BEIJING — Nathan Ikon Crumpton will make his official debut in men’s skeleton here Wednesday morning, whizzing headfirst down the track with his helmet hovering inches above the ice. But his first event of these Winter Olympics simply involved getting dressed.
It started in an indoor staging area before last week’s opening ceremony, where Crumpton shed his street clothes and donned a traditional Samoan outfit featuring a tapa cloth made from mulberry bark; a pale fuiono headpiece adorned with nautilus shells; a feathered kiki fulumoa around his waist; and armbands fashioned out of wild boar’s tusk. It continued as he hustled outside to join the procession of athletes on a 20-degree night, only to duck away near the entrance to receive a full-body coating of baby oil applied by two American Samoa National Olympic Committee officials. “Just to get me nice and shiny,” Crumpton says.
And it culminated when he soon strode into the stadium as a one-man, no-shirt, only-sandals-on-his-feet delegation, gingerly waving a metal flagpole (“I gripped it and thought, ‘Holy cow, that’s pretty freezing,’” he recalls) while proudly representing his Polynesian roots in a glistening tribute to Tonga’s Pita Taufatofua and other barechested Pacific Islander athletes.
Jae C. Hong/AP
The choreography all unfolded according to plan, down to the jumps and paces that the 36-year-old performed to raise his body temperature while waiting around for his star turn. What Crumpton didn’t expect, though, was the viral attention that followed. Reporters from Brazil, Japan and China, among other countries, submitted so many media requests that he self-imposed a “moratorium” on interviews until he is done racing. Volunteers at the National Sliding Centre flagged him down for pictures between training runs. Suddenly the whole world wanted to know his deal. “It’s all new to me,” Crumpton says. “I’m not a household name. I’m not a star, not even in my sport. So the extra attention this is getting is very novel.”
But reducing him to a thirsty tweet or headline (one example: “There's yet another shirtless, oily flag bearer at the Olympics”) ignores everything else that makes Crumpton perhaps the most cosmopolitan competitor in Beijing. He was born in Kenya, has lived in Switzerland, Zimbabwe and Australia and graduated from Princeton where he earned All-Ivy League honors in the triple jump. He is a gallery-published photographer, a model with multiple agents and the author of a 550-page novel criticizing late-stage capitalism and satirizing hedge fund culture. He is one of three participants at the Games (along with German bobsledder Alexandra Burghardt and Japanese snowboarder Ayumu Hirano) to have also appeared in Tokyo last summer, running the 100-meter dash. He speaks English, French and Swahili.
“A jack of all trades,” says friend and Canadian skeleton rider Jane Channell. “Pretty incredible.”
Start, though, with the special jacket that Crumpton has been wearing since he arrived, opening ceremony notwithstanding, emblazoned with big lettering on the back declaring his candidacy in the ongoing election for one of two open spots on the IOC’s athletes’ commission. Strict rules limit how much he is allowed to campaign; no passing out pamphlets, for instance. But Crumpton isn’t just in it for the resumé boost: In his free time, he’s been conducting a survey of athletes for their take on a potentially game-changing question.
“I’m essentially asking them if they think the IOC should be sharing its revenue with the athletes,” Crumpton says. “One of the emerging themes is, plenty of athletes think, in this day and age, with sports as expensive as they are, with the travel demands as large as they are, that they need more financial security. And it’ll be interesting to see, when the survey is complete, what the end result is because there is a ton of money in the Olympic movement, and in many instances, athletes are getting left out of that part of the equation.”
Crumpton acknowledges that other respondents have, like the IOC itself, cited “tradition” as a reason for maintaining the status quo, whereby revenue is funneled to individual national Olympic committees that then decide how to disperse it in the form of stipends and bonuses. He also understands that, if elected to the maximum 23-member commission—voting booths are open in all three Olympic villages in Beijing through the closing ceremony—he might have to “tamp down my own opinions so that I can reflect the broader opinions of athletes.”
And what if said athletes express an interest in banding together to fight for improved working conditions? “If there’s a clear directive from the athletes that they would want to unionize, I would happily take up that banner on their behalf,” Crumpton says. “Whether that should be done at the Olympic level, or at the NOC level, I can’t quite say.” While such a potential move would be unprecedented in international sports, it would nonetheless fall in line with a rising tide of employees at Amazon, Starbucks, John Deere and other companies across the U.S.—including this publication—flexing the power of organized labor for collective good.
“I think there are parallels there, for sure,” Crumpton says. “And I think it ties back into the extreme expense of participating in Olympic sports these days. It’s very much a hand-to-mouth style of living. It's not easy. That’s how I’d put it.”
