They Don’t Need to Act Like They’re Athletic

PORTLAND, Ore. — Some years back, according to Dave Weiss’ story, a Columbia Sportswear catalog went out to customers, many of whom were fly-fishing fanatics. Within days, the switchboard at Columbia was deluged with complaints from the FFFs.

The problem?

The models shown casting in the catalog clearly knew as much about fishing as fish know about modeling, the FFFs argued.

Weiss decided to spare anglers and athletes the agony of seeing pretenders in their favorite sporting goods catalogs. Six years ago, he and his wife, Molly, founded a modeling agency, Sports Unlimited, with athletes only--just 10 of them to start.

Today, Sports Unlimited represents more than 600 athlete-models ages 13 to 74, who themselves represent about 150 sports, from golf to mountain climbing. More than 60 are professional or Olympic athletes.

To Weiss, a former college athlete who used to model for Nike, a sports modeling agency seemed to be the perfect addition to the Pacific Northwest, home to Nike, Adidas, Columbia Sportswear, Soloflex, REI and other sporting goods giants. But healthy, buff models are now in such great demand from other industries that Weiss has been able to open a Santa Monica branch of Sports Unlimited, and his New York office will open in a few months.

“Before, Nike would hire a model that looked like an athlete. [But,] the athletes knew and credibility suffered,” he says.

Sports Unlimited models have graced the covers of Men’s Fitness, Men’s Journal, Runner’s World and other magazines, and in client ads inside Sports Illustrated, People, Mademoiselle, Shape and Rolling Stone.

Weiss thinks this is just the beginning. With a veritable army of buff and beautiful sports models, he wants to take on the whole fashion industry.

“This waif, skin-and-bones look is on its way out,” he says. “People realize it’s not a healthy image. I think it’s about time.”

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For the most part, Sports Unlimited’s athlete-models hail from the West Coast, particularly Oregon and Washington. Most of them, used to cross-training, are adept at numerous sports. Simon Lawton, for example, has appeared in ads showing him performing his career sport--downhill mountain biking. But he has also modeled while cross-country skiing, snow shoeing, motocross racing, four-wheel driving, snowmobiling, whitewater rafting, hiking and paragliding.

“I got into sports modeling to keep doing what I love to do and make some money,” says Lawton, 28. Although he’s rated among the 50 best mountain bikers in the nation, he said only the racers at the top of the list earn enough money to live on.

So when he’s not racing or tending bar at Cutter’s in Seattle, he’s in front of the camera. And that, he says, is not a stressful place to be because he concentrates only on sports and tends to forget that he’s modeling.

“I don’t think about the camera when I’m in a zone,” he says.

Brian Chase, 26, is a rock climber / model but, he laments, “People aren’t really looking for climbers. Track and field gets more demand.” But Chase is versatile. He’s done trail running, snow shoeing, sitting on a rock and, for an Early Winters catalog, “rolling around in the snow with a beautiful woman.” And for that he got paid $1,000.

“It’s really fun,” says Chase, who lives in Portland. “Most of the time you get paid fantastic amounts of money to hang out with fun people and laugh. How can you beat that?”

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The money from sports modeling is what keeps Ron Roley’s Olympic dreams alive. He’s been a bicycle racer since 1988, the last five years in Europe. But his lifestyle has been frugal, if not impoverished, in order to continue competing and training.

Modeling “is a godsend,” says Roley, 31, of Bend, Ore. His only complaint is that most art directors “don’t have a clue what they’re asking guys to do and how dangerous it is.”

He can count numerous strains and falls he’s had while modeling. But the most demanding job was when he was called on to bicycle down a highway through the parched central Oregon desert while wearing a 200-pound antique diving suit. It took 30 minutes to put the suit on, then Roley had to wait two hours until the photographer was satisfied with the angle of the sun.

“I just kept thinking of those Olympic rings,” he says.

Robin Unger, a heptathlete and Olympic hopeful who works as assistant track coach at Portland State University, is in her third year of sports modeling. For the past two years she’s been a model for Nike’s Boston Marathon poster.

“Boston was somewhere I’d always wanted to go,” says Unger, 24. “It was almost like fate.”

But for the two and a half days she was in Boston, she had no time for sightseeing. The photographer had her run up and down Heartbreak Hill for more than two hours.

“That kinda hurt,” she recalls. “After that I had to jog and look tired. It wasn’t acting.”

Probably the most unusual sport performed by a Sports Unlimited model is unicycling . . . while juggling . . . while dressed in a clown suit. But Tyler Bechtol, 24, is indeed a professional clown, and a sports model to boot. Trained at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, Bechtol got a call from Sports Unlimited just a few weeks ago after a client requested a unicyclist.

But Bechtol will have to put off modeling for the next few months as he unicycles all the way from his Portland home to Florida to benefit the Shriners’ Hospitals. He expects to set a world distance record for unicycling.

And, he says, he expects the trip to improve his marketability as a model.