✳️Sabrina Stanley’s Deal is just the Beginning

On Sabrina Stanley’s OF deal and the financial realities of a professional trail runner.

Hey pals,

Seems the athlete sponsorship rodeo hasn’t left town yet with both Riley Brady and Sabrina Stanley announcing their new sponsor this week.

I thought i’d spend this article expanding on something I wrote about earlier this week on Instagram. There is a bigger story that surrounds Sabrina’s OnlyFans sponsorship that needs unpacking - the current reality of athletic sponsorship isn’t working and athletes are starting to realise.

As always, would love to hear your thoughts :)

Hope you have a great week,

Matt

Something is shifting in the economics of trail running. Over the past few weeks I’ve been chatting to various athletes about their reasons for starting a separate media outlet, whether a YouTube channel, podcast or Substack. What fuelled this query is the sudden growth of athletes starting something for themselves shifting our media ecosystem to be more athlete-forward than traditional media outlets. I’ll explore what I found another time, but ultimately I was curious whether this shift was driven by a desire to self-fund their careers beyond traditional sponsorship. Then the Sabrina Stanley news broke.

For those who have just exited the pain cave after a 6-day bender running across unfathomable landscapes, ultrarunner Sabrina Stanley has signed a new sponsorship deal with OnlyFans, the platform that allows creators to be paid for access to their content. Since its beginnings the primary creators on this platform are people who want to be paid for adult content, not training vlogs (“Adult entertainers” is the typical description, but it makes it sound like the adult version of a children’s entertainer, as if they’re all clowns, which they’re not, but I’m sure there are some on OF if that's your kink…).

The timing of the news alongside the growth of athlete content creators signals a fundamental shift in how athletes in trail running are being paid. Sabrina’s sponsorship with OnlyFans is not just another brand deal—it’s a sign of how athletes are rewriting the rules of financial freedom.

This isn’t OnlyFan’s first foray into sport sponsorship. The platform has been quietly sponsoring MMA fighters, pole-vaulters, downhill mountain bikers, bodybuilders, divers, speed skaters, fencers and now, ultrarunners. OnlyFans have not been public about their reasoning, but bringing other types of creators onto the platform is a way to soften their smutty image and acquire and retain users.

The original intention of OnlyFan’s founder Tim Stokely was never to be a NSFW platform, but adult content creators soon made it their home. After 75% of it was bought out by Ukrainian billionaire Leonid Radvinsky, the platform leaned into its newfound clothless clientele. Being the home of sex workers and their lusty fans was a lucrative place to be until 2021 when Mastercard, its payment processing partner, decided it didn’t want to be tarred with the same brush. Mastercard reversed their decision after 6 days, but it must have been a turning point for the company because since then they’ve been on this sport sponsorship spree.

Brands sponsor sports and athletes as a way to tie themselves to the culture and image of that sport. It’s a ticket to start talking to the fans and start building out a personality and meaning to their otherwise corporate facade. For OnlyFans, image rebuilding is part of the incentive for them, but so too is generating more reasons for men (their biggest paying customers) to join and spend more time on the platform. (Anyone who has sampled Sabrina’s page knows this well as signed-up users are also recommended to pay for subscriptions to access more scantily clad women’s content.)

Why then do athletes agree to a sponsorship with OnlyFans? A common thread between all sports OnlyFan’s has sponsored is that their spaces where income is inconsistent and the traditional sponsorship model isn’t working. Trail running too is not a sport flush with cash, and for Sabrina, this isn’t about playing into gendered stereotypes. It’s about securing financial independence in a field where sponsorships are scarce and prize money barely covers travel expenses.

The logic of OnlyFans in trail running sports is straightforward: traditional sponsorship models favor athletes in mainstream, highly visible sports. If you’re not in the NBA or the Premier League, the economics get trickier. Trail running, despite its growing popularity, remains niche. For female athletes, the gap is even wider. They receive fewer sponsorships, lower prize payouts (but this is getting better), and often have to prove their worth beyond their results. OnlyFans offers something different—a direct-to-fan model where athletes can monetise their audience on their own terms. In this landscape, Stanley’s move is less about controversy and more about navigating a flawed system.

I’ve seen comments that this partnership risks reinforcing the sexualization of women in sports. There’s a valid concern that female athletes already face disproportionate scrutiny over how they present themselves, and that a deal with OnlyFans could make it harder for them to secure traditional sponsorships. But this critique misses the broader point. If the sponsorship landscape were working as it should, an athlete of Stanley’s calibre wouldn’t need to look outside traditional sports brands for financial support. Focusing on her decision misses the broader point that trail running, and women’s sports more broadly, remains underfunded.

There is a lingering question as to why choose OnlyFans out of all creator payment platforms when Sabrina knows the platform comes with so much baggage. I’m sure OnlyFans is probably paying a nice signing bonus and Sabrina will keep 80% of her fan payments (she is currently free to subscribe to), plus Patreon and Substack haven’t gone into sports sponsorship to encourage athletes onto their platforms (likely because they don’t need to encourage it, athletes sign up already). After I posted a summary of this article on Instagram, Sabrina’s agent slid into my DMs and after offering some rather unsavoury criticism, he stated that Sabrina has wanted this sponsorship for years. Whilst you can trust what agents say as much as you can trust anyone who shills Athletic Greens for a living, Corinne Malcolm mentioned on the FreeTrail podcast that other agents have been approached by OnlyFans, suggesting that Sabrina’s choice was likely driven by opportunity as much as her personal choice.

The bigger question is what this says about the future of athlete funding. The old model—brands paying for visibility and race prize money for the very best—still works for some. But increasingly, athletes are turning to direct-to-consumer platforms like Patreon, Substack, and now OnlyFans, cutting out middlemen and forging their own financial paths.

The sponsorship deal has highlighted how trail runners, particularly women, are being forced to rethink financial viability in a sport that hasn’t quite figured out how to support them. It’s a reflection of a system where endurance athletes must be increasingly resourceful to sustain their careers. Whether this deal is seen as progressive or problematic, in a time where there is so much optimism in our sport, it forces a conversation about the financial realities of the current model of trail running and where athletes go from here.