5 Famous Figures Who Nearly Made the Olympics
In 67 CE, the Roman Emperor Nero decided to take part in the Olympic Games. He competed in a number of events, including chariot racing, singing, poetry, and lyre playing. Needless to say, the eccentric emperor made sure he was declared the winner in each discipline — including the chariot race, despite him falling out of his chariot and never finishing the event.
Other famous figures have made far more dignified appearances in the modern Olympics. George S. Patton, one of the United States’ most famous military generals, competed in the modern pentathlon at the 1912 Games in Stockholm, finishing in fifth place. Johnny Weissmuller was a superstar in the pool, winning five gold medals, before he became famous on the silver screen as Tarzan. Other notable celebrity Olympians include bestselling author Benjamin Spock (gold medal in rowing), Jessica Springsteen (Bruce’s daughter, equestrian), and Caitlyn Jenner, who won gold and broke the world decathlon record at the 1976 Montreal Games.
Of course, for every athlete who makes it to the Games, countless others fall short of their dreams, including some celebrities who went on to achieve success in entirely different fields. Here are five famous figures you may be surprised to learn nearly made the Olympics.
Geena Davis
Academy Award-winning actress Geena Davis took up archery at age 41 after becoming fascinated by the sport while watching the 1996 Atlanta Games. She’d already established herself as an A-list actress by that point, having portrayed Thelma Dickinson in Thelma & Louise (1991) and the baseball-playing Dottie Hinson in A League of Their Own (1992), but archery was calling.
In 1997, she found a coach and dedicated herself completely to the sport for two years. She won local and national tournaments and soon found herself competing against 300 other women vying for a place on the U.S. Olympic archery team for the 2000 Sydney Games. She finished in 24th place — a highly respectable achievement, but not quite enough to make it to the Olympics.
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Vera Wang
Before becoming one of the world’s most renowned fashion designers, Vera Wang was a competitive figure skater. She took up the sport at age 8, quickly becoming a very promising pairs skater. When she was 19, she competed with her partner at the 1968 U.S. National Championships in Philadelphia — but her efforts weren’t quite enough to gain her a dream spot on the Olympic team.
Devastated, she decided to turn her attention to fashion, where she achieved the success that eluded her on the ice. She gained international fame for her wedding gowns, designing dresses for celebrities such as Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Victoria Beckham, and Kim Kardashian. But she never turned away from skating altogether. She created costumes for many Olympic skaters, including Nancy Kerrigan, Michelle Kwan, and Nathan Chen. For her efforts both on and off the rink, Vera Wang was inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 2009.
Salma Hayek
When Salma Hayek was 9 years old, she watched on TV as Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci competed at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. It was at that event that Comăneci became the first Olympic gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of 10.0. Hayek was inspired and began teaching herself gymnastics.
Determined to improve, and with no classes or instructors available in her village, she begged her father to take her to a gym in Mexico City that summer. According to Hayek, she excelled and within months was “drafted for the Olympic team.” (This was presumably as a future candidate for the Olympics, as the youngest female Olympic gymnasts at the time, including Comăneci, tended to be around 14 years old.) But a stumbling block soon emerged. Her father didn’t want his young daughter — who was still only nine years old — living so far from home, engaged in a highly disciplined regime that he worried would rob her of her childhood. So, Hayek went home with her Olympic dream over — but with an A-list acting career on the horizon.
Jason Statham
Long before he became one of Hollywood’s biggest action heroes, appearing in such movie franchises as Fast & Furious, The Expendables, and The Meg, Jason Statham was a competitive diver. His interest in the sport arose when he was in his early teens, during a family vacation. “I was on holiday in Florida with my mom and dad,” Statham recalled during a 2013 interview with Katie Couric, “and there was a guy who used to do a high dive at noon every day from one of the hotels we stayed in. And I say, ‘When we get home, I’m going to do that.’”
A year later, he was on the British national diving team. He spent the next decade diving and represented England at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland. He also took part in the Olympic trials for the 1988 Games in Seoul and the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, but he didn’t quite make the cut — something he later described as “a bit of a sore point.”
Liam Payne
When he was a young boy, Liam Payne harbored dreams of becoming an Olympic runner. He began training at 5 a.m. every day with the Wolverhampton and Bilston Athletics Club in England, running 5 miles before school and another few miles before going home. He excelled at the sport and for three years was ranked as one of the top three 1,500-meter runners in the country in his age group.
It was a path that could, potentially, have led him to the Olympics. But when he was 14, Payne narrowly missed out on being selected for the England national schools athletic team. It was then that he chose to pursue his other passion: singing. The rest, as they say, is history. As a member of One Direction, he became one of the world’s most beloved pop stars — a career ultimately curtailed by his untimely death in 2024. But Payne did make it to the Olympics, performing in the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Games alongside his One Direction bandmates.
