These Olympic Athletes Turned To Very Normal Careers

Making an Olympic team requires years of hard work and dedication. While we all know that, on some level, few people likely realize just how much time these top-level athletes dedicate to their training. At the height of his career, Michael Phelps revealed to CNN that he "spent three to six hours in the pool" every single day, on top of dry land workouts four to five times a week. In the lead-up to the Tokyo Olympics, Simone Biles told Jimmy Fallon on "The Tonight Show" that she was spending seven hours a day, six days a week in the gym. And an independent study released in 2012 found that the average athlete had spent 10,000 hours working out in the four years leading up to the Olympic Games.

When it's all said and done, preparing for the Olympics is, for most athletes, a full-time job. But for some, it's not their only full-time job. Many Olympians maintain careers outside of their sports, whether to supplement the meager winnings and sponsorships their sport provides or to prepare for life after the games (and their athletic careers) are over. Below, we've rounded up 14 Olympians from all different sports and countries, who have regular jobs on top of their training schedules. If you weren't already impressed by their abilities, you certainly will be once you're done reading!

In 2006, Pete Fenson helped bring home the United States' first Olympic medal in curling. The skip for Team USA, Fenson was the team's captain and was responsible for determining the strategy they used to win. It was a role he'd been training for his entire life — his father, Bob Fenson, was a national champion in the sport, and taught his sons "the ins and outs" of the game from an early age. The younger Fenson told PMQ, "curling is a family sort of game," attributing much of his success to the fact that he grew up surrounded by it in his hometown of Bemidji, Minnesota.

Curling wasn't the only thing Fenson fell in love with in Bemidji. It's also where he met his wife, Roxanne, and tried his first slice of Dave's Pizza. Opened in 1958, Dave's Pizza is something of a local staple, and when it went up for sale in the late '90s, Dave and Roxanne decided to buy it. For the last 25 years, the couple has continued to run the pizzeria, expanding the number of locations and adding in a host of new and exciting flavor options. Juggling the two demanding roles can't be easy, but Fenson has demonstrated he's equally as capable of keeping his cool on the rink as he is in front of a 500-degree pizza oven.

Compared to many other Olympians, Ibtihaj Muhammad came to her sport late. The Wall Street Journal wrote that the athlete tried out a number of games in her childhood, including volleyball and softball, but it wasn't until she reached high school that she discovered fencing. It didn't take long for her raw talent to become evident, and the saber-wielding teenager was promptly promoted to captain of her school's team. She continued on to compete at Duke University — where she was named to the All-American team three times — while earning a double major in African-American studies and international relations. Then, in 2016, she made the U.S. Olympic team, representing the country at the Rio Games.

While at the games she made headlines not only for her athletic prowess (she took 12th place in the individual competition and helped her team bring home a bronze medal), but also for the fact that she was the first American athlete to compete in a hijab. As a Muslim woman, modesty is extremely important to Muhammad (it was actually the fact that fencers are so completely covered that inspired her to try the sport in the first place), and it's this tenet of her faith that inspired her to pursue her adult career. In 2014, she launched Louella, an affordable fashion brand that fills a gap in the market for on-trend, modest clothes.

The official Olympics website describes Gerek Meinhardt as "something of a fencing prodigy." He first picked up a foil at the age of 9, and less than a decade later, at the age of 16, he became the youngest-ever national champion. He's since been to four Olympics, in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020, winning bronze medals in both individual and team competitions along the way. As of this writing, Meinhardt remains the youngest man to ever make a U.S. Olympic fencing team.

His brilliance, however, extends well beyond the strip. Inspired by his wife, Lee Kiefer, who is also a nationally ranked fencer and Olympian, Meinhardt enrolled in medical school at the University of Kentucky in 2020. Keifer, who comes from a long line of doctors, is nearing the end of her own medical studies at the same university. For Meinhardt, who's getting a much later start at the age of 30, a Doctor of Medicine degree won't be his only upper-level diploma — he already holds an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. How he finds time to balance it all, we'll never understand.

