The Breakfast of Champions has long been a lucrative rite of passage for Olympians. Here’s how much it pays to be the face of it.
By Matt Craig, Forbes Staff
Caitlyn Jenner never expected to get rich from the 1976 Summer Olympics. The 26-year-old American decathlete, then known as Bruce Jenner, was living and training on $10,000 a year ($55,000 when adjusted for inflation), but after winning a gold medal in the decathlon at the Montreal Games, Jenner was approached by General Mills with an offer to endorse one of its flagship products, Wheaties.
“We were signing the contract and I remember the guy handing me my copy and he says, ‘Congratulations, you’re a millionaire,’” Jenner tells Forbes. “I’ll never forget that. I said, ‘Me?’”
That $1 million deal (around $4.5 million in today’s dollars) was a five-year commitment to become a General Mills ambassador, not only appearing on a trio of Wheaties box covers and in several TV commercials but also acting as a spokesperson for the cereal at health and fitness events across the country. The contract gave the company 45 days of Jenner’s time a year, an astronomical requirement by today’s standards, cementing the association between the “world’s greatest athlete” and the “Breakfast of Champions.”
“By far out of everything I’ve done in my career, General Mills had the biggest impact and everybody remembers the commercials,” says Jenner, who says she has given every member of her family a framed and signed copy of the original box. “It was just a very big deal.”
The tradition of putting an elite athlete on a box of Wheaties began in 1934, when General Mills used a photo of New York Yankees slugger Lou Gehrig on the back of its box as an embodiment of that champion persona.
Since then, nearly every iconic American athlete has appeared on its cover, from Bob Cousy and Bart Starr to Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods up through Stephen Curry and Serena Williams. During that time, Wheaties has built a particular connection to the Olympic Games, featuring more than 100 Olympians over the decades.
Most cover athletes report that the Wheaties box is, if not a fulfillment of a lifelong dream, at least satisfying a nostalgic itch for the boxes they saw in grocery stores as children. When General Mills approaches, it’s generally an easy sell.
“Wheaties has something that brands can’t buy—and that’s history,” says T. Bettina Cornwell, head of the department of marketing at Oregon University. “The value they have is a very clear message that hasn’t been changed over the years. And it’s just so wholesome, right?”
Because of the immense sentimental value, a Wheaties endorsement is known in sports marketing circles to be something less than a monster payday. In the late 1990s, the Wall Street Journal reported that Olympic figure skater Tara Lipinski had agreed to an offer of $15,000 ($30,000 today) to appear on a Wheaties box after the 1998 Winter Games, but the company instead picked the gold medal-winning USA women’s hockey team, who appeared on the box, reportedly for no compensation.
Gold Bonding: In 1998, the U.S. Women’s Ice Hockey team was featured on Wheaties rather than an individual Olympian.
Donaldson Collection/Getty Images
Today, when multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals are commonplace, a Wheaties endorsement for the upper echelon of Olympians tops out around $300,000, with lesser-known athletes falling in the $75,000-$100,000 range.
“Even if the money wasn’t there, if I used the product and I believed in them, I want to be with them,” says Misty May Treanor, who won three Olympic gold medals in beach volleyball and appeared on the Wheaties box in 2012. “For me that was an iconic box that I never dreamed I would be on when I was reaching for that Mary Lou Retton box when I was younger.”
Treanor says her agent “spilled the beans” on the possible deal in London, before she was set to compete in the 2012 Summer Games, because artwork and box design needed to be approved. But there was a stipulation. Wheaties was the breakfast of champions, so Treanor and her beach volleyball teammate, Kerri Walsh Jennings, would need to win gold in order for the campaign to go ahead. “Athletes, we will never say it, but it was definitely in the back of my mind,” she says. “When he told me I was, like, Oh, I’ve got to win. I want this to happen, I’ve got to win!”
For Olympic athletes who are being introduced on the world stage for the first time, Wheaties can also represent a proof of concept for other brands. Jenner says the association with the cereal directly led to other commercials, for brands such as Minolta cameras and Tropicana orange juice. (Jenner’s association with the brand also led to a classic Saturday Night Live sketch in 1977 for Little Chocolate Donuts starring John Belushi.) Even 40 years later, ski racer Mikaela Shiffrin had the same experience after winning her first gold medal in 2014 and appearing on the box soon after.
Signed and Delivered: In 2004, Michael Phelps (also promoting his post-Olympic trip to Disneyland) signed a Wheaties box for Jay Leno.
Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images
“With the Wheaties box it’s like this sign of credibility,” says Shiffrin, who landed a deal with watch brand Longines later that same year. “I would say that was one of the driving forces behind my brand market value at the time.”
However, Shiffrin says that while Wheaties might have been among the first to make sports marketing cool, “now there’s a thousand places that are cool.” The next generation might dream of being a playable character skin in Fortnite, as Patrick Mahomes, Naomi Osaka and other athletes have been, or perhaps the goal is being interviewed on the YouTube series “Hot Ones,” like Lewis Hamilton and Carmelo Anthony. These days, more people might see a viral video on TikTok than a cereal box in the grocery store, as was the case for gold medal-winning English diver Tom Daley, who was caught on camera knitting during the 2021 Tokyo Olympics and parlayed it into 1.4 million followers and his own knitwear brand.
Today it can feel as if Wheaties needs athletes more than the athletes need the brand. Analysts like Cornwell believe the Wheaties box itself is now more valuable than the cereal inside, pointing to the robust third-party marketplace for past boxes on auction sites like eBay. “I would never attempt to sell Wheaties without an athlete on the cover,” she says.
Wheaties is not as popular as the cereal once was—in large part because cereal sales have been declining in recent years. The brand’s market share peaked in 1941, accounting for 12% of all cereal sales in the country. By the late 1990s it had declined to 1%, outpaced even by other health-conscious brands even within the General Mills portfolio, such as Cheerios. According to market research firm Euromonitor International, Wheaties currently ranks No. 21 in the U.S. among family breakfast cereal brands.
General Mills declined to comment on sales, market share, or compensation for box cover athletes. But Bethany Quam, the company’s president of morning foods, reiterates that cereal remains the No. 1 breakfast in the country and that $9.5 billion in sales are still up for grabs each year in the industry. She says she has seen no diminished enthusiasm from athletes wanting to be on the Wheaties box. “Associating with a brand like this also helps build their brand, so it’s become a lot of value for them, and for us,” says Quam. “You can’t become iconic overnight.”