Kurts Adams Rozentals, a 22-year-old canoeist with Olympic dreams, finds himself at the center of a storm that’s rapidly redefining the boundaries between sport, celebrity, and digital entrepreneurship. On August 27, 2025, Rozentals spoke candidly about his dual life: striving for a place on Team GB’s Olympic canoe squad while simultaneously earning a small fortune—and a suspension—through his adult content on OnlyFans, a website synonymous with explicit material.
Rozentals’s journey is anything but ordinary. Just two years ago, he was celebrated as the world Under 23 silver medallist in canoe slalom—a rising star on the water. But by April 2025, his sporting ambitions collided with controversy. Paddle UK, the governing body for canoeing in Britain, suspended him after his OnlyFans activities drew widespread attention. “I’d be lying if I said before I started that I wasn’t expecting some backlash but I was shocked by how strict Paddle UK were with their response. I believe it’s due to outdated thinking,” Rozentals told Daily Mail Sport. “They still think we live in the times of athletes having a perfect public image and God forbid they do something that doesn’t align with our proposed morals.”
His financial motivations are crystal clear. Living on a modest annual lottery funding of £16,000 from Paddle UK, Rozentals found himself taking shifts at an Amazon warehouse just to make ends meet. “Living on what I was living as a professional athlete was very hard,” he explained. The turning point came at the start of 2025, when he launched his OnlyFans page. On his first day alone, he raked in £2,500—almost double his monthly income from sport. In the four weeks following a BBC interview protesting his exclusion, he netted an astonishing £100,000. Over eight months, his six-figure earnings dwarfed anything he could have hoped for on the water.
Rozentals isn’t shy about his content, which starts with nude images for a £6.30 monthly subscription and escalates for private messages, where “the serious money is to be made.” He draws a line with his subscribers, refusing certain custom requests: “I went into it at the start of the year thinking I was going to do custom requests, but they just got so weird. There was this one request and I’m just going to say it involved gummy bears. I was like, ‘Guys, I’m not doing that.’ There are sickos in this world, brother.”
His story is emblematic of a broader trend. In recent years, a growing number of athletes—across sports and continents—have flocked to OnlyFans. Some, like Rozentals and retired short-track speed skater Elise Christie, use the platform to post adult content. Others, such as England cricketer Tymal Mills, leverage it for sports tutorials and fan engagement. The motivations are as varied as the athletes themselves, but the financial lure is undeniable.
Take Alysha Newman, the Canadian pole vaulter who joined OnlyFans in 2021. By the summer of 2024, she’d earned over £170,000, supplementing her Olympic bronze medal campaign with subscriptions costing around £9 per month. Newman’s content, like Rozentals’s, starts with suggestive imagery and escalates for paying members. “It was a way to fund my Olympic dream,” she’s said, echoing the financial realities faced by many in less lucrative sports.
Elise Christie, a decorated Team GB speed skater with 30 major medals and three world titles, turned to OnlyFans in 2022 after retiring from competition and facing severe financial and mental health challenges. “I was in a bad place when I came out of the sport,” Christie admitted. “With OnlyFans, I’d have to say it has helped pick me up out of a dark place. I couldn’t have done it when I was still competing, and look, the stigma is there. It was a huge concern for me. But I do think society is changing as well around this.” Christie now posts content nearly every day, crediting the platform with helping her regain stability after years of struggle, debt, and even homelessness.
Not all athlete-OnlyFans stories involve adult content. Tymal Mills, who was part of England’s victorious 2022 T20 World Cup cricket squad, uses the platform to sell bowling tutorials and performance analysis for £3.70 per view. “It’s the stuff you’d expect,” he joked, referencing the banter from teammates about the site’s reputation. “It’s like, ‘Are you going to be bowling naked on videos’ or whatever. I obviously won’t do that—I don’t think my wife would approve for one.” Mills’s content is strictly family-friendly, a far cry from the platform’s risqué reputation. The England and Wales Cricket Board, however, denied his request to display the OnlyFans logo on his bat, citing misalignment with the family-friendly ethos of The Hundred competition.
Team GB’s own Olympic gold medallist Jack Laugher and his diving teammate Noah Williams have joined the platform too, though with clear boundaries. Laugher’s page explicitly states there will be no “full frontal nudity.” The British Olympic Association, for its part, was reportedly “relaxed” about athletes’ OnlyFans use ahead of the Paris Olympics in 2024, provided they didn’t cross certain lines.
For many, the appeal is creative control and direct access to fans—plus a potentially life-changing income. OnlyFans, now valued at an estimated £6 billion (eclipsing Manchester United in market value), takes a 20% cut of all creator revenues. This business model has proven irresistible for athletes seeking financial security in a world where Olympic medals rarely translate to wealth. “If people dig deeper into why I did it, they would understand that firstly, this was not my first port of call,” Rozentals reflected, noting his earlier stints as a freelance video editor and warehouse worker. “The way I looked at it, is that I worked for this body and I’m sort of owning that.”
The broader phenomenon raises questions about the evolving public image of athletes. Are sports organizations clinging to outdated ideals, or is this simply the new reality of a digital, influencer-driven age? Rozentals, for one, hasn’t given up on his Olympic dream, even as he remains persona non grata on many British waterways. “Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” he quipped, summing up the uneasy intersection of sport, commerce, and personal branding.
As more athletes weigh the costs and benefits of joining OnlyFans, the debate is far from settled. What’s clear is that the lines between sport, entertainment, and entrepreneurship are blurring faster than ever before—and for some, those blurred lines are the only path to staying afloat, both on and off the field.
