From Olympic Dreams to Visa Law: How One Unlikely Path Led Me to Represent Athletes

I didn't grow up dreaming of being an immigration attorney. I grew up dreaming of being an Olympic eventer.

Like a lot of competitive young riders, life got in the way. Cost, time, the simple math of trying to build a career and a life that didn't have room for the hours a serious riding habit demands. The dream didn't disappear, exactly. It just moved to the background.

What I didn't expect was a way back in through the practice of law itself. My work on athlete visas has taken me into corners of the sports world I never anticipated. For the past eight years, that's included representing steeplechase jockeys competing on the American steeplechase circuit. It turns out there's more than one way to stay close to a sport you love, and mine happens to run through immigration law.

What that work has taught me applies far beyond any one sport, though. I want to use this post to talk about how the extraordinary ability standard actually works for athletes, and why building a strong case is as much about understanding the sport as it is about understanding the law.

The Visa Categories Athletes Use

Athletes coming to compete in the United States typically rely on one of two categories:

P-1A is for athletes who compete individually or as part of a team at an internationally recognized level of performance. It's the primary nonimmigrant pathway for professional and elite amateur athletes.

O-1A is for individuals of extraordinary ability in a range of fields, including athletics, and can offer more flexibility for athletes whose careers don't map neatly onto a single competition season or team structure.

Both categories require evidence that the athlete performs at the top tier of their sport — but neither category defines what that looks like in sport-specific terms. That's left to the evidence the petition presents.

Why the Standard Is Harder to Apply Than It Looks

For an athlete in a major American league, there's usually a clear paper trail: league contracts, stats databases, broad media coverage, governing bodies that already know what these petitions need. The evidence essentially assembles itself.

For an athlete in a sport without that infrastructure , whether that's steeplechase racing, a sport that barely has a footprint in the U.S., or any discipline operating outside the major leagues, none of that exists in the same form. The relevant records exist, but they're not packaged for an audience unfamiliar with the sport. The athlete's accomplishments are real, but their significance isn't self-evident to someone outside that world.

This is where the real work happens. It's not enough to gather records of competition results and rankings. The case has to explain why this result, at this level, in this sport, means what it claims to mean, and who in the sport's own structure is positioned to confirm that meaning credibly.

I've come to spend a lot of my time exactly here: not simply compiling evidence, but building the explanatory framework that lets someone unfamiliar with a sport understand why a given athlete clears the bar.

What This Means If You Work With Athletes

This challenge isn't unique to any one sport. It shows up anywhere the athlete's discipline doesn't have a standardized, U.S.-legible record of achievement. If you're a trainer, agent, team manager, or owner, the visa question can be easy to put off simply because it isn't obvious where to start, or because the case looks harder than a typical filing.

That's the work I do, and the work I love, building extraordinary ability cases for athletes across sports, including the ones that don't get much attention in this country yet. If you have an athlete navigating this, I'd welcome the chance to talk through what the path might look like.