London 2012 Olympics: Power Ranking the 10 Biggest Celebrities on Team USA

Professional athletes are a true cultural phenomenon.

Like more traditional film and television celebrities, athletic personalities can deliver tremendous performances and carry with them the glitz, glamour and tabloid-level infamy of even the most cunning angelic type of Charlie Sheen.

Yet like Sheen and his ilk, fame is an ego boost and in some cases, an entitlement.

For instance, Winter Olympic athlete Lindsey Vonn was found to have owed the IRS $1.7 million in unpaid taxes for the Olympic year of 2010 and golf superstar Tiger Woods—well, we all know about Tiger Woods.

With golf entering the Olympic fray in 2016, Woods still has four years to climb to the top of this list.

Until then, we're left with these top athletes, playing the role of celebrity, on Team USA.

No. 10: Lolo Jones

A second Olympics star in the making, Lolo Jones has risen to the 10th spot in the list of top celebrities on Team USA thanks to a U.S. Olympic Trials performance in 2012 that was tantalizingly close to completely missing the mark.

With the catchy website of RunLoloRun.com, Jones is a former two-time World Indoor Championship winner (2008 and 2010), though she is seeking vindication in the 100-meter hurdles this year, having struck the penultimate hurdle during the 2008 Beijing Games.

With 139,000 followers in the Twitter universe, Jones is still making her way up the celebrity charts, what with a Jay Leno appearance Monday night to go along with a six-hour commercial shoot.

No. 9: Hope Solo

As Hope Solo prepares for the 2012 London Games, we recall her ups and downs during her tenure on ABC's Dancing with the Stars in 2011—whether it was arguing with referee, er, head judge Len Goodman or refusing to grant the press interviews after a rough day, Solo has put on the type of celebrity diva performances that could make Lindsay Lohan cringe.

Nonetheless, Solo has attracted quite the following—419,000 on Twitter to be precise—as she keeps from slipping into irrelevance after a provocative ESPN The Magazine cover shoot.

Why not higher on this list?

As Janet Jackson put it back in 1986, "what have you done for me lately?"

No. 8: Tyson Gay

With a 9.86-second performance at Eugene earlier this week securing him a spot in this year's London Games, Gay has weathered the storm of hip surgery, and though he still faces an uphill battle to the podium this summer, Gay's website says it all: "World Champion Sprinter."

With nearly 30,000 followers on Twitter, Gay has already broken the athlete vs. film/television barrier with his inclusion in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) for an appearance on the comically excoriated Shaq vs.

When Gay arrives in London this summer, he is sure to be a comeback story everyone will be talking about—his heroic return to the top after missing nearly a year while recovering from surgery is truly inspiring and, yes, the stuff Hollywood movies are made of.

No. 7: Ryan Lochte

Ever since 2006—and perhaps even earlier—swimmer Ryan Lochte has raced in the considerable shadow of U.S. icon Michael Phelps.

Yes, the six-time Olympic medalist and bearer of four world records has found himself in a most improbable rivalry with U.S. swimming's darling athlete.

On Monday in Omaha, Lochte beat Phelps in their first head-to-head challenge, the 400-meter individual medley during the U.S. Olympic Trials.

With the duo set to square off a second time—this time in London—Lochte may very well be on his way to usurping Phelps' place as the best swimmer on Team USA.

No. 6: Allyson Felix

The formula for determining an athlete's website is pretty simple.

For instance, take U.S. sprinter Allyson Felix. Her website is www.allysonfelix.com. Simple, right?

Nonetheless, Felix's website—which consists of a large advertisement for her 40,000-follower Twitter account—remains simple yet elegant, just like the athlete it represents.

Felix is a Los Angeles native and a Californian through and through—winning championships and being named Track & Field News' high school athlete of the year before going to her first Olympic Games in 2004 and bringing home a silver in the 200-meter dash.

Felix's first bold move in cementing her celebrity status was forgoing college eligibility to sign a professional contract with Adidas, nonetheless graduating from USC with a degree in education.

Ah yes, the celebrity is always the outlier. Steve Jobs dropped out of college while Halle Berry never even went.

Meanwhile, Felix has achieved an added degree of fame by finishing in a dead heat with competitor Jeneba Tarmoh at the Olympic Trials.

Ah, the outlier.

No. 5: Venus Williams

In 2010, ESPN put out an editorial entitled, "It's high time we appreciate Venus Williams."

If it was true back then, it is certainly true now.

