The athlete at the other end of a surreal phone call is discussing his hope to paddle a canoe for Team GB at the Olympics. But he’s also chatting about the other way he spends his time – the one that left him wealthy and suspended from his sport.
His name is Kurts Adams Rozentals and, as he tells me, you can ask him anything about his work, life and experiences as a creator of adult content for OnlyFans, a website best known for pornography. He’s an open book, in old money.
But there are lines he won’t cross with his subscribers.
‘I went into it at the start of the year thinking I was going to do custom requests, but they just got so weird,’ he says. ‘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.’
He laughed at that and so did I – Rozentals is an amusing raconteur, a 22-year-old who was the world Under 23 silver medallist in the canoe slalom in 2023 and persona non grata on many of the same waterways in 2025.
Kurts Adams Rozentals is a top-level canoeist still dreaming of competing for Team GB at the Olympics…
…and he’s also one of the rapidly increasing number of sporting stars flocking to OnlyFans, a site best known for its adult content
We are talking due to the jolting trend in recent years of sportsmen and women flooding in vast numbers to OnlyFans.
Rozentals’ example sits at one extreme of the spectrum – he doesn’t see himself as a sex worker but he does trade in sex. It’s complicated. But it has also earned him six-figure takings in eight months and today he is arguably the most famous canoeist since Lewis and Clark. A pariah to those who run his sport? That too.
At the other end of the scale are those like the cricketer Tymal Mills, who was part of the England squad that won the 2022 T20 World Cup and last week hitched himself to the platform.
Prior to Mills there was Nick Kyrgios, multiple names from track and field, former England rugby captain Chris Robshaw, the former Bayern Munich footballer Douglas Costa, a variety of Team GB divers and more than 200 fighters from combat sports.
Eyebrows raise each time there is a new recruit, but not all of them conform to expectations. Mills, for instance, is selling tutorials on fast bowling, with analysis of his performances in The Hundred available to any of OnlyFans’ 400 million users for £3.70 a go. Despite the banter from his team-mates at Southern Brave, his content is entirely family-friendly. As he joked to me, it has to be, because his wife knows what he’s up to.
Collectively they are part of a curious, awkward and uncomfortable phenomenon that Daily Mail Sport has explored.
We have visited the website and spoken to multiple athletes using it to gain an understanding of two key questions: why is it happening? And what circumstances have led so many from the world of sport to attach their personal brands to a platform with a distinctly seedy reputation? The latter counts especially for those who aren’t peddling the site’s best-known product.
Rozentals? What he does is closer to pornography and he has no inhibition when it comes to discussing it.
Rozentals had turned to taking shifts in an Amazon warehouse as his Lottery funding was not enough – then he found OnlyFans
Rozentals made £2,500 in his first day alone on the seedy site – and does not have any regrets about his choice
We won’t labour the descriptions of what he offers for an initial subscription of £6.30 per month, but it starts with nude images on his main feed and escalates for those who then pay more for private messages, where he says the serious money is to be made. His cut of revenues, like all content creators on the site, is 80 per cent.
Such a business model has led OnlyFans to a value estimated at £6billion, making it bigger than Manchester United, in a manner of speaking.
For Rozentals, it has left him ostracised from his day job – Paddle UK, the governing body in this country, suspended him in April over what he was posting.
That was a sporting setback for him and also a moment from which he has benefited enormously in financial terms. Indeed, he reveals to Daily Mail Sport that after giving an interview to the BBC in May, protesting his exclusion, the publicity made him £100,000 in the subsequent four weeks.
‘I don’t regret it,’ says Rozentals. ‘I grew up with nothing and on my very first day on OnlyFans I made £2,500. At that point, it was around double my monthly salary from Paddle UK (where his annual lottery funding via their World Class Programme amounted to £16,000). Living on what I was living as a professional athlete was very hard.’
Struggling to make ends meet within the Olympic sector is nothing new – under the British system, which remains the envy of nations around the world, lottery funding typically peaks at £28,000.
It has paved the way to unprecedented success for Team GB at the Games since it was introduced in 1997, but gold medals rarely make you rich. For many, the sacrifice is worth it; for others, and particularly those with little or no backing, the cost of trying necessitates extra revenue streams.
Predictably, or depressingly, depending on your point of view, a platform with potential to generate astonishing sums for less effort than a standard part-time job has proven appealing. The Canadian pole vaulter Alysha Newman joined in 2021 and part-funded her Olympic bronze medal in Paris last year through subscriptions that cost around £9 a month.
Canadian pole vaulter Alysha Newman is another who turned to OnlyFans
Newman, 31, offers suggestive imagery for free on her OnlyFans page, before escalating when members pay a fee
In Newman’s case, as with many accounts, what starts with suggestive imagery for free on her page escalates to private messages offering more explicit shots for £50 or more. She was reported in the summer of 2024 to have earned more than £170,000 from this venture.
Naturally, it is down to each athlete to decide if the stigma is worth it. Just as it is down to everyone else to decide if they feel outraged or indifferent.
