22-year-old Paralympian Catarina Guimaraes of Cranford, New Jersey, reportedly signed a $25,000 annual deal with OnlyFans to help cover medical and living costs as she trains for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. She joins the growing ranks of athletes accepting OnlyFans sponsorship in exchange for safe-for-work content. For Guimaraes, that looks like sharing gym routines, behind-the-scenes training, personal updates, and clips of her singing Broadway songs on her $10-a-month page. The platform is paying her for posts on its site and on her own channels, in her words, “to bring a more wholesome view of their page.” She says the page isn’t racy “unless you want to count a video of me doing power cleans in a sports bra and shorts as racy.”
Not everyone has assumed it would stay that way, though. Guimaraes says she’s been offered serious money for far more, including a $15,000 request for one private call. Her teammates told her to take it. “I was like, ‘Nooooo, that is not what I’m about,'” she said. “I did not realize people would offer that much money for that stuff.”
Pretty much every athlete can use extra cash as they prep for any major sporting event, but Guimaraes has an extra challenge to overcome. She was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at age 3 and describes it as “having bad WiFi in your brain,” a constant half-second delay between telling her body to move and watching it respond. But she didn’t let it slow her down. She went on to earn a second-degree black belt in taekwondo, became the first NCAA Division I athlete with cerebral palsy at High Point University, and placed eighth in the long jump at the 2024 Paris Paralympics. She now lives in Chula Vista, California, preparing for the IFCPF Cerebral Palsy Football World Cup and the Los Angeles Games while finishing a master’s in kinesiology at LSU. Her father, John Guimaraes, said the goal of the OnlyFans deal is to reduce her financial strain. “When she wakes up, she shouldn’t be thinking, ‘Do I have enough gas money to get to the training center?'” he said.
She joins many other elite athletes on the platform, and the pattern says more about sports funding than about OnlyFans. At the Paris Games, Olympians began turning to the platform in droves and being open about it. Matthew Mitcham, the Australian diver who won gold in 2008, said he began posting after failing to secure traditional sponsorships and earned roughly triple what he previously made as a top athlete. Canadian pole vaulter Alysha Newman, who won bronze in Paris, has said her OnlyFans income let her buy property and build savings. If she only relied on Canada’s federal Athlete Assistance Program, she would have received just $21,000 a year, though that’s more than some countries provide their athletes. Newman also said that since people will sexualize her anyway, “OnlyFans lets me be in charge of that.” German bobsledder Lisa Buckwitz, a 2018 gold medalist, joined in November 2024 and funded her trip to the 2026 Winter Games partly through subscription bundles.
Global Athlete, a group founded by athletes to push for fairer treatment, is blunt: “The entire funding model for Olympic sport is broken.” OnlyFans’ own response was to point out that the platform is “helping them to support training and living costs.”
That’s also the idea behind the athlete program the company has been building out, which includes a sports tier with roughly 285 athletes, including WNBA guard Erica Wheeler’s official partnership, freesurfer Maud Le Car’s deal, and ultrarunner Camille Herron‘s decision to treat the platform as a way to sponsor herself. Guimaraes joins the growing list of athletes, though she’s already struggling with the social media side of things.
Instagram has limited the reach of some of her once-viral posts, saying her OnlyFans association violates community standards. After she criticized Sydney Sweeney’s nude Novig ad, the backlash on her roughly 78,000-follower account was bad enough that she turned off comments. She noted that Instagram isn’t paying her a dime, but is punishing her for signing with her most reliable sponsor. The system does seem broken, after all.