ON HIS WAY to his first World Championships in August 2023, Freddie Crittenden was filled with both pride and anxiety. Making the team at age 29 was a hard-earned high point in his career as a hurdler, but the financially precarious life of a professional track & field athlete was weighing on the Syracuse grad.
Sitting in the airport waiting for his flight to Budapest, Crittenden checked his bank balance, which was, he says, “almost negative.” He had finally established his place as one of the best in the world, but economic realities had him questioning his future in the sport.
“If I’m going to last in this sport, this was my moment,” said Crittenden, who had finished 3rd at the USATF Championships a month earlier to book his spot in Hungary. “This was my first team, I’m 29 years old and in the latter half of my career, and if I don’t maximize this opportunity things could look very different for me next year, the Olympic year.”
Before despair could set in at the airport, however, Crittenden received a message that he had been approved for a grant from the USATF Foundation, the non-profit organization that provides financial assistance to American track & field athletes across the sport.
“I got $30K,” he says. “Before that I was having all this stress and pressure about having to perform… To get that grant in that moment it was a huge weight off my shoulders. I had some reprieve.”
That’s a common feeling among the many athletes who have benefited from the Foundation, which was formed in ’02 to aid those whose sponsorships and prize money just aren’t enough to cover their many expenses, including coaching, medical care, physical therapy, travel and accommodations. The Foundation operates independently of USA Track & Field, though federation CEO Max Siegel is a board member.
“We receive several hundred applications every year from elite athletes,” says Foundation CEO Tom Jackovic. “I would say that almost every [elite] athlete, with a few exceptions, applies. Our highest level of grant is our Stephen Schwarzman grants. And that is 100% performance-based and goes to our top 100 athletes.”
For ’25, the top 65 of those athletes will be awarded $40,000 (up from $30,000 last year) and the next 35 receive $30,000 (up from $20,000). The Foundation also offers other types of programs for elite athletes, including development grants (last year 60 athletes received $15,000 each), maternity grants, travel support, tuition assistance, supplemental funding for throwers (including one program dubbed “Operation Hammer Sweep”) and “Adopt an Athlete” grants, one of which went to Crittenden last year, on top of his Schwarzman funding. “If you’re training for an Olympic Games you’re probably going to get money from us,” Jackovic says.
The Foundation also awards grants to Youth and Masters athletes and clubs and supplements the budgets of some domestic meets. In total, more than $4.1 million was doled out in ’24.
Currently about 165 elite athletes are receiving some level of monetary support from the Foundation, including Olympic gold medalists Ryan Crouser, Katie Moon, Gabby Thomas, Grant Holloway and Tara Davis-Woodhall. Up and coming stars like Parker Valby, Nico Young, McKenzie Long and Grace Stark are among the newest class of grantees. “It’s a combination of need and performance,” Jackovic says. “Many of the athletes we support make less than $50,000 a year.”
He cites ’08 Olympic discus champ Stephanie Brown Trafton and ’13 world champion 110 hurdler David Oliver as early examples of the Foundation’s success, while more recently, recipients took home 18 gold, 13 silver and 7 bronze medals at the Paris Olympics.
Athletes apply for support at the Foundation’s website, usatffoundation.org. Money is donated by the Board Of Directors, which includes a mix of business executives (including Schwarzman, the CEO of asset management firm Blackstone Group, and chairman Bob Greifeld, former NASDAQ CEO and cofounder of financial technology investment fund Cornerstone FTM), professionals, former athletes (like decathlon gold medalist Dan O’Brien and hammer Olympian Ken Flax) and others.
Board members all have ties to the sport, including bestselling novelist Nicholas Sparks (author of The Notebook and Message in a Bottle, among many others), who helped coach the New Bern High School (North Carolina) boys team to prep records in the 4×4 and sprint medley in ’09.
His donation to build a new track at the school in ’06 attracted the attention of the Foundation, which relies on its board members to donate. “Everyone on the board loves track & field, and the entire concept made a great deal of sense to me,” says Sparks, who says he has given seven figures to the Foundation over the years. “If you’re 22 years old and you’ve run 44.9 in the 400m, well maybe that’s not good enough to get you a contract with Nike or adidas. But, you’re only 22. What if you had a little bit of funding to continue to train, even if you had to work another job? Can you get to 44.1, can you get down to the point where you make that?”
Indeed, the grants can be the lifeline that allows an athlete to stick with the sport, as is the case with Crittenden. He’s been receiving funding for several years and the money helped propel him to the U.S. indoor 60H title in ’23, that initial World team in Budapest (where he finished 4th) and his first Olympic berth last summer after clocking a lifetime best 12.93 as runner-up at the Trials.
Crittenden now has a contract with adidas, which allowed him to cut back the hours spent at his former full-time job at a non-profit that provides programs and services for youth and young adults. But expenses for the sport (and life in general: he and his wife, Tor, welcomed a daughter last summer) can quickly add up, and sometimes prize money from meets won’t arrive for 6 to 12 months after an event.
“The Foundation grant helps me survive in this space when there are long periods of time when money is not coming in,” Crittenden says. “The support and energy that they gave me, it really made me think it was worth it and that maybe I would have a little bit more time in the sport. I belong here. That gave me the motivation to say that I can keep doing this.”