Olympians
Suzy Favor Hamilton was getting into constant fights with her husband. She’d developed a strange attachment to her daughter, refusing to put her down. She was acting irrational and was prone to huge mood swings and fits of anger.
Her husband thought it might be postpartum depression and urged her to get help. She eventually did and was put on anti-depressants. This seemingly therapeutic decision would be the harbinger of great chaos in her life. And would eventually cost her all of her sponsorships.
How Things Escalated and Then Exploded
Like many eventual Olympians, Suzy showed beaming early promise in her sport. She was a distance runner, who swept her events at the local level. Eventually, she was a national champion and, at one point, the most decorated collegiate athlete in history. Her accomplishments could fill paragraphs. She is one of the only U.S. women to run 1500 meters in under four minutes. Notably, she competed in the three Olympics, her final appearance at the Sydney Games in 2000.
After a life spent competing, she retired and decided to start a family with her husband Mark. After the birth of their first child, and her departure from sports, her behavior started to spiral out.
She was finally put on anti-depressants by a psychiatrist. This was extremely problematic: as she would later learn, she actually had bipolar disorder. She never disclosed to her doctor that bipolar disorder ran in the family and that her brother had committed suicide from it years prior.
Anti-depressants can lift the floor on the lows of bipolar people, but they can also open up the ceiling on the highs. Bipolar people are prone to manias: extremely energetic, almost like they are high but more delusional and detached from reality. Bipolar is also strongly correlated to hypersexuality. With women specifically, it’s called nymphomania.
It’s related to obsessive thinking and chasing highs. This is exactly what happened with Suzy. She was suddenly wanting to take all sorts of risks. She begged her husband to go skydiving and wanted to visit Vegas over and over. She begged and convinced him to have a threesome with a high-end escort. In her words, she’d developed a new obsession with “living life to the fullest”.
A month later, they were fighting because she wanted to go to Vegas alone to hire a male escort. She’d never slept with anyone besides her husband before. He finally let her and he stayed home with their daughter.
Her experience there gave her a new high and she had to have more. After more fighting with her husband, she decided to start escorting in Vegas. Her husband protested but was left with no choice but to either let her do it or lose her. She contacts an escort agency and is seeing clients for $600 an hour.
One day she ran a half marathon and then flew to Vegas to service five clients in a day.Her escort ads as depicted on the site.It’s worth pausing to mention — this is extremely risky behavior for a sponsored athlete. She was being paid by a number of brands, including Disney and Nike. Olympic athletes, more than most, have high standards of conduct. They aren’t like ball sport athletes, who can seemingly get away with murder. Runners and swimmers lose sponsors over minor legal infractions.
Suzy played with fire for too long.
She was at a special event for Rock-N-Roll Marathon and in a display of her mania, she was dancing around on stage, seeming totally ramped up.
Suzy, in pink, jumping on stage. (Source: ABC News)
After she got off the above stage, she walked towards an elevator. Just as she was about to board she heard someone say, “Hello, Suzy.”
She turned, thinking it was a client. She realized it was a reporter from the Smoking Gun. That’s when she knew the gig was up. She’d been found out.
Everything blew up after the article went live the following month. She took tons of bad press. Her husband was harassed for choosing to stay with her as she ran around town escorting. All of her sponsorships were cut. Nike and Disney disavowed her conduct and condemned her for not disclosing it.
Eventually, Suzy was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on the correct medications. Today, she looks back at her escorting with regret and doesn’t fully understand how she came to do it. Logically, it makes little sense for a well-known athlete to just fire up an escorting account and not expect to get caught.
Celebrities can’t even protect nudes on their own phones from being hacked. Servicing dozens of clients each week in person? It seemed like career suicide for someone who needed sponsorship money.
Look, I’m just another free-love hippie writer. Part of me wants to shout at the sky, “Who cares? Let her do her thing? Quit shaming consenting adults.” All the judgment around sex drives me crazy.
Yet the rational side of me knows that brands decide who to put their name on. I suppose a sex worker isn’t quite Disney-friendly.
People will surely have trouble processing how bipolar can drive someone to go into prostitution. They’ll never understand how consequential mental illness is, and how it drips into every aspect of a person’s life. They’ll forget that Suzy’s brother literally jumped off a nine-story building because of this same disorder. But these are the sad ways of the world. People prefer to define illness by visible symptoms.
Sadly, Suzy and her husband recently divorced. They’ve been completely silent on the matter. I know from experience — marriage can be pretty hard on its own. I couldn’t imagine the difficulty, adding in all the things they went through, alongside her bipolar diagnosis. All you can do is wish people the best and hope they find what they are looking for.
