Not long after Erica Wheeler made history as the first WNBA player to sign an official corporate partnership with OnlyFans, the platform’s growing roster of non-adult “Athlete” partners has picked up its latest recruit: French freesurfer Maud Le Car.
The signing continues a rebrand that OnlyFans has been quietly working on for a while now, building a totally SFW athlete program alongside its adult-content core, sponsoring competitors who post training footage, behind-the-scenes access, and daily-life content rather than explicit material. Le Car announced the partnership on Instagram with a description that reads less like a thirst-trap pitch and more like a personal brand statement: “This is a new space where I’ll be sharing even more exclusive content and taking you closer into my everyday life as a professional freesurfer and artist,” she wrote, promising surf and big-wave footage, training breakdowns, and “the real journey behind the dreams: the work, the challenges, the doubts, the adventures.”
What sets Le Car apart from most of the athletes who’ve joined this same OnlyFans track is the range of what she’s promising beyond sport. Her page will apparently include art and artistic advice, as Le Car is also a practicing artist, not just a competitor, alongside environmental content tied to Save La Mermaid, an ocean conservation group. That’s a pretty different pitch than the standard athlete-OnlyFans formula: less “watch me train” and more “here’s my full creative and environmental life,” bundled into one subscription. And for now, at least, that subscription is free. Le Car’s page currently operates on a free tier, meaning the monetization strategy here leans more on visibility and brand-building than direct subscription revenue, at least at launch.
Le Car isn’t breaking entirely new ground by joining, even if her content mix is more expansive than most. She’s stepping into a surf-specific cohort that already includes Nathan Florence, Jacob Szekely, Moana Jones Wong, Billy Kemper, and Pedro Scooby, who are recognizable enough names that outlets like The Inertia have published entire roundups reviewing what’s actually on these athlete pages, aimed at surf fans curious about the content without wanting to hand over a credit card to find out.
Coming off the heels of Wheeler’s WNBA partnership from last week, we’re getting a much better picture of what OnlyFans is actually building here. This isn’t a platform quietly hoping a few athletes wander onto it. It’s an active, structured recruitment effort spanning multiple sports, from major American team sports down to niche action-sports disciplines like big-wave surfing. Wheeler’s stated goal was reshaping public perception of what OnlyFans even is; Le Car’s expanded content mix, folding in art and environmental advocacy alongside surfing, pushes that same rebrand even further; the platform isn’t just diversifying past adult content, it’s diversifying into whatever an athlete’s actual life and interests happen to include.
There’s a financial logic, even when the specific page is free. OnlyFans’ 80/20 revenue split has already proven to be one of the more creator-favorable models in the influencer economy, and athletes, especially in sports without robust mainstream sponsorship infrastructure, like competitive freesurfing, are exactly the kind of talent who benefit most from direct-to-fan monetization tools that don’t require a major brand deal to access. Wheeler pointed to the pay gap in women’s basketball as part of her own motivation; surfing has its own long-standing sponsorship inequities, particularly for women in a sport historically dominated by male athletes and male-focused sponsorship dollars.
Wheeler and Le Car represent two different sports making the same essential bet: that a platform built on direct fan relationships can pay better, and more fairly, than the traditional sponsorship structures both of their sports have relied on for decades.