Apolo Ohno’s “Patient” Real Estate Investing Approach for Financial Freedom

BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast

Olympic medalist Apollo Anton Ono discusses his transition from professional speed skating to real estate investing and entrepreneurship. He

Key takeaways

• Apollo Ohno experienced 'the great divorce,' the difficult process of separating from an identity shaped by Olympic competition.
• He learned a costly lesson in 'blind trust' after being defrauded by a real estate fund during the 2008 financial crisis.

Main topics

• Identity transition after sports
• Real estate investing lessons

Notable quotes

You don't need to be the smartest person in the room to build wealth through real estate.

Conclusion

The episode serves as an inspiring guide for entrepreneurs to apply at

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) You don't need to be the smartest person in the room to build wealth through real estate. But you do need patience, discipline, and a willingness to play the long game. Apollo Ono understands this concept better than most, having dedicated his entire youth to becoming a short track speed skater. He reached the pinnacle of the sport, competing in three different Winter Olympics and taking home eight medals. But when his skating career ended 16 years ago, he faced a challenge he hadn't trained for. He calls it the great divorce, separating from an identity that had shaped nearly every part of his life. Thankfully, many of the skills he had spent decades honing translated to real estate investing. Now, Apollo operates at the intersection of high-performance business and wellness, helping entrepreneurs achieve their goals in a more sustainable way. And today, he's sharing the lessons that helped him weather tough times, why your investing network is your single greatest advantage, and how to avoid burnout on the road to financial freedom. What's up, everyone? I'm Dave Meyer, Chief Investment Officer at BiggerPockets, and today we have a very special guest, eight-time Olympic medalist, Apollo Anton Ono. Apollo has devoted a lot of his time to investing since retiring from speed skating 16 years ago, and he's gonna share the key business lessons he's learned here on the show today. Let's bring on Apollo Ono. Apollo Ono, thank you so much for joining the BiggerPockets podcast. It's great to have you here. Yeah, thanks for having me. I remember your Olympic run very well, but for people who might not know of you yet, maybe just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your backstory. Speaker 2 (1:48) My name is Apollo Anton Ono. I was a short track speed skater. I competed across three Winter Olympic Games. I had a very blessed career. I was able to walk away from the sport with eight. Winter Olympic medals. I retired 16 years ago, believe it or not, over 16 years ago. It sounds crazy just to say that. There's been multiple reinventions, both inside of the sport that I was so passionate and I love so much. And then obviously when I retired, there was the big transition or something that I call the great divorce from the previous identity into forming the new one. I spent a lot of time now focused on high performance at this kind of center of high performance business and wellness. And I'm sure we'll talk about all the investing stuff in Speaker 1 (2:30) our convo today. I'm curious about this great divorce. Tell me more about that. I imagine after dedicating your entire life to a sport, transitioning to doing something else must be really difficult. I think every Olympic athlete probably goes through some format of this, Speaker 2 (2:45) you know, in their each own kind of way or story, or even just people who've done particularly one thing for a very long time. that the world has signaled, your check in the mail has signaled, your fees, whatever, have showed that this is what you're really good at and this is what you were put on earth for. And then sometimes either by force or by choice, particularly in the world of sport, it's usually you age out or you get injured or you decide to go on another path. And it feels like that. It feels like a finger snap in which everything you've done has revolved around this one particular thing and you've said no to effectively every other thing and opportunity. That's not allocated towards, does it make me faster? Does it make me stronger? Does it help me recover better? If no, then it's not in the sphere of where you operate. And then seemingly overnight, after you get back from the closing ceremonies at Winter Olympic Games, and the calls start to get more quiet, perhaps the agent stops calling as much, people stop working for you as much, that you think is this kind of endless supply of deals and opportunities. But more importantly, you just don't really know what the hell you're good at. So for me, there was this great divorce from the previous identity. I had this person who I thought that I was. The world had signaled to me that this is why it thought that I was going to be on this earth. And that was gone. That version of myself had no longer or was no longer going to serve me in the same way. Wearing spandex and going in circles is not exactly the way I want to run