Two Olympic Marathoners. Two Lives Turned Around, Then Turned Around Again.

The International Olympic Committee said athletes who qualified for the 2020 Games would retain their status for the postponed Games, in 2021.

Riley did not doubt that he belonged in the Tokyo Games, but then he started thinking about whether his status as an Olympian could help him pay for rent and food. He does not have a sponsor. He had been working as an SAT tutor and receiving financial assistance from his parents.

“I try to live cheap,” he said.

He started talking to his coach and manager about making sponsorship deals with shoe, watch and sunglasses companies. Might there be speaking engagements?

U.S.A. Track Field was planning a marathon summit in Palo Alto, Calif., to give the six members of the United States marathon team guidance on the Olympic course, which will be in Sapporo, about 500 miles north of Tokyo, in the mountains of Hokkaido.

Initially, there had been conversations with sponsors and questions to ponder, such as whether any shoe company might match Nike’s technology ahead of the Olympics this summer.

Riley and his coach, Lee Troop, also began looking at filling his schedule with shorter races that would help him be more attuned to the surges that can happen in championship events like the Olympics, where running times do not matter and tactics are paramount to beating other runners to the finish line. (There were 155 runners in the 2016 men’s Olympic marathon.) They were looking at a 5K in Boston during marathon weekend there in April, a track meet at Stanford in May and the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta on July 4. Then race cancellations started to roll in, leading to, on March 24, the postponement of the Olympics. Then the conversations with sponsors slowed, too.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/sports/olympics/olympic-marathon-coronavirus.html