The next day she was back at work. Cleaning toilets.

“I’m not too proud to admit it,” she says.

To get a break on rent, Compton cut a deal with her apartment complex to serve as a “caretaker,” which is a fancy way of saying she cleaned apartments — living rooms, kitchens, bathrooms — once tenants had moved out, or put trash back in the Dumpsters whenever dogs got into them. When the caretaker deal ended, Compton and her boyfriend had to move because they couldn’t afford the full rent.

It was the eighth time in four years she packed up.

“It’s one of those things: If I want to be an Olympic athlete, this is what I have to do,” says Compton, 29, who’s scheduled to compete in four events at the Winter Games that open tomorrow in Vancouver. “I just had to keep telling myself: ‘Go for this. Don’t let financial reasons keep you from chasing your dream.’ ”

It’s a pep talk that more and more U.S. Olympic athletes are having with themselves as sponsorship and endorsement opportunities evaporate in the global recession like a puddle in unseasonably warm Vancouver. It doesn’t mean the Olympics are any less prestigious for athletes. It just means that unless you’re snowboarder Shaun White or alpine ski queen Lindsey Vonn or have really rich parents, you’re probably going to be poor doing it.

The U.S. Olympic Committee says it paid out $16.5 million to its winter sports national governing bodies for the 2009-10 season, a substantial increase compared with the year before the 2006 Winter Games. But much of that money goes to staffing and infrastructure, and it’s performance-based. The sports with consistent international success get the most; the also-rans are left largely to fend for themselves.

So ski jumper Nick Alexander works as a dishwasher in Park City, Utah. Teammate Peter Frenette scoops ice cream. Freestyle aerialist Jeret Peterson hangs drywall and lays tile. Luger Megan Sweeney is a waitress at the Downhill Grill in Lake Placid, N.Y.

Read the full article HERE. 

(Note: Athletes’ earnings are estimated. Some numbers may be low.)

25. Raghib “Rocket” Ismael

Notre Dame/Dallas Cowboys star; received the largest 3-year deal in football history
Estimated lifetime earnings: $20 Million

No jail time, drug charges or bankruptcy here, just bad business moves. Financial vultures bled Ismael’s riches by selling him their “fool-proof” investments. After bypassing the NFL as the presumptive #1 pick, Ismael went to the Canadian Football League and signed the largest deal in their history.

He played two years in Canada and 10 in the NFL, earning an estimated $18 million to $20 million in salary alone. He then started to invest in a series of ventures that went bust, including a Rock n’ Roll Café, COZ Records, a movie, cosmetics, nationwide phone-card dispensers, and caligraphy proverbs kiosks.

Today, Ismael does a sports talk show for the Dallas Cowboys—and looks very closely at any money he makes.

For the list of the remaining 24 athletes, click HERE.

So the act of retiring was simple: Go to your hotel in Eugene, Ore., take off your sweats and your sneakers, leave them behind. Don’t even shower. Change into street clothes, cab to the airport, call the wife and say, “Baby, I’m coming home.” Don’t even tell those folks from the tryout for that Chinese basketball league, the ones who didn’t even know who you were or what you have done in this game, that you were packing it in. And by all means, don’t look back.

But retirement — the noun, the state of being? That was dark. That didn’t go so well. 

It was great at first. Who wouldn’t want the life of leisure? But there were a lot of hours to kill between the time when he would send his wife Rosa off to her job and haul the kids off to school, and the time when everyone got back home. There were too many afternoon beer-buzzes, too many self-pitying viewings of the 1995 NCAA championship game, when nobody could stop Ed O’Bannon and those UCLA Bruins.

There was an angry admonishment from Rosa — “Get a job . . . or else” — and there was a business card with a name and a phone number on it, jammed in his hand weeks earlier and sitting out now on top of the dresser, in plain view, as if O’Bannon knew someday he’d have to call the number.

He called the number.

He interviewed the next day, got hired right away, and started work the day after that.

Read the full article HERE

Read the full article HERE

Less than six months after swimming one of the most electrifying laps in the history of his sport—the greatest 46 seconds of his life, witnessed by billions of people—Jason Lezak is sitting in an anonymous hotel conference room in Phoenix trying to save his career. The four-time Olympic gold medalist is wearing a button-down shirt and black slacks.

Across a small table is a smiling, silver-haired gentleman whom Lezak, 32, has just met. The two strangers are being set up. This is a speed date, so to speak. If a connection is made, the older man, a brand-management executive for Mutual of Omaha named John Hildenbiddle, will have a new corporate spokesman. And if the deal is big enough, Lezak, one of many Beijing Olympians who are now effectively unemployed, will be able to get back in the pool. The men shake hands. “I’ve been looking forward to this,” Hildenbiddle tells him. “Me too,” says Lezak. He’s nervous. He feels awkward, selling himself like this. But he’s out of options. Over the din, Hildenbiddle asks Lezak about “that race,” which he says he’s watched “50 times” and still gives him chills. Lezak has recounted the story more than 50 times, but he’s glad to do it again.

It was late morning in Beijing on Aug. 11. In the waiting area before the start of the 4-by-100 freestyle relay, Lezak called a huddle with his young teammates, Cullen Jones, Garrett Weber-Gale and Michael Phelps. Lezak told them he had been a part of this relay in 2000 and had come in second. He was a part of this relay in 2004 and got bronze. The message: enough. They nodded and walked out to the pool. Lezak, the veteran, would swim last. For Team USA to win, he figured he’d have to hit the water ahead of France’s Alain Bernard, the world record-holder in the 100-meter freestyle. But when Lezak dove in, he was already behind. Way behind. At the 50-meter turn, he glanced right and saw Bernard a full body-length ahead. “I thought,” Lezak tells Hildenbiddle, “this is impossible.” Team USA was going to lose yet again, and Michael Phelps’s dream of winning eight golds was about to end while he stood helplessly on the pool deck—unless Lezak swam the last 50 meters faster than anyone ever had. Gradually, he began inching up on Bernard, who seemed to be tiring. Hildenbiddle leans in as Lezak speaks more softly, trying not to sound boastful. As the wall drew closer, Lezak tells his audience of one, he kept thinking the same thought: “I have to do it.”

The face we all remember—after Lezak caught the Frenchman from behind, clinched the gold and turned himself into America’s second-favorite swimmer—belonged to Phelps, who let out a primal roar, his features locked in shock and exhilaration. But Lezak got his moments in the spotlight, too, including a visit with Oprah. He tells Hildenbiddle about all the people who have cheered him in airports all over the country, but he leaves out the other comment he hears all the time: “You must have 10 sponsors by now!”