athlete

Conor McDermott-Mostowy would like to compete at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games. And he certainly has the talent, desire and ambition to do so.

What he lacks is the money.

“You could definitely reach six figures,” David McFarland, McDermott-Mostowy’s agent, said of what the speedskater needs annually to live and train while chasing his Olympic dream.

In the last year, finding that money has been increasingly difficult because McDermott-Mostowy is gay. Since President Trump returned to the White House in January, bringing with him an agenda that is hostile to diversity, equity and inclusion, sponsors who once embraced LGBTQ+ athletes and initiatives have turned away from the likes of McDermott-Mostowy, with devastating effect.

“There’s definitely been a noticeable shift,” said McFarland, who for decades has represented straight and gay athletes in a number of sports, from the NFL and NBA to professional soccer. “Many brands and speaking opportunities that previously highlighted LGBTQ athletes are now being pulled back or completely going away.”

“And these aren’t just symbolic partnerships,” he added. “They’re vital income opportunities that help athletes fund training, fund their competition and their livelihoods.”

The impact is being felt across a wide range of sports where sponsorship dollars often make the difference between winning and not being able to compete. But it’s especially acute in individual sports where the athletes are the brand and their unique traits — their size, appearance, achievements and even their gender preferences — become the things that attract or repel fans and financial backers.

“What’s most frustrating is that these decisions are rarely about performance,” McFarland said. “They’re about perceptions in the LGBTQ community. And that kind of fear-driven retreat harms everyone involved because, beyond the human costs, it’s also very short-sighted. The LGBTQ community and its allies represent a multitrillion-dollar global market with immense buying power.”

Travis Shumake, the only openly gay driver on the NHRA circuit, ran a career-high five events in 2022 and said he once had deals with major brands such as Mission Foods, Procter & Gamble and Kroger while using a rainbow-colored parachute to slow his dragster.

Kroger is the only one whose support has yet to shrink and as a result, Shumake had to keep his car in its trailer for the final eight months of the year.

And when he did race, his parachute was black.

Travis Shumake competes at the NHRA Nationals at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in November 2024.

(Marc Sanchez / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

“It was looking very optimistic and bright,” said Shumake, who spends about $60,000 for an engine and as much as $25,000 for each run down the dragstrip. “Being the only LGBTQ driver would have been very profitable. I ended last season with plans to run six to eight races. Great conversations were happening with big, big companies. And now it’s, I did one race, completely based on funding.”

“When you’re asking for a $100,000 check,” he added, “it’s very tough for these brands to take that risk for a weekend when there could be a large backlash because of my sexual identity.”

A sponsorship manager for a Fortune 500 company that had previously backed Shumake said he was not authorized to discuss the decision to end its relationship with the driver.

Daniel T. Durbin, director of the Institute of Sports, Media and Society at the USC Annenberg school, said there could be several reasons for that. A shrinking economy has tightened sponsorship budgets, for example. But there’s no doubt the messaging from the White House has had a chilling effect.

“It certainly makes the atmosphere around the issue more difficult because advertising and promotion tied to social change has come under fire by the Trump administration,” Durbin said.

In addition, corporate sponsors that once rallied behind diversity, whether out of conviction or convenience, saw the election results partly as a repudiation of that.

“We may be pissing off 50% of the population if we go down this path. Do we really want to do that with our brand?” Durbin said of the conversations corporations are having.

Backing away from causes such as LGBTQ+ rights doesn’t necessarily mean those corporations were once progressive and are now hypocritical. For many, the only color of the rainbow they care about is green.

“You’re trying to give people a philosophy who don’t have a philosophy,” Durbin said. “And even if they believe in causes, they’re not going to self-destruct their company by taking up a cause they believe in. They’re going to take it up in part because they think it’s positive for the bottom line.

“That’s the way it works.”

As a result, others have had to step up to try to help fill the funding gap. The Out Athlete Fund, a 501(c)(3) organization, was recently created to provide financial assistance and other support to LGBTQ+ athletes. McDermott-Mostowy was the first to get a check, after a November event in West Hollywood raised more than $15,000.

“We’re here to help cover their costs because a lot of other people aren’t doing it,” said Cyd Zeigler, a founding board member of the group and co-founder of OutSports, a sports-news website focused on LGBTQ+ issues.

That kind of retrenching, from deep-pocketed corporate sponsors to individuals giving their spare change, is threatening to derail the careers of athletes such as McDermott-Mostowy, who relies on his family and a modest U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee stipend for most of his living and training expenses. And since he’ll turn 27 before the Milano Cortina Olympic Games open in February, he may not be able to wait for the pendulum to swing back to have another chance at being an Olympian.

