Born in Toronto and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria, Simidele Adeagbo made Olympic history at the 2018 Winter Games, becoming the first Nigerian Winter Olympian and the first African and Black woman to compete in skeleton racing at the Olympics. Her pathway to Pyeongchang was an unconventional one: While she had trained in track and field as a young woman, including holding a college record for triple jump, it wasn’t until 15 years after graduating that she made her Olympic debut in the radically different arena of the bobsled.
Adeagbo’s career has covered a lot of ground, both geographically and in terms of her pursuits, which in recent years have included a foray into philanthropy. Adeagbo attended the University of Kentucky, where she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She worked in marketing at Nike for nearly a decade and a half. Through it all, she still felt there was a need to open doors for other underrepresented female athletes. She launched SimiSleighs Foundation in 2021 to increase access for marginalized female athletes within the Olympic and Paralympic communities, while also inspiring and empowering young girls around the world.
IP recently connected with Adeagbo to find out more about how she got to the Olympics, why she started her foundation, what she has planned for the 2026 Winter Olympics, and her biggest hopes for her foundation going forward.
Rise to the Olympics
We caught up with Adeagbo during the waning days of the Paris 2024 Olympics, summer games she originally intended to compete in. She was a long jump and triple jump standout at University of Kentucky and was a four-time All-American. But in her Olympic tryouts in 2004 and 2008, she came up just a couple of inches short in the jumping events.
Adeagbo soon pivoted to the corporate world, working at Nike and no longer competing at an elite level. But about a decade later, she caught wind of a story of three Nigerian women seeking to become the first Olympians representing an African country to compete at the Winter Olympics in bobsled. “I was just intrigued. Somebody had shared a video that had gone viral with these three women,” Adeagbo said.
Of course, like the rest of the world, she’d heard of “Cool Runnings,” the 1993 comedy film about the real-life story of Jamaican track and field athletes turned bobsled competitors. But she was shocked that there had never been any African representation in the sport. At the time of this revelation, she was living in South Africa, away from an American context, and was motivated to broaden the impression and assumptions people had about Africa. “The problem was, I knew nothing about bobsled,” Adeagbo said with a laugh. “So I got up off the couch and started trying to figure it out.”
Bobsled ultimately didn’t work out with her because of timing, she said, but through that process, she got to learn about skeleton and that no African woman — or Black woman, period — had ever competed in the Olympics in that sport. That led her on the path to making history at the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympic Games. She has since migrated back to bobsled and is currently training for 2026. At the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation World Championships in February, Adeagbo was the first African ever to compete in bobsled, a sport that has been around for a century.
“It’s not like [there are] training facilities in the back yard. Representing a country like Nigeria in a winter sport is tough. No one understands the sport. There’s no coaches you can rely on. It’s tough. We compete with countries like Germany and Switzerland,” she said.
Giving back and eliminating barriers
As soon as Adeagbo arrived at the Winter Olympics in February 2018, she immediately recognized her platform and her ability to impact millions. “I’m on the ice for only 60 seconds at a time. That is a platform [where] I felt that there was more impact I could make off the ice,” she said. As a female athlete, she spoke to some of the challenges that come with that in the world of sport, mentioning a lack of equal resources when compared to male counterparts, and, of course, the pay gap.
Adeagbo’s SimiSleighs Foundation works on two levels, supporting both Olympic-level female athletes as well as everyday girls. When it comes to elite athletes, its year-long program offers financial support to women who are competing at the Olympic and Paralympic level, as well as providing other needs to empower the athlete overall. This includes providing access to nutritional teams, sports psychologists and other staff to support the athletes throughout the year. Several athletes in the program competed for medals in the waning days of the Paris Olympics, including Team USA’s Helen Maroulis, who took home a bronze medal in freestyle wrestling 57 kg. Canadian 3×3 basketball player Paige Crozon, meanwhile, also thrived.
“I know the Paris Olympics is the first in history to have gender parity in terms of participation. And while I believe that is a huge step forward, you have to go deeper than that and really look at how athletes are being supported. That’s what we do, we fill that gap,” Adeagbo said.
As for young girls, SimiSleighs is all about building leadership development skills through sport, aiming to benefit hundreds of girls globally, including in Nigeria, South Africa, Morocco and Kenya. “While they may not be the next Olympic skeleton racer — that’s certainly not what this is about — they can shape their own classrooms and communities and be leaders in their own right,” Adeagbo said.
In 2023, the foundation reports that its Athlete Grant deployed $35,000 in grants and essential services to support its elite athletes. SimiSleighs’ long-term goal is to award $1 million in grant funding to female athletes in the next decade.
Institutional boundaries and going forward
As she’s witnessed and participated in groundbreaking trends in women’s sports over the last few years — like the rise of basketball’s Caitlin Clark — Adeagbo believes women’s sports is having a moment. She’s hopeful about all the energy and momentum, but also sees it as incomplete. While the WNBA, powered by figures like Clark as well as Angel Reese, is making strides, she’s not always seeing that translate all the way up to the Olympics — a landmark global event that otherwise offers plentiful opportunity for sports funders to raise and move lots of coin. What’s more, while eyeballs might be on basketball or tennis, what about other more niche sports where women compete, like bobsled skeleton or paratriathlon?
“There’s significant gaps in that regard,” she said. “I was listening to some stories coming out of Paris where athletes, literally some of them don’t know where their next meal is coming from. It’s something that people don’t talk about a lot within the Olympic and Paralympic movement. There are a lot of athletes living at or below the poverty line.”
This is where a funder like SimiSleighs can come in, providing athletes with direct funding up to $10,000, which can be used for everything from training expenses to travel. Outside of that, there’s also the personal and professional development resources that the foundation offers.
SimiSleighs is currently in the midst of a $15,000 fundraising campaign, running through September 8. Those interested can connect with the foundation on its website. The organization also has a mix of corporate partners and foundations that lend support, including Grassroot Soccer, Visa and the Marks Family Foundation.
Adeagbo loves the work she has been doing within the nonprofit space, but also knows how far having proper funding goes toward actually making her ambitious goals a reality. She has drawn, there, on her marketing experience, saying that both the nonprofit and for-profit worlds have similar basics of business. It’s also just about jumping in and pivoting when necessary — as Adeagbo did from her early days on the track and field to her Olympic career gliding down ice.
“It’s learn as you go. Try to read a lot. Day by day. No different than my journey as an athlete. I jumped on a sled 100 days before the Olympics. You figure it out,” she says with a laugh.
