Entrepreneurship
Winning at Life
These seven athletes have won championships and medals and fame, but it's their passionate social projects that make them heroes.
1. Hilary Knight
Hilary Knight stands for gender equity
© Brian Lowe
A hockey superstar battles for gender equity
The peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were getting old.
Around 2012, Hilary Knight was living in Boston, having recently wrapped up a collegiate hockey career that included a national championship and an Olympic berth. She’d expected to hew to the prototypical path of an elite athlete: Get an agent, get drafted, land sponsorships. But her pay from the Boston Blades barely covered her living expenses, even with a steady diet of PB&Js. “It was apparent,” she says of the gender disparity she was experiencing, “how hard it was going to be to make ends meet.”
This revelation crystallized for her the inequities baked into her sport: The men were paid far better and flew in business class while the women collected pennies on the dollar and were relegated to coach, among other glaring differences. Knight and her teammates began to speak up, and she was a leader when, in 2017, she and her teammates threatened a boycott of the world championships in order to address working conditions. Knight took the role of running social media for the players, ensuring that their narrative was told in clear and compelling ways.
The players ultimately extracted some key concessions from USA Hockey, raising their pay closer to a living wage and setting the sport up for a more prosperous future. The terms included more games and more marketing — to keep women’s hockey in the spotlight after a wildly successful Olympics — and greater investment in the sport’s development. “The question is, after the Olympics, how do we stay relevant for the next three years?” she says.
Knight has planted herself squarely in the middle of all of this forward progress. She’s one of two players who will serve on an advisory committee charged with guiding the sport’s future.
The real benefits are going to come 10 years down the line.
But her ambitions spill beyond the fiberglass walls of the rink. Knight plans to go to law school, in part so that she can help represent young athletes in vulnerable situations, like when they’re signing their first professional deal. “You get contracts shoved in your face when you’re young, and you just sign them,” she observes. “You think, ‘They care about us.’ No, actually that’s a business document. I’d love to help out, and it’s frustrating when you don’t have the skill set to do that.”
Ultimately, Knight sees herself at the center of a battle to win equal treatment for all female athletes, not just those who play hockey. As she puts it: “We can use the sport to change the world in other areas, too. The real benefits are going to come 10 years down the line.”
2. Rebecca Rusch
Rebecca Rusch on the Ho Chi Mihn Trail
© Josh Letchworth/Red Bull Content Pool
An endurance icon is out to save innocent lives in Southeast Asia
“Be good.”
Steven Rusch added that coda to every letter he sent home from the Vietnam War. Then one day in 1972, the Air Force pilot boarded his F-4 for a combat mission and was never heard from again. His younger daughter, Rebecca, was 3 when he was shot down in Laos.
Fast-forward four decades. That girl is now one of the world’s foremost endurance athletes — a seven-time world champion and outdoor-sports polymath whose disciplines include mountain biking, adventure racing and climbing. In 2015, she set out on one of the signature trips of her storied career — a mountain bike ride along the 1,200-mile Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos — in a quest to reach her father’s crash site.
The grueling journey, captured in the 2017 documentary "Blood Road," yielded all manner of revelations. Rusch’s most meaningful epiphany came about 500 miles in, when she paused near a cavity in the landscape. It was the crater from a bomb dropped during the war that had recently exploded. “Standing inside it I thought, ‘This can’t be what this is,’” she recalls. The more she looked around, she says, the more she saw how “the landscape looked like Swiss cheese.”
She knew she’d found a new mission in life, one to bookend her father’s story.
She learned from villagers that unexploded ordnance from the war still litters the landscape and has haunted the country for 40 years, killing and maiming people. “There are adults who grew up there as kids who never could safely play in their backyard,” she says. And in a synaptic flash, she knew that she’d found a new mission in life, a way to bookend her father’s story.
Her work on behalf of the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), an organization focused on clearing land mines and unexploded ordnance, takes on several forms. She offers "Blood Road" screenings to raise awareness and funds. She leads trips of 15 riders to Laos; they cover about 500 miles of the route, and proceeds go to MAG. And she has teamed up with Article 22, a company that sells jewelry made by Laotian craftspeople out of exploded land mines and scrap aluminum, on a “Be Good” bracelet. The phrase appears in both English and Lao; each bracelet clears 12.5 square meters of land.
The numbers are daunting: Millions of tennis-ball-sized submunitions from cluster bombs, known in Laos as “bombies,” still lurk. “It feels impossible, but if one bombie is cleared and saves one kid’s life — I look at it that way,” she says.
Be good indeed.
3. Chris Plys
Olympic curler Chris Plys
© Darren Carrol/Red Bull Content Pool
An Olympic curler takes a stand against hunger in his community
There were countless moments during Patrick Plys’ pitched battle with brain cancer when he might have languished in the cosmic unfairness of it all. He was a young man when it started, only in his early 30s, and he endured three surgeries, as well as seemingly endless regimens of radiation and chemo, all while running a family business.
But instead, he doubled down on enjoying time with the family that he and his wife had created — including attending his son Chris’s curling matches as he rose into the Olympic ranks.