For their part, senior British Olympic Association sources have previously told me they were ‘relaxed’ about the number of Team GB athletes using the platform ahead of the Paris Olympics. Crucially, none of those circumstances are known to have veered beyond suggestive material.
They included the gold medal-winning diver Jack Laugher and Tom Daley’s synchro partner Noah Williams. Laugher, for one, still carries a note on his profile that states there will be no ‘full frontal nudity’ on his page. Rozentals makes no such promise.
Like him, Elise Christie’s posts content that is sexual in its nature, albeit as a retired athlete.
She won 30 major medals as a short-track speed skater, including three world titles, but her difficulties have been well-documented. She had traumatic visits to the Winter Olympics in 2014 and 2018 for Team GB, before retiring three years ago and joining the platform soon after.
By that stage, she was out of money, had spent time living in her car, and battled severe mental health problems. Aged 35, she now posts on the site most days, but reports that her life has stabilised.
‘I was in a bad place when I came out of the sport,’ she tells me. ‘I am much better now and a big part of that was being diagnosed bipolar and getting treatment. But I was in a big hole with debt, working three jobs, and couldn’t get out.
Elise Christie, the former Team GB speed skater, has also turned to OnlyFans to help her finances post-retirement
Christie has battled severe mental health problems but is in a better place now and posts on OnlyFans almost every day
Christie is seen in her Team GB kit in a post promoting her OnlyFans page
‘People probably still don’t know how many of us come out of sport with nothing, even if you had good careers.’
Christie says she received ‘cruel comments’ when she eventually pivoted to OnlyFans in 2022, but is now comfortable with the decision.
‘With OnlyFans, I’d have to say it has helped pick me up out of a dark place,’ she adds. ‘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. Do you remember when Big Brother came out and there were certain things on the screen that shocked us? Now you have Love Island and it goes far beyond what we saw back then.
‘People use OnlyFans in different ways. I have made choices, obviously, and I’m getting myself back together. If I was financially stable I wouldn’t have gone on it, and that isn’t a judgement against anyone else, but I needed to do something to get a step up. Many of us do.’
It tallies with Rozentals’ experience. He tells me: ‘If people dig deeper into why I did it, they would understand that firstly, this was not my first port of call.’
His work included freelance video editing and shifts in an Amazon warehouse, but all of it left him close to broke and too exhausted for training. His eventual solution was to use the body he built for cash; Christie did the same.
‘The way I looked at it, is that I worked for this body and I’m sort of owning that,’ she says.
Team GB Olympic gold medallist Jack Laugher has also joined the site – but promises ‘no full frontal nudity’
And Laugher’s Team GB diving team-mate Noah Williams, who won a silver and bronze at the Paris Olympics last year, has also opened a page
Rozentals has not given up hope of competing at the Olympics – a prospect that might well make some observers cringe if it comes to pass. What he says next goes to the crux of the debate: ‘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.
‘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.’
As for other athletes who are trading in material that is unrelated to sex, an interesting dynamic is at play – athletes are using OnlyFans, but OnlyFans are also using athletes.
In Mills’s case, and indeed Kyrgios and the majority, they have been signed as ‘partners’ for a fee, promoting sports-based material that can be monetised.
It is clear OnlyFans are targeting the large, personalised fanbases of athletes for their business, but it does raise the question of why choose a site with a reputation that might lessen his own.
Due to the layout of the site, visiting Mills’s page would not put a user in contact with any pornography unless they happen to subscribe to accounts offering it. What that means is if you happen to choose OnlyFans as the right place for learning how to bowl line and length, you probably can without offending sensibilities. Still, it is a curious mix.
He adds: ‘I guess the first thing that comes to mind (with OnlyFans) is obviously the adult content. And I understand that. But they’re a huge company and once you lift the lid, you do see how many genres are on there – chefs, cooks and comedians from all walks of life.
‘Once I started to learn more about the platform itself and what you can do on it, it became pretty obvious that it’s kind of ready-made for athletes, with how you can form your own content and your own platform.’
England cricketer Tymal Mills has a page… but only to give his viewers tips on how to improve their bowling
Rozentals competes in Olympics trials back in April 2019, long before his venture into OnlyFans
Whether that level of creative control truly means more than a decent signing fee is vulnerable to scepticism. Intriguingly, Mills says the company has planned on adding top-level footballers to their cohort.
For Mills, the response to signing up was predictable. ‘It’s the stuff you’d expect,’ he says. ‘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’ experience so far has highlighted the challenge an interested party might face, with the England and Wales Cricket Board having rejected his request to carry the OnlyFans logo on his bat. It has been reported that they denied approval on the grounds that the company does not align with the family-friendly nature of The Hundred.
Much like the canoeist stuck up the creek without a paddle, it is an illustration of the uneasiness that exists within a growing pattern. Rozentals’ take is simple: ‘Don’t hate the player, hate the game.’ Many might find it harder to digest how the game has changed.