Another Olympic curler with ties to Bemidji, Minnesota (he received a Bachelor's of Science degree from Bemidji State several years back), Jeff Isaacson competed in both the Vancouver Games in 2010 and the Sochi Games in 2014. A Minnesota native, he likely fell into curling the same way Pete Fenson did, through family and community ties. While less is known about his amateur experience, we do know — per Time — that by the 2014 Games, he was good and experienced enough to be named vice-skip (the second most important position on a curling team).

But, just like Fenson, curling isn't Isaacson's only job. At the time of the 2014 Olympics, he was a junior high chemistry teacher at Eveleth-Gilbert Jr. High, according to Yahoo! His students, he told the outlet, are equal parts impressed and indifferent about their teacher's double life, hating when he's out of the classroom for competitions but always eager to hear his stories when he returns. Like many teachers in the U.S., it seems Isaacson is also supplementing his meager income with a second job. According to the Chaska Curling Center website, he's also the curling center's manager, where he surely puts his breadth of knowledge about the sport to good use.

Born in London, Ontario, Lanni Marchant first took up running as a way to cross-train for her primary sport, ice skating. It wasn't until her sophomore year of high school, when she joined a cross country team, that she realized running had become her true passion, leading her to give up winter sport for good. It all worked out in the end, though, when Marchant made the Canadian team in 2016, running both the 10,000-meter race and the marathon at the Rio Games.

Injuries have sidelined Marchant for now — she was unable to compete at the Tokyo Olympics due to a series of broken bones in her lower body and chronic illnesses — but she hasn't fully ruled out a comeback, as she told Canadian Running in 2021. Although she's taken a break from pounding the pavement, Marchant's remained plenty busy working as a criminal defense attorney in Chattanooga, Tennessee. An accomplished lawyer, she earned law degrees from both the University of Ottawa and Michigan State University. On her personal website, Marchant wrote that both of her careers give her "an amazing double life that [she takes] great pride in."

Both of Alex Naddour's careers — gymnastics and real estate — are dynastic. His dad, Mike Naddour, who owns the USA Youth Fitness Center in Gilbert, Arizona, put the younger Naddour in classes at his gym as soon as he was eligible. Then, when Alex showed signs of promise, Mike promoted him to the competitive team and became his primary coach. Together, the duo made it to the 2012 Olympic Games (where Alex was an alternate) and the 2016 Games, where Alex brought home the bronze medal in the pommel horse, becoming the first American man to win an international medal in the event in 31 years, per Time.

Gymnastics is famously hard on the body, and Alex knew that he wouldn't be able to compete forever. So he followed in his mother's footsteps and obtained his Arizona real estate license. The athlete surely appreciates the flexibility of the job, which allowed him to earn money around his five-hour practices, packed competition schedule, and various tours. Now, as a retired gymnast, Naddour's LinkedIn profile reflects that he continues to sell homes in the hours he's not coaching in the gym. Talk about balance!

Finally, there's Nina Roth. Yet another midwestern curler, the Wisconsin native was the skip for the 2018 women's Olympic team (they finished in eighth place), a role she's set to reprise at the 2022 Games in Beijing. She found the sport at age 10, when, according to ESPN, her Girl Scout troop took a field trip to a "local curling club." She told the outlet, "I just fell in love with it. I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be an Olympian and I dedicated a lot of my time to get there."

But the bizarre mix of "shuffleboard, bocce, and chess" isn't Roth's only passion. She also loves helping people, and, to that end, has a separate career as a nurse. For the past decade, she's worked at a Wisconsin hospital caring for "long-term patients" who had experienced serious trauma. Speaking to WKOW after her last Olympics, Roth said, "I'm very lucky to have found two big passions in my life — curling and nursing. And it's so nice to be able to get back and focus on that other passion that I've kind of put to the side a little bit while focusing on curling." So, no matter how successful she is in bringing home a medal this time around, don't expect her to give up her day job.