In case you’ve tuned into any of the ladies’s water polo matches on the Olympics—and you must, as a result of Group USA is going for a historic fourth consecutive gold medal—you’ve in all probability seen a well-known face on the sidelines.
Or not less than, a well-known clock.
That’s proper—it’s Taste Flav, the founding member of the hip-hop group Public Enemy identified for sporting an enormous clock round his neck. He’s now the official hype man for the staff.
A rapper and actuality TV star would possibly look like an unlikely booster for a sport that isn’t on most individuals’s radar. So how’d all of it come about? It’s all due to Maggie Steffens, the staff captain, who’s been on all three of these gold-medal-winning groups. In Might, Steffens posted on Instagram asking for help for her staff—or, for that matter, any different lesser-known girls’s Olympic athletes.
“Some could not know this, however most Olympians want a 2nd (or third) job to help chasing the dream (myself included!) and most groups depend on sponsors for journey, lodging, dietary help, hire/lodging, and easily affording to dwell at the present time,” she wrote. Corporations and people already donate, and the game’s governing physique offers some funding, however “we all the time want extra assist.”
Taste Flav’s supervisor was scrolling that day, noticed the put up, and shared it with the rapper. Flav rapidly realized he may make a distinction. He commented on Steffens’s put up: “As a lady dad and supporter of all girls’s sports activities … imma sponsor the entire staff,” he wrote. “My supervisor is in contact along with your agent.”
After which, he adopted by way of. On July 1, USA Water Polo introduced he’d signed a five-year sponsorship deal, wherein he’d made a monetary contribution of an undisclosed quantity to help the athletes. He additionally pledged to seem poolside not simply in Paris, however in a number of different USA Water Polo occasions all year long. And he vowed to advertise the groups on social media.
To this point, he’s joined the staff at follow sporting a USA Water Polo-themed clock, making an attempt his hand at treading water, passing, and capturing. When the ladies had been in Paris for a check match in Might, he helped them get tickets to a Taylor Swift live performance. At their first match of the Video games—wherein they defeated Greece 15-6 —he was there, taking selfies with First Woman Jill Biden.
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