be an Olympic medalist and still embrace beauty, style and femininity. That balance is where my confidence comes from.”

From a broader perspective, her story raises a bigger question for the sports world.

If a country’s first Olympic medallist in a discipline has to open a subscription page to keep training, what does that say about how we value athletes?

And if platforms like OnlyFans, Patreon, and similar sites are what finally give athletes, especially women, real financial independence, are we prepared for the complicated conversations that come with that?

Newman, at least, seems ready.

She walks onto the runway knowing her pole vault career is funded by her own business decisions, not just the goodwill of federations and brands.

She’s not just clearing bars anymore; she’s rewriting the rules about what an elite athlete is allowed to be.

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The article Olympic medallist turns to OnlyFans to help support her career first appeared on Survival World.