Here his views have been shaped by personal experience. A former Team USA slider for eight years who missed qualifying for the 2018 Olympics in South Korea thanks to a herniated disc, Crumpton departed in the wake of a messy early ‘19 arbitration case, filed by then-teammate Greg West against USA Bobsled and Skeleton, that resulted in Crumpton losing not just his hard-earned spots for the final two World Cup races that season. “The CEO and director of sport [of USABS both] apologized to me,” Crumpton says. “And two days after, they cut my health insurance, they cut my stipend, they cut my access to all my World Cup team benefits.
“I was extraordinarily bitter. I was extraordinarily sad. I was heartbroken. I thought that was how my skeleton career was going to end. If I hadn’t found a team, I would’ve quit sliding.”
Fortunately, thanks to his heritage—his late maternal grandmother is Hawaiian—Crumpton found a home with American Samoa, whose NOC welcomes members of the Polynesian diaspora. The move gained him more freedom to decide when he races and where, as well as eligibility for the IOC’s Solidarity Fund, which he estimates covered about half of his $40,000 costs for the most recent International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (IBSF) season. “So I’m funded better than I ever was with my stipend through Team USA,” Crumpton says.
Dmitri Lovetsky/AP
On the other hand, as a skeleton team of one, Crumpton, who is based in Park City, Utah, still must fight for resources that richer nations enjoy. “All of my equipment is over four years old,” he says. “Skeleton specifically is a technology-driven sport, in terms of the science in training. I haven’t had the budget to do all the wind tunnel testing, the computational fluid dynamics, the ice-to-runner-friction coefficient analysis.” Worse, he can’t even afford a full-time coach.
That Crumpton has nonetheless climbed to 26th in the IBSF world rankings heading into the Olympics, higher than any U.S. racer, elicits remarks of respect from peers on the skeleton circuit. Says Channel, “He's persevered through a lot.” Adds Great Britain’s Laura Deas, “When you don’t have much support, it’s that much harder to work everything out.” And Marcus Wyatt, another Brit: “What he's doing is super impressive, to be out here on your own.”
Well, not quite alone; in Beijing, he has an unofficial partnership with the British team in which its coaches are helping film his training runs and will lend a hand in preparing his sled on race day. Then there are the many more sliders—plus, randomly, the German team physiotherapist—who has approached Crumpton to buy a copy of his novel, Alpha Status, the plot for which he mapped out during a cleansing beach vacation to a Greek island after failing to make the PyeongChang Games, finding motivation from a range of literary sources like The Brothers Karamazov, American Psycho and Fifty Shades of Grey. “The protagonist is an absolutely absurd character,” Crumpton says. “He's completely conceited and arrogant and, I hate to say it, also inspired by a few of my actual friends who work on Wall Street but taken to the next level.”
Reviews from readers are positive thus far. "I really like it,” says Deas and Wyatt’s teammate, Matt Weston. “It’s nice knowing Nathan, as well. Hopefully, he’s not that bad [as the main character].” Adds Deas, “I’m really enjoying it. I can obviously hear it in his voice. So that’s quite funny.” Indeed, it bodes well for book sales that Crumpton has clout among fellow competitors. “He’s a really popular guy,” Deas says. This is also a good sign for his athletes' commission candidacy, although Crumpton still plans to hit up the other Beijing bubble zones once he is finished racing, both to spread his campaign message and to conduct his survey.
“Hopefully try to get into the triple digits,” he says. “I think that’d be a nice sample size.”
Matt Slocum/AP
Of course, Crumpton has another matter to handle first. On Tuesday, he will squeeze into his Lycra racing suit and slip on his helmet, both adorned with a design from a Samoan tattoo artist that Crumpton also wore on his running sleeve in Tokyo. There, he finished last in his heat but still posted a personal-best 11.27, despite hardly ever having run the 100 in his life (not even at Princeton) until he decided to give qualifying a shot and won by 0.08 seconds.
Reaching the podium in Beijing seems like a long shot, with reigning gold medalist Yun Sungbin and six-time world champion Martins Dukurs headlining the 25-man field. But Crumpton isn’t complaining. He is soaking up the experience of his second Olympics, having already learned to navigate their transport systems, athlete cafeterias and mixed zone interviews in Tokyo. “So I wasn’t a deer in headlights when I came here,” he says.
Despite the reaction to his opening ceremony appearance, Crumpton isn't some shirtless novelty, either. He is a seasoned skeleton veteran with a bright future ahead in whatever he chooses, an opportunity now to help influence how that future will look and a global stage to showcase his sliding skills. He hopes it all goes well. He hopes it will be as smooth as baby oil.
