Throughout the years there have been several high-profile Olympians getting stamped as cannabis advocates. Whether through childhood experimentation, taking bong rips, eating pot brownies or using it as a potential performance-enhancing drug — these Olympic champions and athletes have been associated with cannabis throughout their professional careers. Some of them were never regular users, but anytime a high-level athlete smokes weed, people seem to care.
Michael Phelps
Michael Phelps is the most successful Olympian of all time. He’s won 28 medals and 23 of them were gold. Phelps has been labeled a pothead athlete ever since he was caught ripping a bong on camera. While he apologized for the optics he stated that cannabis never prevented him from excelling in any way.
Usain Bolt
Usain Bolt is often associated with cannabis but he never used it during competition. He’s also not a regular user outside of competition. However, it seems cannabis-culture was a regular part of his youth because he once told reporters “when you’re a child in Jamaica, you learn how to roll a joint.”
Ross Rebagliati
Ross won a gold medal for snowboarding and is a believer in the notion that cannabis is a performance-enhancing drug. He even had a gold medal temporarily suspended after the 1998 Winter Olympics after he tested positive for THC. WADA has since raised the threshold for in competition blood-THC levels. Which is a good thing because cannabis is incredibly popular in snowboarding culture.
Nicholas Delpopolo
Judo and jujitsu are two more sporting cultures that have a close connection to cannabis. Many high-level martial artists also believe that cannabis is a performance-enhancing drug. Nicholas Delpopolo is an American Judoka that was disqualified in 2012 for a positive cannabis test. He reportedly ate a pot brownie at a party during the week of competition and he didn’t know it was infused with cannabis. He came back in 2016 and finished seventh in his division.
Jamie Anderson
Olympic snowboarders seem to be the most common type of Olympic champion that openly use cannabis. Jamie Anderson is another gold medalist snowboarder. She’s taken home the Olympic gold twice and has been a finalist at the X-Games 17 times. She has openly admitted to using cannabis’s medicinal properties to cope with the brutal psychical demands of professional competition.