Unlike her sister Serena, who quasi-regularly acts the fool and threatens line judges, Venus keeps her cool and was ranked as the 77th-most powerful celebrity in the world by Forbes in 2009.

Williams is coming off a gold-medal performance in 2008 Beijing, winning the top prize with her sister in doubles competition, just as they did in the year 2000. Venus additionally claimed the singles gold medal in Sydney during those Games.

No. 4: Misty May-Treanor & Kerri Walsh-Jennings

Beach volleyball partners Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh-Jennings née May and Walsh are two huge athlete-celebrities, though their celebrity status intersects and is so interrelated, they may as well be one and the same.

May-Treanor, for one, seems to love the television cameras, appearing on multiple episodes of Pros. vs. Joes, The Ellen DeGeneres Show and the Late Show with David Letterman. She additionally found herself as a contestant on the 2008 season of Dancing with the Stars—rupturing her achilles tendon during dance practice—and guest starred in Disney-ABC staples Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and Wizards of Waverly Place.

Talk about the VIP experience.

Meanwhile, Walsh appeared on Dancing alongside May-Treanor as "Herself - Audience Member" and as part of the duo on CSI: Miami, Extreme Dodgeball and as a challenger on Shaq vs.

If you didn't happen to know that May-Treanor and Walsh-Jennings happen to be two-time defending gold medalists, you might even confuse them for run-of-the-mill TV celebrities.

No. 3: Justin Gatlin

Over in Major League Baseball, top performers and celebrities Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Gary Sheffield—oh, we could keep going all day—were linked to steroid and performance-enhancing drugs in the sport's comprehensive Mitchell Report.

In USA Track and Field, Barry Bonds has given way to sprinter Justin Gatlin.

In 2006, Gatlin failed multiple drug tests and was banned from the sport for four years, returning in 2010 and recently qualifying for London in a first-place, personal best performance in the 100-meter dash in Eugene. 

Like all athletic celebrities, Gatlin has his own website and Twitter account and like Bonds, Clemens, Pettitte and the rest, Gatlin has a unique and controversy-filled storyline.

Some fans will cheer him on in London while others will deride his past drug use, and in today's kooky and screwy world, such controversy elevates Gatlin high up on the list of U.S. celebrity Olympians.

The bad boy of the Track and Field world, Gatlin bought himself a few slices of controversy pie with the suggestion to ESPN that Allyson Felix and Jeneba Tarmoh resolve their trials tie by Jell-O wrestling match.

Someone over at Yahoo! clearly disagrees.

No. 2: USA Basketball Team

Don't you dare forget about these guys.

Listed individually, the members of the 2012 USA Men's National Basketball Team might have truly infiltrated this list, destroying any hope or prayer of most other athletes from making the cut.

Instead, the entire team has been lumped together and the whole kit & caboodle merged into one—that's right, no Kobe vs. LeBron comparisons here.

Heck, had USA Basketball actually been one tremendous human being, it might have taken the top spot.

From Kevin Durant to Blake Griffin, LeBron James, Kevin Love, Kobe Bryant and Anthony Davis, this team is truly stacked.

Oh, what's that?

We're forgetting Rudy Gay, Tyson Chandler, Russell Westbrook, Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh, Eric Gordon, James Harden, Andre Iguodala, Lamar Odom and Deron Williams?

Oh forget that.

USA Basketball is the closest thing to a celebrity athlete the Summer Olympics are going to get...

No. 1: Michael Phelps

...Unless, of course, you consider Michael Phelps.

No surprise here, the No. 1 celebrity on Team USA in 2012 is swimmer Michael Phelps.

Competing in his last Olympic Games, Phelps already holds numerous records, including the all-time record for most Olympic golds with 14.

He founded the philanthropic Michael Phelps Foundation (michaelphelps.com), which is not to be confused with his No. 1 fan site (michaelphelps.net). With an IMDb profile to boot, Phelps is a bona fide actor, and has 5,332,509 likes on Facebook and nearly 200,000 followers on Twitter.

Yet Phelps has not been immune to the celebrity's legal stigma, arrested and sentenced for DUI related to reckless operation of a vehicle while intoxicated, incurring the wrath of USA Swimming and losing Kellogg as a sponsors after an image surfaced of Phelps inhaling from a marijuana pipe.

The U.S. team's No. 1 Olympic celebrity is therefore Michael Phelps, who, like any other A-list celeb, has now experienced both the ups and downs of the limelight.