Gamers of Staff United States have fun following victory in the course of the Ladies’s Rugby Sevens Bronze medal match between Staff United States and Staff Australia on day 4 of the Olympic Video games Paris 2024 at Stade de France on July 30, 2024 in Paris, France.
Michael Steele | Getty Pictures Sport | Getty Pictures
The 2024 Paris Olympics are attracting new funds for lesser-known sports activities and girls’s groups, with USA girls’s rugby sevens, water polo and girls’s observe and area scoring main contributions this yr.
The USA girls’s rugby sevens staff earned a $4 million reward from investor Michele Kang earlier this week. Rapper and actuality TV character Taste Flav threw his help behind water polo, and Alexis Ohanian, the husband of tennis famous person Serena Williams and the co-founder of Reddit, is investing in girls’s observe and area.
“Area of interest sports activities typically do not get the highlight they deserve, however they’re filled with unbelievable expertise and coronary heart,” Taste Flav mentioned in asserting his help for water polo in July.
Taste Flav introduced a five-year partnership with USA water polo, which incorporates funds for the 2024 USA girls’s staff in addition to serving because the “official hype man” for each the lads’s and girls’s groups. The dimensions of his contribution wasn’t disclosed.
Taste Flav of United States of America in the course of the Ladies’s Water polo Group B match between Greece and United States of America on Day 1 of the Olympic Video games Paris 2024 at Aquatics Centre on July 27, 2024 in Paris, France.
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He pledged to his help after participant Maggie Steffens posted on Instagram that she and her teammates typically need to work a second or third job in an effort to compete, on condition that water polo does not garner as a lot consideration as different sports activities.
The USA girls’s water polo staff has received gold for the previous three Olympics, and Taste Flav goals to raise their visibility. The partnership consists of his dedication to boosting USA water polo on social media, past cheering poolside.
Rising help
Kang’s contribution to girls’s sevens rugby will span 4 years, offering assets for gamers and training workers forward of the 2028 Summer time Olympics in Los Angeles.
Kang, who based Kynisca Sports activities for the development of ladies’s athletics globally, mentioned that 2024 has been a “banner yr” for ladies’s sports activities with record-breaking engagement. As sponsors and networks more and more acknowledge the worth of ladies’s sports activities, she mentioned that now’s the time to spend money on them.
Staff United States have fun victory as they pose for a photograph with the Bell after the Ladies’s Rugby Sevens Quarter Ultimate match between Staff Nice Britain and Staff United States on day three of the Olympic Video games Paris 2024 at Stade de France on July 29, 2024 in Paris, France.
Michael Steele | Getty Pictures Sport | Getty Pictures
The help comes after the ladies’s rugby sevens staff received bronze, gathering the primary Olympic medal for america in rugby sevens, amongst each the lads’s and girls’s groups. In addition they set a brand new report for a girls’s rugby occasion, with 66,000 followers packed into Stade de France, in response to World Rugby.
“This Eagles staff, led by gamers like Ilona Maher and co-captains Lauren Doyle and Naya Tapper, has captivated hundreds of thousands of latest followers, bringing unprecedented consideration to the game,” Kang mentioned within the announcement.
Maher instructed CNBC this week that with no sturdy efficiency on the Video games, the staff might not have survived.
“Our coach mentioned to us if we do not win a medal, we’d not have a program subsequent yr, and so that actually caught with me, these phrases, and so we delivered,” Maher mentioned.
Past the Video games
Ohanian already co-own’s a girls’s soccer membership, and he instructed CNBC’s “Squawk Field” this week that he goals to increase the recognition of ladies’s observe and area past its Olympics peak.
He introduced in April that his enterprise capital agency will host a contest in late September with the most important ever prize pool for a girls’s observe and area occasion. Ohanian is doubling the stakes of the Paris Video games with a $30,000 prime prize.
“Nothing about that is charity nor ought to it’s charity,” Ohanian mentioned. “That is about excellence, about celebrating it.”
— CNBC’s Jessica Golden, Kasey O’Brien and Nicolas Vega contributed to this report.
Disclosure: CNBC mum or dad NBCUniversal owns NBC Sports activities and NBC Olympics. NBC Olympics is the U.S. broadcast rights holder to all Summer time and Winter Video games via 2032.