“I’m 99% sure I qualify for [food] stamps,” said McDermott-Mostowy, who medaled in the 1,500- and 500-meter events in October’s national championships, making him a strong contender for the U.S. heading into the Olympic long track trials Jan. 2-5 in Milwaukee. “What really saves us every year is when we travel. Almost all of our expenses are paid when we’re coming [with] the team.

“If I didn’t make the World Cup one year, I would be ruined.”

McDermott-Mostowy’s past success and his Olympic potential are what he pitches to sponsors, not that he’s gay. But that’s what makes him stand out; if he qualifies for Milano Cortina, he would be one of the few gay athletes on the U.S. team.

“I have always been very open about my sexuality. So that wasn’t really a debate,” he said.

“I have definitely heard from my agent that, behind closed doors, a lot of people are like ‘Oh, we’d love to support queer athletes. But it’s just not a good time to be having that as our public face.’”

The debate isn’t a new one, although it has evolved over the years. Figure skater Amber Glenn, who last year became the first out queer woman to win the U.S. championship, remembers gender preferences being a big topic of discussion ahead of the 2014 Games in Russia, where public support for LGBTQ+ expression is banned.

“At that point I wasn’t out, but I was thinking, ‘What would I do? What would I say?’” Glenn said. “Moving forward I hope that we can make it where people can compete as who they are and not have to worry about anything.

“Figure skating is unique. We have more acceptance and more of a community in the queer space. That’s not the case for all sports. We’re definitely making progress, but we still have a long way to go.”

Conor McDermott-Mostowy hopes to be competing for the U.S. in speedskating at the Milano Cortina Olympic Games in February.

(Dean Mouhtaropoulos / Getty Images)

In the meantime, athletes such as McDermott-Mostowy and Shumake may have to find ways to re-present themselves to find new sources of support.

“It’s not like I’m going back in the closet,” said Shumake, who has decided to rent out his dragster to straight drivers next year rather than leave it parked and face bankruptcy. “It’s just that maybe it’s not the main storyline at the moment. I’m trying a bunch of different ways to tell the story, to rebrand.”

“It’s been weird to watch,” added Shumake, who once billed himself as the fastest gay guy on Earth. “I know it will swing back. I also fear, did I make the right choices when I had a partnership with Grindr and I had rainbow parachutes? Like did I come on too strong?

“I’ve chosen to go the gay race car driver route and it’s just a little bit of a slowdown. I don’t think I need to blame myself. It’s just a fear people are having at the moment.”

A fear that’s proving costly to the athletes who can least afford to pay.

Growing up just outside Melbourne, Australia, Scotty James was more likely to spot the Loch Ness Monster or Big Foot as he was to spot snow. For him, the Winter Olympics seemed about as accessible as Mars.

“It is very unique, being an Australian in winter sports,” he said. “We’re very few and far between.”

Unique, but not impossible. Because if he qualifies for February’s Milano-Cortina Olympics, as expected, James will become the first Australian man to represent the country in five separate Winter Olympics. If he reaches the podium in the men’s halfpipe, his specialty, he will become the most decorated winter Olympian in Australian history with three medals.

Yet it almost didn’t happen. If his father Phil, a passionate snowboarder, hadn’t talked a Vancouver ski-shop worker into selling 3-year-old Scotty a miniature display board during a family vacation to Canada decades ago, James still might be watching the Winter Olympics on TV.

“My parents were always making sure that I realized how fortunate I was to be doing what I was doing,” said the 31-year-old James, a four-time world champion and the most successful halfpipe rider in history. “And incredibly supportive through all of it, through the challenges and through the most recent great moments.”

But James, whose fortunate if still unfolding life story is told in the film “Scotty James: Pipe Dream,” which will be available on Netflix beginning Friday, won’t be the only accidental Olympian in competing in Italy. The Summer Games feature running, jumping, swimming and throwing, activities that can be done mostly anywhere, but many of the disciplines in the Winter Games — skiing, figure skating, luge and snowboarding, for example — require ice and snow, which are unavailable to about two-thirds of the world’s population.

That’s why more than 10,000 athletes from more than 200 countries competed in the 2024 Summer Games in Paris and fewer than 3,000 representing about 90 nations will participate in Italy.

“Africa, big parts of southeast Asia, South America, many of those countries don’t have a heritage of winter sports,” said Gene Sykes, president and chair of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. “Given that there’s a limitation that all the sports have to conducted on snow or ice, we have to be creative.”

