Come 2022, the United States Olympic luge team will, in part, fund their endeavours with a financial asset as risky as the sport itself. The team is diving head first into Bitcoin, as it plans to accept the cryptocurrency to help fund its path to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
In a Medium blog post, the USA Luge Foundation conveyed that its olympic athletes have set up a team account to invest in Bitcoin with their endowment fund. The blog post continued by indicating that the team would begin accepting Bitcoin donations for their endowment, as well.
Outlining their reasoning for what many would brand as a reckless investment, the foundation wrote:
We’ve looked at Bitcoin hard, and it is definitely a risk-reward we understand and are eager to take.”
This move comes mainly as a method to grow the team’s endowment fund and secure its financial future. Ty Danco, a former luge Olympian and an early Bitcoin adopter, stated that,
with the decision, the luge team is not thinking short term, but long. By hodling Bitcoin with the express goal of holding on through the 2022 and 2026 Olympic Games.”
The team hopes that the investment will uplift the sport in the near future. Historically, luge is not a very popular sport in the United States, and as such, it often does not receive much financial backing.
America’s team hopes that Bitcoin will help to change this, and it seems fitting that such a team involved with a dangerous sport is taking a chance on the volatile asset.
It’s likewise fitting that the team is making such an accommodation ahead of an Olympics hosted in South Korea. The South Korean public is wild for Bitcoin and its cryptocurrency cohorts, and the South Korean government has been one of the most proactive in the world at adopting a regulatory framework for the digital craze.
