What It Costs to Go to the Olympics: Show the Receipts

Welcome to Show the Receipts, a new series where we ask interesting people to share exactly how much it costs to get shit done. No matter the task, we’re tracking every last dollar from start to finish. Up next: getting to the Olympics.

Jonathan Cheever had an unconventional intro to snowboarding at age 11. “ExxonMobil was having a promotion: get a tank of gas and get a free snowboard lesson,” he remembers. “My parents would fill up their rigs and my brother and I got free snowboard lessons. I fell in love.”

Fast forward, and he was competing in (and winning) competitions like the snowboarding International Ski Federation (FIS) World Cup. By 2011, he was the U.S. snowboarding champion, and he competed in the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang.

It was an incredible journey — but the path to getting to the Olympics was a pricey one.

“If you’re only talking about going to the Olympic Games, after you’ve qualified, that travel is completely covered,” Cheever tells PS. But before you make the team, there’s tons of travel and expenses. “If you want to go to the Olympic games as a snowboarder, you have to first go to South America in the fall to qualify for the World Cup, then you have to go to Europe for more competitions,” Cheever says.

“Saying it out loud, I’m bitching about needing money to go snowboarding in cool places,” he jokes — but much of the travel, lodging, gear, and many other expenses were all on his own dime, and the costs quickly became steeper than the mountains he glided down. “There’s not a whole lot of funding from the governing bodies of the sports. A lot of stuff has to be self-funded or funded by parents or sponsors, and sponsors are very few and far between.” Perhaps proving his point, at the Paris Olympics this year, multiple athletes who qualified have billionaire parents, per Business Insider.

Cheever did get some financial help along his journey to the Olympics, including getting some access to free coaching, a training facility, and securing some small sponsorships. However, a lot of it felt like “a drop in the ocean” compared to how much he ended up spending. Competing and qualifying for the Games put him into serious debt.

“You need a budget of $50,000 to $100,000 per season to qualify for the Olympics,” he continues. “That’s everything from equipment to traveling to coaches. And if you’re doing it for $50,000, you’re scraping by.”

Here’s his general cost breakdown of what it took to get to the Olympics.

Task: Getting to the Olympics

Occupation: Olympic Snowboarder and founder of Team Cheever Plumbing and Heating

Location: Park City, Utah

Timeline: 1 year

The Receipts

Flights, lodging, and other qualifying games expenses in South America for qualifying Men’s Snowboard Cross: $18,000

Flights, room and board, lift tickets, and meals in Europe to qualify: $15,000

Non-World Cup entry fees: about $200 per event, or $1,000 total

Licensing fee: $300

Hotel and registration fees for World Cup: $1,000 per event, or $3,000 total

Snowboards, boots, and other equipment: $10,000

Miscellaneous gym expenses: $1,000

Snowboard wax: $0, covered through sponsorship deal with TOKO wax (up to $10,000 in product for the season)

Coaching: $0, free for athletes in the US Pro team

Flight to the Olympics: $0, covered

Olympics Village accommodations: $0, covered

Olympics meals: $0, covered

Total: ~$48,300

How I Did It

PS: What was the most surprising or shocking expense or experience of the whole process?

Jonathan Cheever: Comparing American athletes to other countries like Austria and Germany, we get so little support Other countries have more of a socialist mindset. Their teams are funded by the taxpayer, but that isn’t the case in America. The Austrian Team might get something like $2,000 a month plus all of their traveling funded by their Olympic committees and the US Team doesn’t do anything of the sort. So, all these American athletes are competing against athletes from other countries that are mostly fully funded by their national governing bodies.

The athletes need more support from organizations like USOC and the USSA [now called US Ski & Snowboard]. The USSA, in particular, I believe, to some extent, they use the athletes to get funding for themselves and the athletes get a minimum cut of it. It’s completely unfair . . . At the end of the day, I believe a lot more of the money could go toward the athletes themselves.

PS: Where did you cut costs?

JC: I’m sure some people are going to look down on this, but you’ve seen the Ralph Lauren kits and outfits they give you for the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics? They’re cool, but no one would normally wear that in everyday life. When I was going, I immediately listed all my Opening Ceremony gear on eBay. I needed to fund the rest of my season. I still had three World Cups afterward, and the time to sell the gear is when the ceremonies are happening and before they start. I wish I was privileged enough to have that stuff hanging on my wall, but to make some cash to fund my next Olympics? That’s what I was doing. I would say I made about $8,000 to $10,000 that way. The Opening Ceremony itself was amazing. It really hit me that I was there representing my country and my sport. It took me decades to get there.

PS: Did having sponsors help you make the Games happen?

JC: My best sponsors throughout my snowboarding career have been plumbing companies. Bradford White Water Heaters started sponsoring me in 2009, so I’m super grateful my parents got me into plumbing to get this opportunity. American Standard sponsored me leading into the 2018 Games, and Viega, a pipe fitting company, I’m still an ambassador with them. Triple 8 helmets helped me out throughout my career.

I had a deal that helped me out with board wax; it’s like $250 for an ounce of this stuff to make our boards fast. You hear about independent teams where athletes pay a coach and a professional wax technician, and the wax budget per athlete would be $8,000 to $10,000 alone.

Another thing that really helped was funding from the Level Field Foundation — two Olympic athletes Ross Powers and Michael Phelps backed that and gave us a few thousand every year. The first time they funded me, I got first in the world for a while — I was lucky to get that money, and, it’s funny, looking back, getting that $2,000 from them felt like all the money in the world to me.