Among the creative ideas that have been discussed is adding events such as cross-country running, cycling and indoor sports that could be practiced anywhere to the Winter Olympics calendar, which would make the Games more universal.

In the meantime, athletes such as alpine skier Richardson Viano of Haiti and figure skater Donovan Carrillo of Mexico will be curiosities in Milan, having followed paths that were arduous, complicated and completely out of the ordinary.

James fits that description as well, having lived much of his life abroad, traveling to the U.S., Canada and the Nordic countries in search of mountains, snow and competition. That’s a hardship unknown to Winter Olympic athletes from Europe and North American.

“You know, 80% of the time I wasn’t really in Australia,” said James, who started competing in snowboard at the age of 6 and began traveling to events at 10. “I was always overseas. My mom would organize some tutors in different countries and then I would do some online stuff with my school back in Australia.”

There is snow in parts of Australia, but since the country is in the southern hemisphere, the winters there are short and they come during what is summer in the northern climes. So to stay fit and to compete in major events, James had to live on a Northern Hemisphere calendar, meaning he was overseas from October to May almost every year.

“It was a real task,” he said, “to get it all done.”

It was expensive, too, though it proved a wise investment since he progressed quickly, turning pro at 14 and making the Australian Olympic team at 15, becoming the country’s youngest male Olympian in 50 years and the youngest male competitor in the Vancouver Games in 2010.

Yet on the eve of those Games, James was ready to pass all that up.

“I didn’t love it anymore,” he said. “I would go home and cry to my mom all the time. I wanted to quit. I ended up in this spiral that made me want to go home and just have a normal life and go to school and be with my friends.”

It didn’t help that James broke his right wrist in practice before the Olympics. But he recovered from the injury and the lack of confidence to place 21st; four years later, while still a teenager, he won the first of four World Cup titles in the halfpipe and ranked No. 1 in the world.

At 23 he was chosen to carry the Australian flag in the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, where he won a bronze medal.

Scotty James carried the flag of Australia’s team during the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

(Julie Jacobson / Associated Press)

“It’s one of the biggest honors, being an Olympic athlete, to walk your team into the opening ceremony,” he said. “The first time I ever watched the Olympics, I remember watching the opening ceremony and I believe one of the basketballers walked the team in. And I just remember being like ‘wow, that must be just a special thing to do.’

“Little did I know it was potentially on the radar for me. That’s a moment that lives rent-free in my head, that’s for sure.”

But if James had to leave Australia to become an Olympian, back home his exploits have made enough of a celebrity that he’s often recognized on the streets of Melbourne or Sydney.

“They remember for sure, which is really cool,” said the still-boyish James. “I always am chuffed when people come up and recognize me or have followed my career. It never gets old.”

Neither, it seems, does James, who turns 32 in July but isn’t ready to call his fifth Olympics his final one just yet.

“I don’t have a timeline. I don’t give myself an end date,” he said. “Every day when I wake up I think about how I can be better at snowboarding and what I can do to make myself better. So I really haven’t thought about that at all.”

But James, who is raising 14-month-old son Leo with his wife, Chloe Stroll, a Canadian singer-songwriter and daughter of Aston Martin chairman Lawrence Stroll, has begun preparing for a life beyond the slopes. In the last two years he’s released two illustrated children’s books featuring MOOKi, James alter-ego who has adopted the snowboarder’s childhood nickname and his insistence on always dreaming big.

He’s also an investor and brand advisor for MSP Sports Capital, which purchased the X Games — James is a seven-time X Games gold medalist — in 2022, kicking off his move from snow moguls to business mogul. There’s also the Netflix film, directed by Emmy-winning filmmaker Patrick Dimon, which will spread his legend and legacy even further.

“Typically athletes kind of close the door on their athletic journey and then they start to invest in their sport. But I want to do it right now,” he said. “I can really add value to a business like X Games because I’m still competing. I can speak to the athletes and I can give really good feedback about where it can get better.”

However, the contribution he’d really like to leave involves creating an environment that would allow the next generation of Australian Winter Olympians to learn and grow in their sports without having to leave their homes. James did that by building Australia’s only 13-foot mini halfpipe for kids in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales, where he trains when he’s in Australia. That’s a project he’d like to expand.

“I would love to leave a mark in some sense of hopefully opening up the door and creating some access [for] freestyle sport in Australia,” James said. “Specifically in the winter, to see if we can produce some really great talent in the future.”