Roughly twice a month, the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee sends out a fundraising appeal. Each appeal features a different Team USA athlete. So, in all, these appeals feature roughly 25 athletes a year, each of whom gets what is described as a modest fee for appearing in the USOPC advertisement.
Fundraising is big business for the USOPC. Over what is called the 2017-2020 quadrennium, it exceeded its $125 million overall goal; the final numbers are still being calculated, according to Paul Florence, senior vice president for strategy and operations. The twice-per-month appeals — which go out via direct mail and electronically — accounted for $3.54 million in 2020, up ever-so-slightly from $3.50 in 2019, Florence said.
This is the story of one such recent appeal — a tale that underscores two basic tenets.
First, athletes are entitled to their personal lives, which they assuredly can express on their social media pages. But when the USOPC opts to feature an American athlete in its fundraising materials, it should — must — perform adequate due diligence in reviewing what’s on those pages to ensure it does not undermine or contradict the Olympic values and the USOPC mission.
Second, though this story centers around track and field, it is well beyond that. To effect change going forward, it is key to understand how things not just are changing but have changed, and dramatically. Social media is increasingly central as a means for athletes to tell their own stories without using the press, which traditionally served as a filtering — and thus, in its way, a vetting — medium. The upshot: these issues can affect any and every sport. There are literally dozens in the USOC landscape. All the same, the USOPC must do such due diligence for any and every athlete it chooses to promote. Track and field is not unique. Not hardly.
In this instance, the featured athlete, Mike Rodgers, a sprinter, had a known brush with the doping rules, and the USOPC opted to use him, anyway. Then the USOPC failed to appropriately vet his social media pages. There Rodgers misrepresented himself as an Olympic silver medalist — he is not. There, linked to another Instagram page from his side gig as a DJ, he featured pictures of women in tawdry images at a nightclub.
American sprinter Mike Rodgers at the 2019 IAAF world championships in Doha, Qatar // Getty Images
Those pictures could hardly be said to be consistent with the image of the USOPC, which not only seeks to be family-friendly but, at every edition of an Olympic Games, Winter or Summer, goes out of its way to remind American athletes about the strict rules of conduct they are expected to live up to. As a reminder, ask Ryan Lochte.
Surprisingly, the images were still up on that linked Instagram page after the fundraising appeal was issued, at a time when the USOPC is for the first time in its considerable history being run by a female chief executive, Sarah Hirshland, and its board of directors overseen by a woman, Susanne Lyons, and as the USOPC has spent considerable time and resource confronting the culture in the American Olympic sports landscape, sparked particularly by revelations in gymnastics.
There is some irony, meanwhile, in the USOPC using an athlete who has served a doping ban as the featured face of a fundraising campaign even as Hirshland and Lyons in December were sending a letter to the World Anti-Doping Agency urging certain governance reforms.
Referring to the photos and the misrepresentation about the medal, Rodgers, reached Friday by telephone, said, “It was a mistake on my end and I corrected it.”
Hirshland, in a Friday telephone interview, said, “Obviously, until we spoke, I was, a, unaware of and, b, did not have any involvement in this. But it sounds like this was bad judgment. We have to believe at the USOPC in the integrity of competition and fair play, and on the grounds of his involvement in doping, I don’t believe it was good judgment to use him as a representative of our organization.”
Rodgers is, by any measure, an accomplished sprinter, particularly in the relays.
He ran in the winning 4x1 relay at the 2019 IAAF world championships in Doha, Qatar, and he has two world championship silvers in the 4x1, 2017 in London and 2013 in Moscow.
He was fifth in the 100 at the 2015 worlds in Beijing, He won the 100 at the 2019 Pan Am Games in Lima, Peru.
He is the world indoor silver medalist in the 60 meters, in 2010, again in Doha.
Rodgers stands No. 14 on the world all-time list in the 100, running 9.85 seconds in Eugene, Ore., on June 4, 2011.
On Saturday, at a meet in Metz, France, Rodgers ran 6.59 in the 60, finishing second to another American, Devin Quinn, who won in a personal-best 6.54.
In July 2011, in an in-competition test conducted in Lignano, Italy, Rodgers tested positive for a stimulant called methylhexaneamine.
From the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency news release at the time:
“Rodgers originally requested a hearing in front of [an] independent American Arbitration Association (AAA) panel, at which he provided inaccurate and misleading testimony. However, before the false testimony was acted upon by the arbitration panel, Rodgers came forward, acknowledged the truth to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, recognized his responsibility and agreed to accept his sanction and to pay the full cost of the arbitration hearing.
