Surfing and OnlyFans: Legit Funding Platform, Sportswashing, or Plain Porn?

Jul 23, 2026 608 views

Ask most people what OnlyFans is for, and you'll get one answer. For a growing number of professional athletes and surfers, you might get a different one. For the platform, well, maybe it's a bit of both.

OnlyFans recently sent out a new press release, detailing how Basque SUP and surf champion Alazne Aurrekoetxea, a Gold Medal winner at the 2025 ISA World SUP & Paddleboard Championships, has become the latest surfer to sign on as an official OnlyFans athlete.

Her profile is pitched as a digital hub for training routines and surf adventures. By signing up, she can also bypass the usual sponsorship bottlenecks that make funding a career so difficult for athletes outside the sport's commercial mainstream.

She's not alone. Nathan Florence, Billy Kemper, Pedro Scooby, Moana Jones Wong, Zeke Szekely, Portuguese big wave charger Antonio Laureano, and others have all joined what OnlyFans now calls its roster of "sports creators”. There are currently 285 professional athletes across surfing, cliff diving, fencing, motorbike racing, tennis, snowboarding, and combat sports.

It's enough of a trend that OnlyFans has built a dedicated sports landing page and a free-to-watch docuseries on its safe-for-work streaming arm, OFTV. Though you might think that the name of the series, Rise & Grind, might muddy the waters somewhat. So what's actually going on? Is it a funding lifeline, image rehab, or just the same old platform with new branding?

The OnlyFans pitch: funding the unfunded. The platform argues the economics of niche sport are brutal, and with surfing they have a point. Outside the small handful of surfers on major deals, most competitors and big wave surfers are self-funding flights, coaching, and gear out of pocket, chasing prize money that barely covers the trip. So when OnlyFans offers a flat and, by insider accounts, generous sign-on fee, plus a cut of whatever paying subscribers add on top, you can see the attraction.

And this isn’t putting about putting blocks of wax where they shouldn’t go, but athlete content that tends to be centred around training footage, travel, and access to their world, funding a career that would otherwise be financially unsustainable.

The Other Read: Sportswashing

OnlyFans built its business, and its $7.2 billion in 2024 creator gross revenue overwhelmingly on adult content. $5.8 billion of that was paid out directly to creators (with the top 1% earning a third of all revenue). On average, 80% of the content is explicit, and the revenue slice is probably even higher. The athlete program is part of a rebrand: a way to normalise the OnlyFans name among a mainstream, sponsor-friendly audience. Tennis was the first sport in, with Nick Kyrgios signing in 2023 and several more players following in 2025. Some commentators have called this exactly what it looks like: sportswashing, using clean-cut athletes to launder a brand.

This is where Moana Jones Wong might come in. The Queen of Pipeline is a devout Christian, Hawaiian culture advocate and runs the Moana Surf Club, a mentorship program for young women and surfers. “This platform is going to be where I share the parts of my surfing life you don’t always see: training days, travel adventures, mindset, surfing tips,” she said when she joined in 2025. “I am stoked to share my love for surfing and a more in-depth version of what it’s like being a professional surfer from Hawaii.” Many of Christian fans on her Instagram, however, pointed out the possible conflict of lending her values to a platform that elsewhere doesn’t match her morals.

Jones Wong was very different approach to when surfing and OnlyFans were first linked. Former Aussie pro surfer Ellie-Jean Coffey joined in 2018, but with adult content. “They said in the first month you'll probably garner between $20,000 to $80,000,” Coffee said not long after. “Well, I made a million. It still hasn't sunk in!”

The End Product

In surfing terms, the athlete content hasn’t been much different to their existing footage on Insta and YouTube and, in many cases, is much worse. High-profile stars Nathan Fletcher and Billy Kemper quickly vacated the space. From the outside looking in, it seems they may have taken the sign-on fee, then cut and run. Wong, Pedro Scooby, Lucia Martiño and Tony Laurano at least have made some type of effort to make fresh content, but why fans would fork out hard-earned cash to watch the content is a mystery. Even Zeke’s claim that his OnlyFans subscribers will get "raw, unseen footage and behind-the-scenes content that doesn't fit on Instagram or YouTube” doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. He’s gated some content behind a paywall, some flagged with the kind of “X-rated”, but I didn’t have the journalistic integrity, or the stomach, to actually check it out.

So Which Is It?

Well, with the exception of Coffey’s content years ago, no surfers on the platform are offering adult content. And for an ocean advocate funding a paddleboard world tour, a Pipe surfer trying to earn a living or a snowboarder documenting an injury comeback, the "legitimate funding platform" framing holds up reasonably well. You can’t knock an athlete taking a better deal than one on the table for a brand sponsorship. For OnlyFans itself, the sports program is doing some heavy lifting in a rebrand away from its adult content roots. Whether the athletes will get any subscription revenue, however, is still unanswered. We know where the platform gets most of its $7.4 billion a year, and it's not from watching a wipeout at Jaws, or the latest pop-up tips.

Source: Ben Mondy · https://www.surfer.com/news/surfing-and-onlyfans-legit-funding-platform-sportswashing-or-plain-porn