PS: How did you save on, say, food?

JC: Living in Park City, Utah, near an official training facility, The Center of Excellence in Park City helped, eventually. When that building was first opened, big donors would come in and they’d give these tours and show off the kitchen. But for years, that kitchen was a goddamn showroom . . . I’d piss and moan and say: you guys are showing off this place but there’s no chef or food here. Eventually, they got the funding, and athletes could eat at the facility. That was night and day. Athletes could go, train, have a meal, have a nutritionist and a dietitian. But that took years to figure out.

My buddy and I used to also send Tweets to local McDonalds and KFC to say, “Hey, we’re Olympic athletes and we’re visiting for competitions.” And McDonalds would randomly fire us gift cards here and there. It was awesome. We’d try to leverage anything we could.

PS: Did you lose money stepping away from plumbing jobs to compete and qualify?

JC: I worked installing water heaters in between seasons. There’s an opportunity cost to everything. In 2020 or 2021, I was in the twilight of my career, and I was questioning myself: should I focus on starting a business or try to qualify for the 2022 Olympics? I tried to make the Games and I didn’t. Granted, it was nice to get some closure on my snowboarding career, but looking at the opportunity cost of that decision? . . . If I had forgone my last season and focused on my career, I imagine I’d have an extra quarter of a million dollars, based on my company’s current trajectory. I will say, I have a pretty high risk tolerance, I have no problem putting my head down and grinding when I need to, but it would have been nice to have that cash, because I ended my athletic career with over six figures in credit card debt. Digging out of that has been no easy task. Of course, it’s a double-edged sword. I get to say I’m an Olympian and put that on the side of my truck. To even be in the position to run up $150,000 of credit card debt doing this is a privilege.

PS: Any other expenses that are harder to quantify?

JC: The hard costs are easy to break down. But the soft costs? Living in the right area, being at the right training facility, having a good diet, the necessary equipment to train. The head coach when I was on the team wanted every athlete to have an Enduro mountain bike for off season training. Look up what those costs are. [Editor’s note: They’re about $2,000 to $4,000.]

In our sports, when we are measuring times in hundredths of seconds, with the fastest snowboarders in the world, there are no shortcuts. An athlete is putting the best wax on, and using the best equipment to make sure the only variable they have to worry about is their performance. Look at the time trials on any World Cup Snowboard Cross. You’ll see results of guys and girls that travel around the world to do a couple runs on a snowboard and only miss qualifying to heat races by 0.01 seconds. Those factors can be a small gust of wind, or the sun coming out at the wrong time that slows the snow down. These athletes are in the business of splitting hairs. No cutting corners, no cheaping out.

PS: Was the cost worth it?

JC: Abso-fucking-lutely. How many people get to say they get to travel the world as an Olympic athlete?

It took a village — my family, my friends my sponsors supporting me, as well as the coaches and the USSA. But at some point with the USSA, it was like: fuck you guys. I fought tooth and nail for years to get them to help me with funding, and as soon as an athlete had issues, it was like, “See ya! Next.” Toward the second to last season of my career — after knowing all the athletes and coaches for decades — I had an off season. I had to get two ankle surgeries, my mom died, and my wife walked out. Then, I got a phone call just saying: “I just want to let you know your funding is cut for next season.” That was the only phone call I got, and I thought they handled it terribly. That left a bad taste in my mouth with the USSA.

Still, snowboarding has been so good to me in general and I want to promote it as a sport in every way I can.

Editor’s note: When asked for comment, a spokesperson for US Ski & Snowboard noted that the organization’s “focus is always athlete first and more than 80 percent of every dollar brought in through donations, sponsorships and grants goes to supporting athletic programs, including travel, training, coaching and more.” They added: “Under new leadership, we have worked to make funding criteria transparent and ensured that all elite team athletes above the development level have their athletic programming fully paid for by US Ski & Snowboard.”

Final Thoughts

Now that he’s retired, Cheever has no regrets about pursuing his dreams, but he does wish that the US would help athletes like himself out more with costs. He adds that he would sponsor an athlete in the future, but wouldn’t go through an official organization affiliated with the US Olympics, as he believes they don’t put enough of their funding toward helping the athletes themselves. “More and more, it’s becoming the sport of kings where you have to have some type of privilege or support system,” he adds.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to complain about being a professional snowboarder. But there’s no money at all in snowboarding in America. Unless you’re Shaun White, or these types of people who are freak athletes — who’ve definitely earned it — there is no financial benefit to doing the sport. It’s a labor of love.”

Still, he’s paying it forward and trying to help young athletes like himself, who may not come from super privileged backgrounds. “My family and I and my business, we do everything we can to help give back,” he says. “We love the USASA for kids, which is a grassroots organization where everybody starts. We do events with them with cash prizes and swag and Carhartt gear. Once I’m in a better financial position, I’ll probably talk to the coaches I still have good relationships with and ask: who are the athletes who have financial struggles? I’d love to give back.”

As for snowboarding, Cheever still loves being out on the powder. “I’m not worried about sponsors or tricks or training anymore,” he says. ‘It’s just nice to ride with my family and friends and enjoy snowboarding for the sake of snowboarding.”

Molly Longman is a freelance journalist who loves to tell stories at the intersection of health and politics.