“Rodgers provided independent corroborating evidence that his positive drug test resulted from the use of the supplement known as Jack3d several days prior to a competition. Jack3d has been implicated in positive tests involving several athletes and lists 1,3-Dimethylamylamine HCI on its label.”
Rodgers accepted a nine-month ban. That stretched to April 19, 2012. He has not had any doping-related issues since.
Rodgers, per ESPN, is listed on the 530-person U.S. roster for the London 2012 Games. But records indicate he did not run in the 100 or the 4x1 relay. In the 2012 relay finals, the Americans took second, behind Jamaica and Usain Bolt, but gave up their medals when, in 2014, Tyson Gay accepted a one-year doping suspension. Trinidad and Tobago moved to silver, France bronze.
Rodgers’ Olympics moment finally came in Rio, in 2016. He ran in the 4x1 in both the prelims and the finals, pulling the opening leg in each. The American squad in the finals: Rodgers, Justin Gatlin, Gay, Trayvon Bromell. All but Bromell have had doping-related encounters.
Jamaica, anchored by Bolt in his final Olympic race, won. Japan came second. The Americans crossed third. For 15 minutes, they had a bronze medal. Then, though, came word that the Americans had been disqualified: Rodgers’ pass to Gatlin had come outside the designated zone.
In selecting Rodgers as the face of one of its twice-per-month fundraisers, the USOPC wanted “to highlight the teamwork, the passing of the baton,” Florence said. “It’s a bit of a story with Mike in 2016 in Rio but we still felt like the imagery was the right message we were trying to establish with this appeal.”
The imagery that captivated the USOPC: Rodgers passing to anchor Noah Lyles in the 4x1 at the Doha 2019 IAAF world championships, the U.S. men winning in an American-record 37.1 seconds // Getty Images
The USOPC also was in the mood for a track athlete. For these fundraising appeals, it seeks to rotate through Summer and Winter sports, Olympic and Paralympic, male and female athletes.
The USOPC chose Rodgers mindful of two factors. One, he’d served a doping-related suspension. Two, the perception in many quarters — right or wrong, fair or not — that track and field is not infrequently in the news for doping-related reasons.
Of course, two track and field gold medalists with reputations beyond reproach had also appeared in the exact same sort of fundraising appeals on behalf of the USOC, as it was called until June 2019, or USOPC — the shot put star Michelle Carter, who sits on the USA Track & Field board of directors, and decathlon great Ashton Eaton. So, too, had the high jumper Tynita Butts-Townsend — no doping issues.
“I was flattered and I was happy to do it for them,” Rodgers said.
The USOPC’s recent fundraising appeal featuring Rodgers
When the Rodgers appeal went out, Florence said, he did not know about any of what he called the “character issues.” He said he was “vaguely aware after the appeal went out.” He did not see the social media pictures at issue until after inquiries from this reporter.
This is what Rodgers’ sports-related Instagram page looked like until last Monday afternoon.
Last Monday afternoon, this reporter put in a courtesy call to USA Track & Field to let the organization know this story was in the works. Thereafter Rodgers’ agent, Tony Campbell, was alerted. By Monday night, changes had been made:
Campbell was reached late Friday night in Germany, where he was at a meet. Why, he was asked in a telephone interview, did Rodgers represent himself as an Olympic silver medalist?
“Maybe he was trying to appease a woman or something,” Campbell said. “These athletes will do anything.”
Rodgers, speaking from France, asked the same question, said, “Basically, it was a typo, and I changed it. I meant to say Olympian and indoor silver medalist.” How long was it up like that? “I really don’t know,” he said. “It was just a typo.”
As is evident, before last Monday Rodgers’ sports-related Instagram page, @rodgerdat100, linked on the fourth line to another Instagram page promoting his DJ work, a side gig well known in track and field circles: @djrodgerdat.
There, at @djrodgerdat, he shouted out a video from late last year that featured scantily clad women in a variety of poses. A sampling:
These images no longer appear on that page.
Asked if he believed these images — and others — crossed a boundary, Rodgers said, “I didn’t know people were going to take it the wrong way because I’ve been doing it so long,” adding, “It’s just something I do to make money. It’s something I do to make ends meet. It’s something I do to [put] money in my pocket.”
Asked, too, if these images might not offer the best look for someone who was the face of a USOPC fundraiser, particularly given that the chairwoman and the CEO were female executives, Rodgers said, “It might not be the best look but the chairwoman and whoever it is, they might not know I DJ.”
Florence said, “The buck stops with me. I take responsibility for the decision to do it.”