After having a stroke during the second surgery, Pat couldn’t speak, so he resorted to communicating via a whiteboard. The first thing he wrote to his family gathered in his hospital room: “I choose joy.”
Six years after his death at age 48, that powerful message is a kind of compass point for the Plys family, beginning with Chris, who represented the United States in the 2010 Games. Chris now juggles his sporting life with an effort run by his mother, Laura: Project Joy, an organization in Pat’s memory that provides food to children in their native Duluth, Minnesota, who may not have enough to eat.
Run in partnership with Second Harvest Northern Lakes Food Bank, the program enables volunteers to discreetly place items like easy-to-prepare entrees, shelf-stable milk, fruits and vegetables, and breakfast and nutritious snack items into the backpacks of participating children, whose enrollment in the program is kept secret.
The entire effort clearly would have resonated with Pat Plys. “He always really cared about people who were less fortunate than us,” says Chris. He recalls that when one man asked his father for money, Pat offered the guy a job, then began inviting him over for dinner and holidays. “There were a number of random people he met who pretty much became members of our family,” Chris says.
Every cent donated to the program goes directly to food donations. The program now feeds more than 1,100 elementary kids in 16 school districts. Plys says they hope to expand the program to include middle and high school kids in the future. For every $1 raised, Project Joy provides about $10 in food — so a $4 donation can feed a kid for a weekend.
Plys, who has since acquired an “I choose joy” tattoo, has used his reach as an Olympian to help the cause. He helped launch a curling tournament called House of Hearts in Duluth, in which participants pay for the chance to play with Olympic- level athletes who fly in from around the world. The tournament has raised nearly $250,000 for Project Joy.
“The response has been crazy,” Plys says. “The whole curling community has gotten involved, and it’s now a weekend- long party.”
A little joy for a good cause. That’s something Pat Plys clearly would have gotten behind.
4. Lexi Thompson
Lexi Thompson and SEAL companions
© Robert Snow/Red Bull Content Pool
One of the world’s top golfers fights for veterans’ welfare
Before the prom date, the parachute and the pin, there was a precocious first win. On the afternoon of September 18, 2011, Lexi Thompson — only 16 at the time — tapped in a putt to become the youngest player to notch an LPGA tournament victory. That performance made the weekend memorable enough, but there was more: Over the course of four days at the Navistar Classic, she had spent time talking with military veterans attending on behalf of the Wounded Warrior Project. Thompson had been so moved by their stories that she donated $20,000 of her winnings. “I didn’t come from a military family, so talking to them was really inspiring,” she recalls.
In the end, she walked away from the tournament with a victory and a cause. Thompson, now 23, has added eight more LPGA wins to her tally — and she’s used her celebrity, along with some creativity and a proclivity for fun, to follow through with impressive initiatives focused on veterans’ welfare. She designated Wounded Warriors as her main charity, and the year after the Navistar win, she held a contest to take a vet who had been injured in combat to her senior prom. She chose a 20-year-old Chicago-area man from more than 100 entries; the “date” included an all-expenses-paid trip to South Florida.
Lately, she’s narrowed her focus to the SEAL Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit that provides support — medical, educational and otherwise — to families of Navy SEALs wounded or killed on duty. Last year she announced an initiative that involved wearing blue camouflage on Sundays to broadcast her support for the cause. And as part of Lexi’s Legacy Challenge, she unveiled a commemorative SEAL Legacy Foundation Pin that she wears during tournaments — anyone who donates $25 or more receives the same pin.
She made the initiative uniquely Lexi in the way she launched the initiative: She literally launched herself out of an airplane. Thompson parachuted to the first tee at a tournament in Williamsburg, Virginia, with a team of three SEALs. “She didn’t have to skydive — that was her decision,” says her manager, Bobby Kreusler. “Quite frankly, I was terrified.”
Although skydiving had been on her bucket list, Thompson acknowledges feeling some butterflies when her legs were dangling out of the open bay door. “The only way I was ever going to do it,” she says, “was with a Navy SEAL on my back.”
5. Ryan Sheckler
Ryan Sheckler at Skate for a Cause
© Michael Custodio
The skateboard legend is also a charitable multitasker
Ryan Sheckler was bewildered. He was a 17-year-old skateboard phenom starring in the new MTV show "Life of Ryan" when a young leukemia patient named Casey asked, via the Make-A-Wish Foundation, to meet him. Things had come easy for Sheckler, who had won X Games gold at the age of 13. This seemed hard.
“I was a kid,” Sheckler, now 28, recalls. “I couldn’t fathom why this girl wanted to hang out with me. I was nervous.”
As soon as they met, though, “it was like we’d always been friends — it was super comfortable,” he says. “I was feeling something.” By the end of their time together the meeting had, for Sheckler, become about not what he was doing for her but how much she inspired him. He went home and told his family that he wanted to use his reach to help people like Casey. Soon after that, the family auctioned off Sheckler’s Range Rover, donating the proceeds to the Children’s Cancer Fund. A year later, he formed the Sheckler Foundation. The focus was always laser clear: to help kids with serious illnesses and action-sports athletes who’d suffered traumatic injuries.
