WASHINGTON, December 21 (RIA Novosti) –Three-time US Olympian Suzy Favor Hamilton has admitted to taking her talents off of the track and into the bedroom over the last year, doubling as a $600-an-hour prostitute, a career change that she now regrets and calls a “huge mistake.”
“I was drawn to escorting in large part because it provided many coping mechanisms for me when I was going through a very challenging time with my marriage and my life,” Favor Hamilton wrote on her Twitter account on Thursday after the website The Smoking Gun (TSG) broke the story.
“It provided an escape from a life that I was struggling in. It was a double life,” she wrote.
A middle distance runner who competed in the women’s 1500 meter (1.5 km) race in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 Olympic Games, Favor Hamilton is also one of the most decorated female athletes in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) track and field history.
She has appeared in a Nike commercial and a swimsuit calendar, and has done promotional work for national firms including Disney, Reebok and Clairol.
According to TSG, which had been working on the exposé for several months, the 44-year-old former track star worked for Haley Heston’s Private Collection, billed as one of the premiere escort services in Las Vegas.
Favor Hamilton, who is married to her college sweetheart and has a seven-year-old daughter, admitted she was booking “dates” in cities throughout the country including Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston.
She told TSG her husband Mark was aware of her escort work and said “he tried to get me to stop” and that “he wasn’t supportive at all.”
While Favor Hamilton used the name “Kelly” as an alias with most of her clients, she told TSG she did share her true identity with several of her male “dates,” believing they would keep her secret and honor a code of silence.
According to TSG, the former Olympian suspects one of her clients told a reporter about her role in the escort service, because she was approached by a member of the media earlier this month in a Las Vegas hotel and questioned about her work as a call girl.
“Everybody in this world makes mistakes. I made a huge mistake. Huge,” she said.
Since Thursday, Favor Hamilton has also posted comments on her Twitter account trying to explain her reasons for joining the escort service:
As crazy as I know it seems, I never thought I would be exposed, therefore never hurting anybody.
— Suzy Favor Hamilton (@favorhamilton) December 20, 2012
I do not expect people to understand, but the reasons for doing this made sense to me at the time and were very much related to depression.
— Suzy Favor Hamilton (@favorhamilton) December 20, 2012
Although Favor Hamilton said she made a mistake, she told TSG that working for an escort service was “exciting” and a diversion from her life as a real estate broker.
Favor Hamilton posted on her Twitter account on Thursday that she is “seeking the help of a psychologist” and “and will continue to do so after I have put things together.”
The escort service also deleted Favor Hamilton’s photos earlier this month at her request.
