Eileen Gu, Olympian by day, millionaire social media star by night

Dan WolkenFri, February 6, 2026 at 12:55 AM UTC

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LIVIGNO, Italy — On Jan. 9, freestyle skier Eileen Gu posted on Instagram a “Day in my life” video commemorating the one-month countdown to the Milan-Cortina Olympics.

Glimpses of Gu brushing her teeth, eating breakfast, riding a ski lift, practicing tricks on a giant airbag, cooling down with a 5 kilometer run, talking to the media, completing a doping test and reading a book while she’s in a hyperbaric chamber were all stuffed into a 29-second Instagram reel.

Within 10 days, it generated more than a million views.

So it’s probably no coincidence that Gu, the American-born dual gold medal winner who chose to compete for China in 2019, was the fourth highest-paid female athlete of 2025. According to Sportico, all but $20,000 of her $23 million came from endorsements.

While sponsorships have always been crucial to the earning potential of Olympic athletes, who generally aren’t raking in huge sums of prize money, financial success no longer hinges on whose image lands on the Wheaties box.

Now most of it happens on social media, where the line between Olympic athletes and influencers has been blurred — usually to the benefit of their pocketbooks as this Winter Games draws close.

“The number of Olympians who have become more popular and made money in the Olympics has grown exponentially,” said Doug Shabelman, the CEO of Chicago-based Burns Entertainment, a firm that matches celebrities and athletes with marketing opportunities. “Now everybody, whether you win or lose, can be an influencer. Before you had to win gold medals, you had to do something special. Now social media has leveled the playing field, and the marketability of these athletes is 365 days a year.”

(Amy Monks/Yahoo Sports illustration)

Gu is among the handful of Olympic athletes at the top of that food chain along with the likes of Simone Biles and Lindsey Vonn. It’s no surprise given Gu’s success in the sport and her endorsement potential in China, which likely played at least some role in her choice to represent her mother’s homeland rather than the more crowded American market.

But you don’t need to be the most successful winter sports athlete in a country of 1.4 billion people to leverage social media for endorsement dollars.

Take freestyle skier Alex Ferreira. Once a year, he puts on a prosthetic mask, a gray wig and fake facial hair to make him look like a skiing has-been, goes to the slopes with a film crew, talks trash to younger skiers and shocks crowds as executes Olympic-level tricks.

The character, “Hot Dog Hans,” was inspired by Kyrie Irving’s portrayal of streetball legend “Uncle Drew.” Though it started out as a one-time gag a few years ago, Ferreira realized within 15 minutes of his first day in costume that it was something he could draw out into a multi-episode series of short films.

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The full Hans skits now generate hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, with the clips drawing millions on Instagram. And while it may have started as a fun distraction, it has become a high-profile example of how an Olympic athlete who is not particularly famous in the mainstream world can find a niche that leads to dollars.

“We’re in this day and age where your main job is to compete, learn new tricks, go to these contests and win them,” Ferreira said. “But the other half of the business is gaining sponsors, so you need to create content as well. I’m a professional skier, but I’m also an influencer in a way. Basically, when you think the job is over, you have to get back and get on the computer and start cranking out content. When I started, it was much less than that.”

Though the content game does require more time outside of traditional training and media obligations, it keeps many athletes in the mix during those four-year gaps between Olympics when they don’t get as much mainstream attention. And then, once an Olympics begins, you never really know what’s going to hit.

One of the biggest social media stars of the Paris Games was Henrik Christiansen, a Norwegian swimmer who did not finish better than 20th in any of his three events but went viral for videos about chocolate chip muffins in the athletes’ village. The “Muffin Man” now has more than 500,000 followers on TikTok and is still trading off the joke. One of his most popular recent videos from last October shows him whisking cocoa powder into a mixing bowl trying to replicate a recipe he’s watching on television.

“I’m 56, and our generation, we still look at it like, ‘We want to see the winners and the great stories,’” Shabelman said. “But a different generation has different things they’re more interested in, and there are so many different avenues now, so many different ways to get your story and your personality out that it changed the game in a big way on the marketing side.

“It’s not just the winners anymore. Engagement on social media with fans is so important to marketers because they don’t just want to see how many people look at videos. They want to see who’s engaging, who has that accessibility and who has something that other people don’t.”

It also helps that Olympic sports, particularly in the winter, have great visuals that lend themselves to social media. Whether it’s a striking costume being worn by a figure skater, a gravity-defying trick on a snowboard or simply the backdrop of a snow-capped mountain, Winter Olympians don’t necessarily have to stretch far outside their comfort zone to create eye-catching content.

Many of Gu’s posts, for instance, have nothing to do with sports and fall more into the category of modeling or a peek into the lifestyle of a rich, young woman who travels the world like a true celebrity and hangs out with other celebrities. They are slickly produced and undeniably targeted to demographics that are not watching the Freestyle Ski World Cup.

“We are still a society that does value attractiveness and different elements that we all have come to know about people who are endorsers,” Shabelman said. “But then you also add on being really good at building great content, you have a lot of (famous) friends you might tag in a post and that might get you even more followers.”

Though not every Olympic athlete handles their social media as seriously or professionally as Gu, it’s now just a fact of life that maximizing endorsement potential — which is what keeps many of these Olympians going in sports that don’t offer big prize money — often runs through Instagram or TikTok.

“Content creation is what’s happening right now,” snowboarder Jamie Anderson said. “It’s bigger than almost anything. There are YouTubers making more money than NFL players. So it really doesn’t matter what I think about it, it’s happening. You kind of have to move with the waves. It’s definitely the future of marketing and sports. Times have changed quick.”

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Source: “AOL Sports”