The hard work of raising cash to help an array of causes that fit under that umbrella has been spread among events that have become Sheckler Foundation touchstones. There’s the annual Skate for a Cause, connecting directly to Sheckler’s brand and passion. And there’s a golf tournament now in its 11th year and still growing — Sheckler plans to tap his music-industry connections to add a concert next year. In a decade, the organization’s fundraising tally has topped $1.2 million.
It's just like a big love network.
The foundation has also hit upon a creative way to disburse that cash — the “Be the Change” initiative. Now organizations can apply for a $10,000 grant to propel some sort of cause: an accessible skateboard park, or autism-cure research, or an organization that helps families battling pediatric cancer.
Ryan’s mother, Gretchen, who helps run the foundation, says they hope to award a grant quarterly by 2019, and eventually hope to bump the pace to monthly. And the Shecklers have noticed an unexpected benefit from the program: Even organizations that don’t win a grant often see a huge bump in traffic and interest as a result of entering.
Good begets good. As Sheckler says, “It’s just like a big love network.”
6. Angel Collinson
Collinson speaks out on climate change
© Nic Allegre/Red Bull Content Pool
She’s a pro skier and a leading advocate on climate change
Imagine that you are a member of Congress. Your duties include meetings with constituents and lobbyists seeking to edify you about various causes, and one day your calendar serves up a session with Angel Collinson, who is coming to discuss climate change. You note that she’s a professional skier whose videos feature harrowing descents and jumps, and assume that anyone who does that for a living can’t be coherent on such a complex topic.
This would be a mistake. After all, Collinson fell 0.01 points short of a perfect 4.0 GPA in high school, then tackled environmental studies and philosophy at the University of Utah. You’d quickly learn how competently she can articulate the steep consequences of climate change and the benefits, to both the planet and the economy, of a carbon fee and dividend program. You’d find how she parries concerns about new government red tape by noting that such a program provides “a market-driven solution to putting a price on carbon” and “exponentially drives the future of energy use to where it needs to go.”
Sometimes your cause finds you.
As she is talking, you would see why she was recruited for advocacy work by Protect Our Winters and the Citizens’ Climate Lobby. She hadn’t known much about either organization when they reached out to her about six years ago — she only knew that the planet’s fate was a growing concern. “Sometimes,” she says, “your causes find you.”
Since then, she has spoken to classes and used her social media platforms to advance awareness and initiatives. And yes, she has personally lobbied members of Congress on Capitol Hill. “It’s an awesome platform for practicing listening and communication,” she says.
Don’t expect to ambush her by pointing out the ironies of a pro skier wringing her hands over climate change. She acknowledges that her sport is carbon heavy. You will find that rather than getting defensive, Collinson is contemplative. She gets it, and counters that it’s far better to speak than not.
“It’s something I struggle with, and think about a lot,” she says. “Now that I have a voice, I can’t quit everything I’ve done to get here.”
7. Kai Lenny
Kai Lenny for cleaner oceans and beaches
© Andy Mann/Red Bull Content Pool
A big-wave standout leads the charge for cleaner oceans and beaches
It you were a 25-year-old native Hawaiian, like Kai Lenny is, you’d have a certain way of thinking about all the plastic and garbage washing up on your shore. “It’s like coming home every day,” he says, “and finding people were partying all night there, and you’re the one picking up their trash.”
This is not a new problem. Lenny first heard about it as a child in his Montessori school. Part of the issue is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a fast-growing mass of trash that covers more than 600,000 square miles (twice the size of Texas) — but also, due to its location and the vagaries of oceanic currents, Hawaii is a magnet for rubbish floating around the Southern Hemisphere.
The issue really hit home for him one day when, after a long surfing session, he noticed masses of tiny colorful particles — microplastics— on the beach. It registered that the material had always been there and was becoming more ubiquitous. “Once you see it,” he says, “it’s like you become exposed to it in a way. Now I swear, it has to be double the amount I remember — even triple.” The issue is a glaring one for Lenny, whose “office is the beach and the ocean,” as he puts it.
You can’t make people do anything. You have to inspire them to want to.
Still, the Maui-based water-sports icon — he’s a world champion in stand-up paddleboard racing, in addition to a big-wave surfer, windsurfer and kitesurfer — isn’t going to preach to you about the straw in your iced tea or taking a plastic bag for two items at the pharmacy. Lenny believes in trying to convert people by example, so he came up with the idea of hydrofoiling 200 miles across the Hawaiian Island Chain over five days to help focus attention on the problem. He coordinated his journey with Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii, which organized volunteers for a beach cleanup at each stop on his trek. It turned out to be the largest such trash removal effort in the state’s history; at one stop alone, a crew of volunteers snapped up more than three tons of plastic flotsam.
To Lenny, there’s a lesson in this: “You can’t make people do anything,” he says. “You have to inspire them to want to.”
And the way to do that, ultimately, is to get people out on the ocean so that they can feel a sense of connection and ownership. “Once they have a relationship to the ocean,” he says, “I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t start to care about it.”