my business. Speaker 1 (4:11) I think there is relatability here to people who go from a W2 job or just following one path and then figuring out, like you said, by choice or by force, time to do something different. It can be a really jarring experience. For you, Apollo, were you ready when you retired from speed skating? Like, was that by choice or by force? Speaker 2 (4:37) I thought that I had been prepared. You know, I had went to university. I didn't pay any attention when I was there. My mind and energy was totally spent on the world of speed skating. And so when I had really had time to come to terms with what I call the inner voice, right? The inner voice is really when no one else is around and you're not putting on the facade or the smile or playing the game of poker to show that you're fine and okay and transitioning. It's really just you and your own thoughts. So as a young man. When that voice started to get louder because the world became quieter for me, I really had to come to terms with, I don't have the skill sets yet. I need to identify what Speaker 1 (5:15) I'm going to do in my next pivot. Were you after something financial? Did you want to build something for the sake of building it? Or what was driving your next steps? Were you able to use a goal to sort of narrow down what you did next? Speaker 2 (5:30) It was financial in the beginning. But I think that... Pure drive of financial also was a big part of why I made mistakes, because I was more willing to say yes to certain types of risks that perhaps didn't resonate with me as an individual. And everyone has their own story, right? So this is not in any way, shape, or form advice anyone. But for me, what I've noticed is that when I chase something purely on a capital basis versus trying to have synergy between does this make sense financially and does this fit with the synergy of the... attributes that I bring to the table? Does it fit within the sphere of the thing that I think that I could do even for a couple of years or three, four, 10, whatever it might be? If those are totally mismatched, almost always. it has resulted in a complete failure. And forget about misallocation of capital. That tuition that I have paid was very expensive, more expensive than all the universities probably that you could add up many times over because of either rushing, wrong business partners, wrong timing. And something that I had to learn that many folks would probably resonate with, coming from the world of sport, one of the key skills that you develop is never giving up, having this insanity of work ethic, driving. grit to create resilience over long durations of time and never stopping. And eventually you will compound that into having an amazing result at the Olympic games, which is a four year cycle, sometimes an eight year cycle to getting there in business. You need to learn how to spot when to pivot very quickly, cut your losses and then begin again. I was not accustomed to that, nor was I accustomed to asking for help. And that's another part. That's my second part, Dave, where. Looking back, if I could speak to a younger Apollo, it would be like, dude, you don't have to do all of it alone. There are so many resources out there and mentorship. I mean, I'm such a big believer in mentorship and guidance and community because that's how you learn. People are there and they want to help. They want to teach. They want to guide to help you sidestep those landmines. And for me, I was like almost playing whack-a-mole. Like, oh, let me step on every single landmine known to man. Let me figure this out. Speaker 1 (7:40) All right, so we got to take a quick break, but we'll be back with more from Apollo Anton Ono right after this. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. Let's get back to my conversation with Olympian Apollo Ono. You talk about this divorce and making a lot of mistakes. How did you go from trying out different things and experimenting a little bit into finding your calling and what you feel you're good at in business and as an investor? It took me a long time Speaker 2 (8:14) because even though I cognitively understood the concept, behaviorally, I still found myself to be making the same types of mistakes. So for example, blind trust, right? My father had told me at a very early age, he's like, trust, but verify. I heard the words. I didn't feel the impact of what that meaning could really be. In real estate, I think it's pretty, almost pretty cut and dry, right? You can get every piece of information you need to get before you go to any type of a closing, right? You can really dig deep. And I was not sure what that was like because I was not willing to do those things. So just to give you backstory and context, I started investing in real estate back in 2006, 2007, and 2008. 2006, 2007, and 2008. Right before this like devastating. Yeah. So I was buying real estate through a fund. I was writing promissory notes. I was writing loans. And unbeknownst to me, because of my blind faith in this particular group, they had been doctoring and changing. They were doing all of the mortgage do not dues. Like full-on fraud. Full-on fraud. And they kind of survived. Coming out of the crisis, they had