Victoria Pendleton

Interesting article in today's Observer.

They won glory and were promised that riches, too, would follow. Just 12 months ago British athletes produced the country's best performance in 100 years at an Olympic Games, leaving Beijing with a total of 47 medals.
*The lives of the 27 Olympic heroes of 2008 would change for ever, or so it was widely predicted. Steve Martin, chief executive of sponsorship at advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, said they all had a golden opportunity to be millionaires. "People don't understand how much these guys could actually make," he said in August last year. The potential was huge, he said, because of their high profile in a country that was "going to be obsessed with the Olympics for four years". *
But the Observer has discovered that far from the goldrush to fame and fortune, last year's British Olympic medal winners came home, in the majority of cases, to an anti-climax.
*The reality is that just a year after their glorious moments on the winners' podium, no one is rich, most are still struggling against anonymity and a lack of sponsorship and funding, and 23 of them are back in the daily grind of training, preparing to try and do it all over again at the London Olympics in 2012. *
*For athletes who dedicate much of their lives to punishing daily training routines towards just one goal, it is hard to move on into any other future especially when the public is so quickly prepared to forget its one-time Olympic heroes. In the opinion of at least two of them, Tim Brabants and Chris Boardman, it seems the British public only has the capacity to remember one or two Olympic celebrities in any given year. For 2008, they claim, it was Chris Hoy and Rebecca Adlington. For the rest, they are all left to fight over the very few sponsorship deals, speaking or media punditry gigs that might be available to sportsmen or women who are not footballers. *
Cyclist Paul Manning was the first of the gold medalists from Beijing to retire. He is now an assistant construction manager helping to build London's velodrome for 2012, and he admits he was daunted at the prospect of entering a job market after years of cycling training that left him with a fairly empty CV. A paper round and an Olympic gold impress no one, he said.
Canoeist Brabants went back to eight-hour shifts as a doctor in a Nottingham accident and emergency department. Brabants - who tells Observer Sport Monthly that he only ever gets an invite to anything when it has already been turned down by fellow Nottingham Olympian Adlington - certainly has not been scooped up by some great sponsorship or advertising deal despite his two medals and, indeed, says his life was in part set back by his sporting success.
*"Its difficult to progress when you're only working part-time," he says of his stalled medical career. *
Another Olympian complained: "People say that I must be making loads of money, but how? Everybody wants you for free."
One success story all the athletes point to and envy is Hoy, who won three individual golds in cycling events at Beijing - the first Briton to win three golds at one Games since 1908. He went on to scoop Sports Personality of the Year, Jaguar ambassador and face of Kellogg's, he had a passenger plane named after him and even caught a knighthood in the New Year honours among the MBEs given out to other Olympians.
*After Beijing, Hoy had said that a gold wouldn't change his life. *
"I have eaten my words there a bit," he says now.
But even he, the exception to the rule, says that despite his rise in earnings he still is nowhere near attaining the wealth of most comparable professional sportsmen. "Olympic athletes are very much amateur athletes. When you finish you're going to have to start at the bottom rung of a different career somewhere else."
***Track cyclist Victoria Pendleton says she is frustrated by the system and its inequalities that saw her teammates find a fame that slipped past her grasp; even a photoshoot for men's mag FHM was unpaid she says. ***
"I've pretty much done everything I can and I'm still an unknown," she says. "You come away with two gold medals and you think your life is made," she said. "But I'm not sure anything is different at all."
It seems that the lesson for Martin is that it was only Saatchi & Saatchi itself - the New York office of which won an estimated $62m advertising contract to promote the games ahead of Beijing - that actually profited out of its Olympic work.