"Suzy [Favor Hamilton] had 'a very hard time turning 40.'"

"And for someone who used to draw all this attention,' and suddenly doesn’t get it as often, wouldn’t it be exciting, she says, to 'hear someone saying you are worth $600 per hour?'"

Elle Magazine quotes a friend of the disgraced Olympian in an overlong article summarized here.

($600 per hour sounded like a big compliment to SFH? Seems like the threshold for feeling like a compliment should have been more like $2,000.)

Suzy Favor Hamilton — exposed as a call girl — had gotten in a couple other PR jams.

For one thing: "She became famous during the Sydney Olympics in 2000 for intentionally falling to the track in the 1500 meter final when it became clear she could not medal in honor of her late brother, Dan."

And:

But I recall her... as the young woman in one of the most horrid and controversial commercials ever shown on U.S. television. The Nike spot, a dozen years ago, showed her being chased out of her house in the dark woods — stripped to her bra — by a maniac with a chain saw. Running through the woods, she finally outdistances him thanks to her Nikes. Protests centered on exploitation of violence against women (especially one half-naked) and it was soon pulled.

I feel bad about all the winners of the Big Ten's Suzy Favor Athlete of the Year Award.

If your name has been pasted on others as an honor, you have a special responsibility not to besmirch it. I feel sorry for the winners of that award, but otherwise, I wasn't in the mood to add to the exposure of "Three-time Olympian Suzy Favor Hamilton [who] says she coped with depression and a troubled marriage by turning to a life of prostitution."

One of the country's best-ever middle-distance runners, Favor Hamilton competed for the U.S. at the Olympics in 1992, 1996 and 2000 but did not win a medal. She won seven U.S. national titles. She lives in Madison, Wis., where... she and her husband, Mark, live in a $600,000 home and appear to be in no financial distress....

Favor Hamilton told the website that only her husband was aware of her escort work, but that, "He tried, he tried to get me to stop. He wasn't supportive of this at all."

Favor Hamilton has been attempting to tweet her way back into respectability, working the mental health angle, saying she had "reasons for doing this made sense to me at the time and were very much related to depression" and that she 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."

This is the standard approach famous people use to explain sexual misbehavior when they get caught. But here's a person who worked for an escort service that scheduled $600 an hour dates for her in as well as in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago. It's a business venture that seems organized and deliberate, not some sad symptom of mental illness. Too bad she can't own it.