Fake-dating your Olympic rival to save a sponsorship seemed manageable. Three weeks in, neither of them can remember what 'fake' means — and qualifiers are in thirty days.
Sprinters Zoe Park and Cole Mercer are competing for the same Olympic qualifying slot and, as of last Tuesday, pretending to date for a $2M sponsorship deal neither can afford to lose. The arrangement has a contract, a timeline, and a line neither of them is supposed to cross. The line stopped being clear somewhere around week three. The qualifier is eight weeks away. Zoe has been in this situation before — the one where she trades something real for something strategic — and she knows exactly how it ends. She's doing it anyway. That's the part she hasn't explained to herself.
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